Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 Alexander Nevsky is silly propaganda with a scenario that makes Star Wars look like Ingmar Bergman.  However, the film can not be dismissed because of its abundant stupidity.  The level of graphic intelligence embodied in the film's design, editing, and photography is truly formidable.  Furthermore, the film is innovative in a number of ways -- it may well be cinema's first example of a music video. 

Single-minded to a fault, Alexander Nevsky is a movie in which everything is subordinated to a huge battle scene that occupies half the film's running time.  Nevsky is a handsome Russian prince who lives beside a vast lake and spends his time peacefully fishing.  (This being Eisenstein, the fishing scenes involving men arranged in picturesque diagonals holding nets in the shallow water have a spectacular quality; the shallow lake extends out to the horizon and the peasants in the water wear snow-white garments like swans and most of the frame consists of turbulent sky and lake.)  A Mongol envoy, a representative of the Golden Horde, approaches Nevsky and asks him to serve the Khan as a "war lord."  The Mongols are straight out of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied, sinister Asians on little ponies with high-fashion furs and boas around their snarling faces.  Nevsky declines the offer saying that he first must rally the Russians to defeat the Teutonic Knights, Germans who have invaded his country and are ravaging its cities.  Eisenstein cuts to the Germans in Pskov where the Russian princes are humiliated, kneeling in smoke drifting from dozens of fires.  When the Russians refuse to swear fealty to the Germans, the heavily armored troops (they have ugly buckets on their heads) simply plow over them like so many tanks.  Screaming infants are cast into bonfires and women are slaughtered and the Teutonic Knights, in their grotesque space-alient helmets and armor stalk around menacing everyone.  Nevsky gives a speech in Novgorad.  He summons together an army and fights the Germans on a frozen lake.  After a long and hard-fought battle, the Germans are routed.  Women carrying torches search among the dead and wounded for family members -- a visual feast that Eisenstein exploits to the utmost.  Back at Novgorad, there is a triumphal procession, the outraged populace tears to pieces the leaders of the German army while the rank and file infantry are pardoned, and a couple of wounded men win brides by way of their battlefield valor.  The movie concludes with Nevsky addressing the camera, and, presumably, the German High Command in Berlin:  "Don't invade Russia or this will happen to you!" he asserts.  There is nothing even remotely sophisticated or nuanced in any of these proceedings.  It would be seductive to claim that Eisenstein has some sort of critical or, at least, ironic sub-text to this material -- but that claim would be futile:  what you see is what you get.  The distance between this film and the ideologically complex and politically self-conscious movies that Eisenstein made in the Twenties -- for instance, Strike and The Battleship Potemkin -- is immense.  Alexander Nevsky bears no trace of any ideology except the most naïve, vicious kind of nationalism -- it's certainly not a Bolshevik film and, indeed, could have been directed by Leni Riefenstahl.  What passes for romantic comedy, the byplay between two warriors competing for the attentions of a buxom Bruennhilde, a sort of wild-eyed Russian Valkyrie who we see swinging an axe in combat, is painful to behold.  Eisenstein isn't good at these scenes and they are simply embarrassing -- as embarrassing as the scene in the triumphal procession in which the one buffoonish warrior yields to his equally buffoonish colleague from the battlefield. with respect to the fair Amazon while his mother, symbolizing Mother Russia, rolls her eyes at her wounded son's generosity.  (Eisenstein's homosexuality is implicit in his utter lack of interest in this cartoonish romantic subplot or, perhaps, he simply can't devise any pictorial strategy to invest these proceedings with the statuesque, aggressive beauty of many of his other sequences in the film.) 

Notwithstanding all of these defects, the film rises or falls with its climactic battle and this extended sequence is a bravura master-class in dynamic editing and pictorial composition:  the advance of the wedge of Teutonic knights crossing the white expanse of the frozen lake is an alarming spectacle to behold -- rhythmically cut to Prokofiev's score, the monstrously armored knights (they have iron hands and claws and horns sticking out of their helmets) are genuinely frightening.  When the forces crash into one another, there is a sense of palpable impact, a real thud of steel ringing against steel that the audience feels in their gut.  Scenes in which the German forces kneel on the ice and use their lances to slaughter attacking Russians are chilling and the imagery of  hand-to-hand combat, visualized as men swinging their swords wildly at the camera is brutally effective.  When the ice breaks and the German knights are swallowed up in the depths of the lake, Eisenstein gives us a montage of the Teuton's bucket helmets sucked down into blackness, their cloaks trailing over icebergs as they are pulled into the water.  The entire film is structured as a visual accompaniment to Prokofiev's oratorio-like scores -- the triumphal procession, for instance, features a male chorus intoning the Mother Russia theme and the Germans have a sinister Wagnerian motif, a sort of distorted Dies Irae to characterize them.  Many of these musical cues are presented as part of the action -- the Russians play on pan-pipes during the fight on the lake and the Germans have a monstrous organist, black-caped like the Phantom of the Opera who makes his instrument wheeze and moan as the vicious Teutonic knights celebrate their mass.  At the end of the battle, the black-robed monks close ranks and fight the Russians with crucifixes turned into bludgeons.  Prokofiev's spectacular score is integral to the film and you can't really imagine the movie without the themes that the composer devises:  deep droning bass lines for the Russians with a beautiful and operatic cantabile melody superimposed, the locomotive chug-chug-chug of the advancing Teutons, the wild braying carnival music that accompanies the rout of the Germans, and, finally, the huge choruses singing in triumph at the end of the film.  The interesting feature in this film, Eisenstein's first sound movie, is that he doesn't gravitate toward dialogue -- indeed, the film's dialogue is mostly idiotic -- rather, he immediately understands the importance of music to the action:  ultimately, his entire approach to this subject matter is not analytical but musical.