Ordered by Le Printemps de Septembre contemporary art festival, this show joins together the instrumental group nlf3 (trio) and unfinished masterpiece by Eisenstein, "Que Viva Mexico! (1931).

Nicolas Laureau: Fender Rhodes, electric guitar and synthetizers
Ludovic Morillon: drums, guitar
Fabrice Laureau: bass, synthetizers
Production: Le Printemps de Septembre, La fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, le musée d'art moderne de Lille, Le Melies and Prohibited Records.

"This fictional documentary recalls the history of the Indians of Mexico, from the origins to the revolution of 1910, through several episodes. The shooting of this film was ordered by The Paramount to Eisenstein at the time of his stay in Hollywood at the end of the years 1920. It was quickly stopped for financial reasons. Forced to get back to Russia, Eisenstein left behind him the whole of the rushes and did not have any more access to them until his death in 1948. It is only in 1979 that the film was shown, thanks to the great work done by former Eisenstein assistant Gregori Alexandrov. He delivered a version of the film that respected the intentions of the great director.
The instrumental group nlf3 (trio) started their activity playing improvised performances as accompaniment on experimental silent film screenings in 1999. On disc and in concert, the musical briefs landscapes of the group recreate cinematographic environments. They are keen on melting psychedelic loops, underground rock, Brazilian rhythms and afro-jazz sonorities. If the two albums resulting from their sound experiments were very well acclaimed, the trio never yet had the occasion to score a soundtrack for a long movie. This order is the occasion for the group to apply its meticulous compositions to the one of the masterpieces of the pre-war period cinema ."
text of presentation taken from the Printemps de Sepembre catalog

"These innovating explorating bands, give to the instrumental music of all obediences the colors of unceasingly renewed and evolutionary reliefs. From Pascals (Japan) to Clogs (the USA), from NLF3 trio (France) to Esbjšrn Svensson Trio or Jagga Jazzist (Scandinavia), they appear as the cardinal points of the most enthralling contemporary musical cartography ." Christophe Conte/Inrockuptibles - 2003

Pictures taken at Festival Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, 24th and 25th of september 2004.
first picture by C Mascarin - 2004 - all other pictures by B.Rault 2004


Complements according to the book "Que viva Eisenstein!" by B Amengual (ed. L'Age d'Homme)
The experiment of "Que viva Mexico!" mark in the life and the art of Eisenstein an idealistic metamorphosis. It is the return in strength of a religious mystical bottom, up to no return point. He found in the cross and the triangle of Golgotha the formula of the human and cosmic drama. It was the occasion of a true Revelation, almost a miracle. He felt that he was only the instrument "of supernatural capacities which transcend human reason" According to Marie Seton, his partner and biographer: "the dominating theme of the film is that, while the biological man as an entity is mortal, the social principle represented by the man does transcend the limits of the physical existence and is immortal, eternal". And Eisenstein precises: "the three episodes of film represent three successive historical human conditions, from the animal state to Death, in the evoltion of this attitude (by awakening then the revolutionary action) in the design of the social collective entity" the remains of this film breathe another air that the completed films of the director and another force.
It constitutes the first film of Eisentsein, and it occupied the filmmaker a few months before his death. After "Que viva Mexico!", the historical vision of S. Eisenstein will not be any more the same. The obsession of the epic and titanic fresco, contrary to the reductions and concentrations of the Synecdoque, will haunt from now on all its projects. With each new film, the screen becomes for him like another ceiling of the Sixtine vault.
All its films, thereafter, do not escape this Mexican "stratification". Indeed, historical reality, the event even, were almost always given to Eisenstein the made-to-order of a landscape where adventures did not have any more but to choose and enthral. However here a country which simultaneously presents all the layers of its history: the precolombian past, the out of time matriarchy in the Tropics, the Spanish past, the feudal age, the present, the last close revolutionary effects. This moving "cut" in the body and the heart of a nation, its dignity and its still sharp formal splendour under misery and the exploitation, were to exacerbate at Eisenstein a tendency attached up to now, with the communion, contemplation - from where the extraordinary humanity of the images that are never abstract. And it allowed him to check poetically the judgement of Marx : "the religion is the general theory of this world, its solemn complement, its general reason of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of human energy; religious misery is on the one hand the expression of real misery, and on the other hand, the protest against real misery ".
In Mexico, more than ever perhaps, Eisenstein is inside the world" It is not possible to live without liking, being impassioned, adoring " he wrote in his Memories, started in 1940. Mexico unceasingly recalled him this. Undoubtedly this is the reason why "Que viva Mexico!" remained, until the ultimate moments of his life "the preferred oeuvre, fruit of labour, love and inspiration"

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technical Rider (word doc)