Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (1945 - 1946) is a film that scholars spend their lives studying. The film-maker intended so much by this movie that, in some ways, the picture itself is almost unintelligible, a bizarre pageant of grotesque tableaux, a narrative like an iceberg with ninety percent of the meaning concealed. Like Finnegans Wake or The Waste Land, you need a commentary in order to access this work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the viewer must be advised that the various layers of meaning encoded in this picture are not all evident. Eisenstein was always a self-indulgent artist and here, paradoxically, under the least auspicious circumstances for self-expression that can be imagined, he indulges himself the most. Stalin commissioned the film, a mind-boggling fact that makes the production of this movie as fraught as that other great, but much less interesting, folly, Harlan Veit's Kolberg, a movie made at the end of World War II on orders by Joseph Goebbels. Even though both pictures are epic in scale, there is something weirdly claustrophobic and disjointed about them -- psychosis runs close to the surface. Further, Eisenstein worked on the picture for years before an opportunity to actually film his script arrived -- he is said to have filled-up 100 notebooks with sketches and notes; he read widely and obsessively in four or five languages about Ivan the Terrible, toured palaces and forts, researched the clothing and fashion of the 16th century, and, then, imposed upon all of this raw material, his own psycho-drama: critics observe that, in his research papers, Eisenstein's pen sometimes slips and for "Tsar" he writes "Father." (Eisenstein announced to his collaborators that he was modeling Ivan's character on that of his own father -- the template, however, was broad enough for Stalin to see his portrait in the increasingly nightmarish film and the dictator halted production before more than a few reels of the projected third film in the trilogy could be shot). Eisenstein had gained a lot of weight and lost most of his hair -- he looks like a fat, sad clown in the footage showing him on set -- and he suffered a heart attack when the second part of the epic was first screened and, then, immediately suppressed by Stalin. (Part Two of the film, containing a famous Technicolor sequence, was not formally released until a political thaw in 1958.) Accordingly, to properly appreciate the picture, the viewer must assimilate to his encounter with the film the actual history of 16th century in Russia, the biography of Stalin, the USSR's travails in the Second World War, the history of censorship and repression in Russia, and Eisenstein's own autobiographical commentary on the film. The movie also encapsulates much of the history of film in the first half of the 20th century and has a score by Prokofiev to boot.
On first viewing, Part One of Ivan the Terrible resembles a less beautifully lit version of The Scarlet Empress, Joseph von Sternberg's sado-masochistic bio-pic involving the loves of Catherine the Great. In both cases, décor threatens to overwhelm the film with huge and grotesque statuary lurking under enormous icons in the churches and palaces depicted in the narrative. The Scarlet Empress, although a very great film, represents variations on a Hollywood theme -- a lovelorn leading lady and her sacrifices. By contrast, Ivan the Terrible (Part One) is wholly chaste -- a suggested romance between Ivan's best friend, the courtier Prince Kurbsky, and the tyrant's wife, Anastasia, consists of some sidelong glances by the man, an attempt to touch Anastasia followed by her horrified rejection of the suitor. (This is not to say that Part One is without erotic frisson: at one point, a group of Tartar boys, all of them beautiful, are stripped and tied to a palisade. This is done by Kurbsky to show his ferocity to the defenders of the besieged Muslim city of Kazan. The defenders of the city perforate the boys with arrows in a sequence that invokes images of Saint Sebastian, a Gay icon.) The Scarlet Empress is about sexual repression and unrequited love; Ivan the Terrible (Part One) is political -- it shows how Ivan consolidates his power in the face of what seem to innumerable conspirators seeking to destroy him. (The conspirators are generically described as "Boyars.") At the outset of the film, we see Ivan's coronation and his gilding -- two courtiers, one of them Kurbsky, pour a seemingly endless cascade of gold coins over his head and shoulders. The coronation scene features whispering conspirators, a demonic-looking woman (a sort of Soviet Macbeth) with her mentally retarded son Vladimir (she has ambitions for him to be crowned Tsar) and various noblemen wearing absolutely grotesque hats and ruffs. People are dressed in fantastical clothing and huge painted frescos glare out of the gloom. The doors to rooms are like mouse-holes in old cartoons -- tiny three-foot high archways requiring characters to bow deeply to pass through them. The actors all glare at one another like figures in a demented silent movie -- all the acting is expressionistic and generally involves staring at one another with huge, sinister, globe-like eyes. Eyes are the focus of much of the mise-en-scene -- huge iconic eyes frescoed on walls bear down on the characters in the churches and throne-rooms; the actors are mostly unblinking and their eyes, shifting nervously back and forth in their sockets, are like cameras recording events. Indeed, the best way to watch the film is focus on the eyes and think of them as indicia of mood (mostly paranoid and hysterical) as well as recording mechanisms, photographic devices that are making a record of the proceedings to be shown to the secret police. When Ivan marries Anastasia, who may have been Kurbsky's mistress, servants carry larger-than-life-size swans full of food to the banquet table. But, then, news arises that the Tartar ambassador has arrived with a message to Ivan. (The Mongol isn't exactly the soul of discretion: he challenges Ivan to a war and courteously suggests that the Russian Tsar kill himself to avoid humiliation at the hands of his emperor.) Ivan rushes an army to Kazan, lays siege to the walled city, directing operations from a conical sand hill capped by a tent that is conical itself and represents the Russian Tsar's crown. Sinuous queues of soldiers march in ornamental patterns around the city and huge bronze guns shaped like dragons are aimed at the walls. The city falls and, on the way home, Ivan becomes ill. It's not clear whether he's dissembling to lure his foes into open revolt or actually sick. The ever-present mobs of black-crow Priests administer last rites and set a Bible over his face (we see Ivan surreptitiously peeping out from under the huge gilded book.) Ivan doesn't die, but several of the traitors in his court are emboldened to action. His chief nemesis, the Russian lady Macbeth, poisons Anastasia. Her corpse is set on a bier eight feet tall surrounded by ten foot clay or terra-cotta candles. Ivan rages and decides to flee to the country hurling down the huge candelabra. He goes to a bizarre Max Reinhardt style set of white terraces and archways and narrow, primitive stairways. It's winter. Ten-thousand Russians come from Moscow and form a huge serpentine queue marching across the white and frozen steppe. They want their Tsar to return to Moscow. Some aspects of the film are hieratic, resembling Egyptian bas relief -- Eisenstein manipulates the image to show Ivan's importance in terms of his size. In the final scenes in Part One, we have enormous close-ups of Ivan with his spiky, bristling beard framed to show the vast multitude of Russian peasants and tradesfolk marching across the steppe to petition for his return -- he is huge with eyelid-less glaring eyes and a bizarrely misshapen head (it seems to come to a sharp point at its occiput) and the insistent multitude is tiny. In other scenes, Ivan casts a forty foot shadow against walls while traitorous courtiers scuttle this way and that like frightened rats. Nikolai Cherkasov plays Ivan and he is certainly impressive in a fatally grandiose way -- in some scenes, he looks vaguely like Elsa Lancaster's Bride of Frankenstein, turning his head with birdlike precision to ferret out signs of treason in his court with his unblinking, search-light eyes. Eisenstein's homosexuality seems to be on display in many of the images -- men are shot in soft focus and provided full glamor treatment: Kurbsky is prettier than any of the women in the movie. The film's primary female character is the terrifying harridan, the mother of the soft, effeminate and mentally retarded Vladimir -- he snatches flies and cups them to his ear to hear them buzz. The harridan looks like a man and talks like one too and shows no signs of being female at all -- gender roles are all scrambled. Sometimes, Ivan looks like Jesus, sometimes, he's shot like the horrific Nosferatu in Murnau's vampire film. The happy ending of Part One is the formation of a "steel circle of lances" protecting Ivan, that is, the creation of a ruthless secret police.
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