This beautiful silent excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film on Mexico, ¡Que viva México!, is an exquisite example of avant-garde film making and a fragment of what Eisenstein described as his “greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy.”

Eisenstein went to Mexico in 1931 with assistant director Eduard Tisse and producer Grigory Alexandrov to shoot a film about the country’s mythic landscape with the financial help of writer Upton Sinclair, the muck-racking genius behind 1905’s controversial slaughterhouse exposé The Jungle, and his wife Mary Craig. Shooting stopped in 1932 after a series of financial mishaps with most of the work completed, though one of the film’s segments couldn’t be filmed. The Stalinist regime prevented Eisenstein from ever seeing Que viva México! as he had intended it.

Of the over 50 hours of film that Eisenstein shot, various versions of Eisenstein’s Mexican epic have been constructed, none are definitive. Ultimately, no one knows what the director’s final version might have been like, but even unfinished the results are quite magnificent.

Happy Mexican Independence Day.