Ivan the Terrible (Part Two)

 

Ivan Grosny

“...of all the arts, cinema...is the most important.”

Vladimir Lenin

“...we may stare at Ivan the Terrible in a kind of outrage...True, every frame looks great – it’s a brilliant collection of stills, but, as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and, frequently, ludicrous.”

Pauline Kael in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

“Every spectator is a coward or a traitor.

Frantz Fanon

From Solzhenitsyn’s One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:

Ivan Denisovich: “Ivan the Terrible is a work of genius.”

Prisoner X 123 (an old man): “It’s all so arty there’s no art left in it.;..And, then, that vile political idea – the justification of personal tyranny.”

Ivan: “ But Eisenstein had no choice.  No other interpretation of history was possible under Stalin.”

X 123: “Then, don’t call him a genius.  Call him an arse-licker, obeying a vile dog’s order.  Geniuses don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste of tyrants.”

1.

Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein’s two-part historical epic, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grosny) is an immensely intricate and complex film.  Indeed, some critics have argued that the movie is the most complex film ever made.  Ivan is not complicated on the basis of its plot, a narrative that is schematic and, even, more than a little dim-witted.  Rather, the movie is overwhelmingly complex on the basis of its spectacular (and monstrous) visual design.  There has never been a film so carefully imagined and so arduously prepared.  Eisenstein’s notebooks contain detailed sketches of every shot in the movie.  These images are accompanied by copious journal entries written in Russian, French, German, and, indeed, frequently in English.  The film-maker was a formidable graphic artist, in fact, a draftsman of genius.  (David Thomson has speculated that if Eisenstein were alive today, he would be famous as the creator of graphic novels or comic books.)  Every aspect of Ivan was designed in detail and, then, annotated with extensive commentary.  Each shot in the film is graphed, then, rendered in Eisenstein’s vibrant expressionistic sketches.  Images mirror other images in the film and Eisenstein footnotes his pictures with references to hundreds of paintings, engravings, and other works of graphic art.  The director’s visual memory was so prodigious that he retained in his imagination precise allusions to works of art spanning all epochs and schools – he references Holbein, ancient Greek and Roman statuary, as well as a vast repertoire of classical, romantic, and modern art.  Eisenstein’s annotations to his story-board images summon to the feast Freud, Otto Rank, Marx and Lenin as well as dozens of commentaries on the theater, Shakespeare, and literary theory.  Further, Eisenstein precisely indexes lighting cues, sound effects, uses arrows to indicate camera motions, and, further, charts patterns of light and shadow integral to the effects that he intends.  The finished films embody all of this advance preparation and superimpose addition levels of meaning on the pictures recorded by his photographers.  Scholars who have watched Ivan on a frame-by-frame basis observe that individual shots are often decorated with a filigree of ephemeral lighting effects, sudden flares of light or incursions of shadow that are scarcely perceptible to the viewer watching the movie in real time but that were obviously sufficiently important to the director to contrive during the film’s production.  Set design and costumes were researched in obsessive detail.  Eisenstein’s historical research involved two-years of study before  any film was exposed.  This research is also the subject of hundreds of pages of notes, sketches, and speculative proposals.  

In short, Ivan is immensely overdetermined.  Every image is researched and, then, justified within a vast system of similar pictorial motifs.  Each picture has its counterpart, its rhyming image, and its negative or opposite.  Each gesture recurs like postures and motions deployed in classical ballet, prototype tableaux that are, then, repeated in complex iterations and variants.  Acting styles are subordinated to decor.  The films are conceived as Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, objects of art that are intended to communicate on all possible levels of meaning.  No potentially expressive aspect of film-making or performance is neglected: Ivan is simultaneously opera, melodrama, historical documentary, folk tale, ballad and lyric, combat movie, film noir, medieval mystery play, and, even, Kabuki theater.  It’s Shakespeare refracted through Freud and Balinese shadow puppetry.  Ivan purports to be nothing less than an encyclopedia of all graphic, theatrical, and cinematic arts.  The film is intimidating and nightmarish.  People have spent their lives writing books about the movie and attempting to explicate it’s enigmas.  

All of this begs a question: as researchers uncover and transcribe more and more of Eisenstein’s annotations and remarkable story-board sketches, we must ask what exactly is the work of art that we know as Ivan the Terrible (Parts I and II)?  Is it the film?  Is it the notebooks and historical research and Eisenstein’s theoretical writings on the project’s design and meaning?  In some ways, the actual films themselves shrink into insignificance before the mighty design of the enterprise.  Is Ivan Grosny  a mere movie or, instead, a huge constellation of sketches, notes, historical musings, photographs of paintings clipped to sheets of scribbled commentary, film theory, and annotations to Joyce, Marx, Freud, and Otto Rank to which there just happens to be appended some 186 minutes of exposed celluloid?

2.

Ivan Grosny roughly translated means “Ivan the Terrible”.  But the Russian word Grosny, the epithet for the Tsar, means something like “thunderous” or “as awesome as a thunderstorm.”  In Russian, Ivan the Terrible is Ivan, God’s Thunderstorm.  

3.

Remember what happened to Leon Trotsky.  After breaking with Lenin, Trotsky, the engineer of the Red Army and an advocate for international revolution, fled Mother Russia, and, after surviving several assassination attempts, hid out in a heavily fortified villa in Coyoacan, then, a floral suburb south of Mexico City.  Trotsky surrounded himself with thugs, theorized, wrote revolutionary tracts, swilled tequila, and enjoyed a dalliance with Frida Kahlo.  On several occasions, Mexican muralists of the Stalinist persuasion attacked the foreboding, concrete-walled house where Trotsky was holed-up.  (If you tour the rather grim villa today, you can see walls pocked by bullets sprayed by Thompson submachine guns aiming for Trotsky.)   You can run but you can’t hide.  In the end, one of Stalin’s henchmen hacked Trotsky to death with an axe – this was in 1940, six years after Eisenstein had left Mexico.  By that point, all of the original architects of the Russian Revolution were dead, the victims of Stalin’s murderous purges.  

I think that a similar fate might well have befallen Eisenstein, although he was shrewd enough to stay just ahead of the gunmen and died in bed.  In 1930, Eisenstein left Russia and flirted with a career in Hollywood.  (Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin had proclaimed his movie The Battleship Potemkin, the greatest film ever made.)  The studios offered Eisenstein a couple of projects and he went to work scripting an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.  Although Eisenstein enjoyed Hollywood and hobnobbing with its movie stars, he was suspicious of the Capitalist limitations on art imposed by the studio moguls.  He liked Mickey Mouse and engaged in some desultory negotiations with Walt Disney, but these were fruitless.  Eisenstein was homosexual, a libertine, and enjoyed Hollywood’s decadence as much as possible but he remained, after all, a man of the Left, indeed, a card-carrying Communist.  So Eisenstein importuned the muck-raking novelist, Upton Sinclair, to finance an exploratory location-scouting trip to old Mexico.  With Sinclair’s sister, Mary, and a large entourage, including Eisenstein’s ace cameraman, Eduard Tisse, the Russian auteur traveled to Mexico City, then, Puebla, Tehuantepec, Guanajunto, and Oaxaca.  Mexico proved too rich a subject for Eisenstein and he found himself drowning in tropical exotica.  He made sketches for a documentary film on the subject of the Mexican revolution, Que Viva Mexico and exposed over 100,000 feet of celluloid, but the work was too chaotic and Eisenstein was out of his depth – he couldn’t make the footage cohere.  (Some of this material was released much later, after Eisenstein’s death in 1948 as Thunder over Mexico, a film-torso most notable for an extraordinary sequence documenting the Day of the Dead.)  Mexico was seductive to Eisenstein and he fully indulged his sexual proclivities south of the Border (homosexuality was illegal in Mother Russia).  In the end, the funding ran out and Upton Sinclair cut off the money-spigot, demanding that Eisenstein return to the U.S. with something to show for his expenditures.  But Eisenstein had nothing but spectacular, if inchoate. raw footage and, so, he returned, more or less empty-handed, to Soviet Russia.

Eisenstein’s flamboyance and uncompromising stance as the Soviet’s world-famous premiere film-maker made the authorities suspicious of him.  He was an asset on the world-stage, but obviously too fickle (and intelligent) to be relied-upon and likely to turn into an embarrassment or liability.  Stalin’s commissars authorized Eisenstein to make a film version of a Turgenev sketch Bezhin Meadow, but the script wasn’t approved by the censors and, although some footage was shot, the project came to nothing.  Next, Eisenstein was recruited to make Alexander Nevsky, a sort of red-blooded he-man Western featuring the grisly Teutonic Knights in the role of Apaches.  Alexander Nevsky, released in 1938, is a thoroughly successful piece of anti-German propaganda, a warning to Hitler that if his forces invaded Russia there would be hell to pay.  (Nevsky, a stoic warrior on horseback, leads the Russian army to victory against the German invaders; the movie features a monumental battle-scene on a frozen lake and a thunderous score by Prokofiev.)  The film was an international success and has a kind of pulse-pounding rhythm that works directly on your senses and that is well-nigh irresistible – it’s also a deeply stupid and pernicious piece of political propaganda. By the time Alexander Nevsky was released internationally, Hitler and Stalin had formed a non-aggression pact that rendered the film’s narrative an embarrassment to both countries.  Eisenstein was, in effect, ordered to apologize to the Nazis that he hadn’t really meant to offend them with lurid sequences in the film featuring Teutonic Knights (dressed up like horned Darth Vadars) roasting babies while playing horror-show tunes on wheezing medieval pipe organs.  Such were the times that the Germans accepted the apology, albeit only temporarily, and agreed that all the pro-Russian carnage in the epic should be viewed just as good fun – after all, it was only a movie.

On the strength of the heroics in Alexander Nevsky, Stalin commissioned Eisenstein to make a historical epic about one of his personal heros, Ivan the Terrible.  Vast sums of money were budgeted for the picture and, once again, Stalin ordered Prokofiev to provide a score for the three-part movie.  Stalin had two objectives.  First, he aimed to legitimize Soviet control over Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and other satellite republics – the film’s argument was to be that Ivan the Terrible had, in fact, shown the way by annexing those republics to Mother Russia.  Second, Stalin wanted to demonstrate a historical antecedent, rooted in medieval Russian greatness, for his own deadly secret police.  Ivan the Terrible had exerted power through a group of murderous thugs called the Oprichniks, a “brotherhood of iron” accountable only to the Tsar.  So Stalin desired that the film justify his own rule by terror by showing that Ivan had implemented similar tactics in support of his brutal regime.  Stalin told Eisenstein: “You should not shy away from showing Ivan’s cruelty.  You must show that he was supremely cruel but also must demonstrate why his cruelty was necessary.”

Eisenstein spent two years writing the script and designing the enormous sets required for the film’s production.  By this time, the non-aggression pact with Hitler was in ruins – the Germans invaded Russia in 1941.  Eisenstein, with a small army of extras and crew, decamped to Alma Ata in central Asia, far from the theater of actual World War Two combat, to begin shooting the film.  Footage for parts I and II was complete in 1945 and Eisenstein screened the first installment in the epic for Stalin in that year.  Stalin was duly impressed and arranged for the movie to be awarded the Stalin Prize for Artistic Excellence.  The movie was shown at Locarno Film Festival and won international prizes there and elsewhere.  Part Two (“The Boyar’s Plot”) was screened for Stalin in 1946.  The dictator was horrified by the movie, grasped that it was fundamentally subversive to his regime, and immediately banned it.  Eisenstein was summoned to the Kremlin and given a long list of changes required by Comrade Stalin and his minister of art, Zhdanov.  

The changes were too difficult for Eisenstein to make.  He was initially disabled by a heart attack in 1946.  Ivan (Part 2)  was all of a piece and no element could be removed from picture’s complicated structure without destabilizing the rest of the movie.  The director labored fitfully on revising the picture for several years and, then, evaded completion of the film to Stalin’s satisfaction (or, in the alternative death by firing squad or inanition in Siberia) by perishing of a second heart attack in 1948.  Eisenstein was fifty years old.  Some screen-tests exist, a few scattered fragments of Part III, but very little footage was actually exposed with regard to the last part of the trilogy.  Stalin died in 1953 and his memory was purged – in effect, the autocrat became a historical non-person.  During a thaw in Soviet authoritarian rule in 1958, Part Two of Ivan Grosny was finally released to the public and, then, the world.  By this date, Eisenstein’s film practices and theory had become archaic and obsolete; his style of film-making was out of fashion.  (The French New Wave was in its first birth-throes.)  Part Two of the epic was largely regarded as an artifact of the bad old days, a hypertrophic and camp homosexual melodrama.  Most critics interpreted the film to be a Gay allegory about Stalin’s dictatorship.  

Enough time has passed for the passions of that day to be remote from us and, therefore, allow a more objective assessment of the film.  Beginning in the 1980's, Ivan Grosny has been reconsidered by many film scholars, has been the subject of a number of treatises, and is now regarded as one of the most important Soviet films of the 20th century, indeed, a perverse monument to a brutal regime and, on par, with Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and the Margarita) as an artistic representation of the Stalinist terror.    

4.

Eisenstein’s fame rests of four films that changed cinema history.  In 1925, Eisenstein directed the feral and audacious Strike, a spectacularly violent film about labor unrest at a factory in 1903.  (To call the events in Strike, “labor unrest” is an understatement: a worker accused of theft hangs himself, Tsarist police butcher children, strikers are murdered en masse with their deaths intercut with documentary imagery of the slaughter of cattle.)  Battleship Potemkin followed in 1927, a similarly violent movie about a sailor’s mutiny in Odessa in 1905.  This film features the much-imitated Odessa steps sequence in which Cossacks advance down an enormous marble stairway massacring protesters, an astonishing example of montage deployed to act aggressively on the viewer’s nervous system.  Film critics tend to be Left-leaning and, until about 1980, Potemkin was almost universally hailed as the greatest film ever made – in fact, it is archaic, over-blown Soviet propaganda but, of course, brilliantly designed.  October, known in this country as 10 Days that shook the World is a reconstruction of the October Russian Revolution.  The film looks so authentic that footage from the picture is often shown in documentaries about the Bolshevik revolution, although, of course, everything in the movie was staged by Eisenstein.  (Eisenstein’s scenes showing the Bolshevik attack on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg involved a number of accidental casualties that exceeded the number killed or wounded in the actual 1917 storming of that place.)  Finally, in 1931-1932, Eisenstein made The General Line, another propaganda film, about the collectivization of a dairy farm.  This film was a vexed production – Eisenstein began shooting the movie on a collective farm in 1927, but, then, shelved the project to make October, commissioned by the Party for the ten-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.  The General Line is the first film directed by Eisenstein that featured an actual character as opposed to a collective – that is, the workers in Strike, the mutinous sailors in Potemkin, and the crowds that storm through October.  Eisenstein cast an actual farm-girl in the lead role.  His casting criteria for the film is reflected in his question to auditioning actresses: “Can you milk cows, plow, guide a tractor?”  Leon Trotsky was the champion of farm collectivization and, by the time, the movie was scheduled for release the Party Boss had fallen from power and was a persona non grata with the Soviet authorities.  Accordingly, The General Line was subjected to harsh scrutiny by censors, and re-cut by party apparatchiks.  (The film has since been restored to something like Eisenstein’s original design). 

Eisenstein was the son of Jewish architect, born in Riga (now Latvia) in 1898.  He studied architecture and engineering in St. Petersburg, but left school without a degree in 1920.  Eisenstein applied his impressive skills in graphic design to working on theater sets and costumes.  One of the avant-garde plays on which he worked involved a filmed interlude that Eisenstein produced.  This experiment led him into cinema and resulted in the production (through Gosfilm Kino) of his four masterpieces made between 1925 and 1930, when, as we have seen, he left Soviet Russia for America.  In Hollywood, he was first commissioned to make a film about Sutter’s Mill (scripted by Blaise Cendrars) and the discovery of gold in California.  Nothing came of this film project.  He negotiated with Disney, worked on a script for An American Tragedy based on Dreiser’s novel for Paramount, and became close friends with Charlie Chaplin.  (In one of his notes for Ivan, Eisenstein suggests that Chaplin would be perfect for the titular role; this is not as farfetched as it sounds – Chaplin effectively played a vicious autocrat modeled, Hynkel, modeled in Hitler in The Great Dictator released in 1940.)

5.

Nikolay Cherkasov (Ivan) was Stalin’s favorite actor and a fait accompli to be cast as the Russian Tsar.  Cherkasov, who was from St. Petersburg, was a gifted comedian and mime.  However, he was most famous for playing the Russian medieval hero, Alexander Nevsky in Eisenstein’s 1938 film about that warlord.  Cherkasov remained a popular star in Russian films until his death in 1966.  He played a variety of roles and, even, acted in Soviet musicals.  After Ivan, he is most well-known for playing the title role in Alexander Popov, a bio-pic about the man whom the Russians claim invented radio.  He also performed famously as Don Quixote in Grigori Kozintzev’s film based on the Cervantes’ novel.  

A medal for service to Russia is named after Alexander Nevsky, the man who repelled the vicious Teutonic Knights from Russia in the 13th century.  If you are awarded that medal, you will see that Cherkasov’s face is featured on the bronze award – this is because there are no images showing us what the real Nevsky looked like and, so, the film version must suffice for the medal.  

6.

The actress Serafima Germanovna Birman plays the villainess in Ivan, the lethal Evfrosinia Staritskaia.  The homely and somewhat saturnine, Birman (she has long face and a long nose), born in1890, was one of Russia’s greatest theatrical actresses.  Eisenstein recruited her for role as Ivan’s antagonist, Evfrosinia, after the actress that he originally cast, Faina Raynavskaya was rejected by censors because of her “Semitic features”.  

Historically, Evfrosinia Staritsakaia was a powerful, ambitious, and conniving noblewoman married to Prince Andrei of Staritska.  (Prince Andrei was Ivan the Terrible’s uncle).  Staritska is a town and a region in Tver Oblast on the Russian border with Poland (and what was once greater Germany).  Prince Andrei and Evfrosinia had a son Vladimir, born in 1533.  Unlike his depiction in the film, Vladimir was not a feckless moron, but, in fact, a valiant fighter and accomplished politician in his own right.   During the regency in which Ivan was under guardianship, Evfrosinia conspired with the boyars to supplant the rightful heir to the throne (Ivan) and replace him with her son, Vladimir.  The mechanism for this scheme relied upon displacing the Regent supervising prince Ivan with a new Regent sympathetic to the Staritska family.  The scheme failed and Evfrosinia, her husband (and Ivan’s uncle) Andrei, and her young son were imprisoned.  In prison, Andrei died.  These conflicts occurred in the general setting of political controversy between the various quasi-independent principalities comprising Russia and the powerful Grand Duchy of Moscow ruled by Ivan III, the father of Ivan so-called the Terrible. The ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow (Ivan under the guardianship of the regency) was generally considered the heir to the Tsar’s throne.  And, in fact, when Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) reached his 16th birthday, he was crowned Tsar in the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow.  

Evfrosinia and Vladimir were released from confinement.  Vladimir returned to rule Staritska.  When Ivan the Terrible fell ill in 1553, possibly due to poisoning, Evrofrosinia exploited the situation, again attempting to install the rather reluctant, Vladimir, as Duke of Moscow.  Vladimir demurred and the Duma, or parliament of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, opposed Vladimir’s accession to the throne.  Nonetheless, Vladimir briefly occupied the role of Tsar.  In any event, Ivan IV (the “Terrible”) recovered unexpectedly.  Evfrosinia was tried for treason.  She was convicted but spared execution on the condition that she take the veil and retreat into a convent, far from the political intrigues of the day.  Ivan’s secret police, the Oprichniks, burned Vladimir’s palace in retaliation for the plot against the Tsar.  However, Vladimir, for his part, was pardoned on the condition that his mother cease meddling in the succession of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.  

Vladimir fought in the Livonian War (beginning 1558 and lasting until the 1580's) and his exploits in battle were well-known throughout Russia.  Once again, Evrfrosinia, from her convent, conspired with the boyars, scheming that Vladimir assume power over the Russian confederation.  Ivan caught wind of the conspiracy, arrested Evfrosinia and her principal allies, and ordered them imprisoned.  Since it was inconvenient to have Evfrosinia publicly executed, Ivan arranged for her to be confined under house-arrest.  The indefatigable Evfrosinia continued to plot against the Tsar and so Ivan ordered that she and her closest associates, including Vladimir’s wife, both of them now (reluctantly) nuns, be drowned in the Sheksna River near the convent where she was residing. (This was accomplished by Ivan’s secret police, the “Iron Brotherhood” of the Oprichniks.)  Vladimir and his children were summoned to Ivan’s residence at Alexandrov in 1569 where they were forced to take poison.  In this way, the entirety of the Staritska royal dynasty was exterminated.    

Vladimir was the last appanage prince in Russia.  Appanage was a feudal convention in which a younger son, not able to succeed to the throne by the rule of primogeniture, is given, as a sort of consolation prize, an estate and official tenure.  (The notion was to avoid entirely disenfranchising the younger son from power and, thereby, discouraging power struggles.  In fact, appanage typically simply provided the disgruntled younger brother with a source of income and a seat of power from which to launch rebellions against the throne.)

7.

Here is the gestural plot of Ivan the Terrible as articulated by Eisenstein: “In the first part, Ivan is active and moves everywhere; in the second part, Ivan moves only his eyes; in the third part, only Ivan’s eyelids move.  He becomes increasingly petrified as the film progresses.”

8.

Eisenstein’s theoretical writings on film are both ingenious and highly influential.  Innumerable film-makers have tried to follow Eisenstein’s cinema esthetic or, in the alternative, have denied its validity and adopted practices that are the opposite of the great director’s famous declarations.  A director such as Andrei Tarkovsky, for instance, is heavily influenced by Eisenstein but as an opponent to his theories:  Russian filmmakers either follow Eisenstein or demonstrate his influence by self-consciously refuting his approach to cinema.  Sokhurov, also a great contemporary Russian director, was a student of Tarkovsky and his film, Russian Ark, consisting of a single monumental sequence-shot pays homage to Eisenstein by contradicting him.  

Eisenstein declared that “cinema is first and foremost montage.”  Each shot is what Eisenstein terms a “montage cell”– that is, a unit of imagery that has no intrinsic meaning in isolation.  Eisenstein argues that “montage cells” can be thought of as “hieroglyphs”.  The meaning of a film emerges from the “copulation” of “hieroglyphs” – that is, the montage of “cells’ as cut together to form sequences in the finished movie.  Eisenstein, who was famously combative” says that “montage is conflict,”and that “conflict lies at the very basis of every art.”  Eisenstein differentiates his film practice from that of his contemporary Vladimir Pudovkin (who appears by the way in a small part in Ivan.)  Pudovkin asserted that individual shots were organized to create a narrative “series”.  Eisenstein’s view was that shots should not be edited into a coherent series, but, instead, be juxtaposed in such a way as to create “collisions” or conflict.  This is the notion of “dialectical montage” that Eisenstein relates to Marxist methodology – each image is set against and contradicts the preceding image.  Thus, images (“montage cells”) are used as thesis and antithesis, ranked in opposing pairs, that results in a higher synthesis or meaning in the mind of the viewer.  Eisenstein thought this higher synthesis was “transcendent” – that is, more than the sum of the two opposing shots.  Whereas Pudovkin favored a smoothly flowing sequences of logically conjoined imagery, Eisenstein advocated for “collisions” between hieroglyphs.  He described the “collisions” between “montage cells” as creating “explosions.”  For him, a film was analogous to an internal combustion engine, a device that propels itself forward on the basis of continuous, confined, and controlled explosions.  Each image contains, Eisenstein argued, a fundamental energy that remained “potential” until activated by “collision” with adjacent shots.  

In this context, Eisenstein wrote (in prose-poems that resemble Mayakovsky’s texts) that:

“FOR ART IS ALWAYS CONFLICT: (1) because of its social mission; and (2) because of its nature; and (3) because of its methodology.”  

Art’s social mission (1) is to reveal the contradictions in being, the fact that every system of thought is riven by inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies.  The nature of art is “conflict” (3) because art arises from the clash between formless natural being, the chaos, as it were, of nature and the artist’s “purposeful initiative” to impose order on such chaos.  Finally, the methodology of film art (and art in general) is “montage” – “Soviet film has stipulated that montage is the nerve of film.”  Similarly, Eisenstein declares that “montage is conflict.  And conflict lies at the basis of every art.”

Eisenstein’s ideas about montage deepened with practice and, in fact, his technique in Ivan is far more complex than the relatively schematic design of Strike and Potemkin.  (The example in Strike of Eisenstein intercutting the massacre of workers with the slaughter of cattle in an abbatoir is typical of the rather lurid, sensational – even slightly vulgar – effects that the director implemented in his early work.  These films have a raw, blaring, Constructivist energy; there’s no mistaking the points that Eisenstein intends.)  As a simplification, Eisenstein’s early work treated individual shots as syntactic elements that were edited into hieroglyphic characters: for instance, door + ear equals listening; add a windowless wall and three-shot glyph means “listening but not hearing.”  The ultimate meaning is encoded in the individual shot “cells.”  But Eisenstein also conceived that dialectical montage could be applied within individual shots themselves – in other words, a single shot or montage cell could be constructed to embody opposites and, therefore, kinetic energy within one image.  Thus, montage could occur within a single frame.

Eisenstein, originally trained as an architect and, then, set designer, influenced by theatrical practice.  (Even at the height of his fame, he continued to direct theater productions, including a famous interpretation of Wagner’s Die Walkuere).  Therefore, he distinguishes between mise-en-scene and what he called mise-en-cadre.  Mise-en-scene is staging within a shot, that is, what theater-people call “blocking” – that is, the art of emphasizing action and creating meaningful patterns of movement within the “frame” of the proscenium.  Eisenstein was a master of this sort of staging.  Mise-en-cadre (or more simply stated mise-en-shot) is the creation of dialectical tensions within a single frame or image.  Eisenstein declared that the frame of the shot could be used to create tension – that is, forms shifting and straining against the frame of the picture field.  He also asserted that a conjunction of opposites could be created by using extreme depth of field that contrasted foreground with small figure in the deep background.  (This is a typically Wellesian mise-en-shot as can be seen in many famous images from Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil for instance – but there are spectacular examples in Ivan particularly in some the large-scale crowd scenes in Part I of the movie.)  More prosaically, contrasts in light and darkness, figure and ground, and camera angle as opposed to the object or person shown, can be employed to create a tense, even dialectical opposition, within a single shot.  The schematic clash of one image against another is not much in evidence in Ivan.  Eisenstein’s practice in Ivan is far more subtle and intricately designed.   

9.

In the development of his theories, Eisenstein adverts to his understanding of Asian writing systems.  Considering the Japanese kanji or characters, he notes that a system of glyphs representing things or simple actions are combined to generated complex pictographs that yield abstract meaning.  He cites Japanese characters combining the signs for “mouth” and “bird” as an ideogram for “to sing.”  In this context, Eisenstein argues that, although cinema relies upon pictures as its communicative substrate, the art of the movies is completely unlike painting or the other graphic arts.  In Eisenstein’s view, sequences of images constitute utterances – that is, film is a language comprised of syntactic units. 

Ezra Pound is not Eisenstein’s exact contemporary – born earlier (1885) he outlived the great Russian director by 24 years, dying in 1972 as compared to Eisenstein’s death in 1948.  Nonetheless, an interesting comparison can be made between Pound’s theories of poetic practice and Eisenstein’s ideas about cinema.  Pound also studied Chinese characters, albeit without much discipline or rigor, relying generally on his friend Ernest Fenellosa’s (1853 - 1908) studies in Asian linquistics.  (Fenellosa’s notes on Chinese poetry were the basis of Pound’s renowned poetry collection Cathay that imitates classical Chinese verse.)  Pound’s understanding of Asian writing was similar to Eisenstein’s rather primitive grasp of those linguistic systems.  Pound alleged that Chinese characters were combinations of pictographs for simple, concrete things or motions  – thus, a character combining signs for “dance,” “temple roof,” and the fluid edge of a dancer’s fringed garment meant something like “sacred elegance in motion”.  Pound elaborated this theory to assert that a combination of precisely limned verbal images conjoined with abstract words or, even, documentary (forensic) quotations might yield what he called “ideograms’ – that is, complex constellations of signs that yield meanings that exceed the sum of their parts.  Pound employs the practice of juxtaposing an image from nature with, for instance, a quotation from Jefferson or Mussolini to devise an “ideogram” that bursts into a meaning that transcends its component parts.  This technique can be observed throughout Pound’s verse, but particularly in The Cantos where ideograms comprised of separate and contrasting utterances form the spine of the work.  Literary critics define Pound as the progenitor of “imagism” in early 20th century verse.  Likewise, we can regard Eisenstein’s methods of making films as “imagistic” as opposed to primarily narrative.  Central to Eisenstein’s film theory is the notion that combining two or more potentially opposing phenomenon in a shot or series of shots creates an “excess” – that is, something that is greater than the sum of the parts.  

One can connect these ideas about making art with the works of 20th century figures as disparate as Charles Ives and Kurt Schwitters.  Schwitters devised collages constructed from what he called “Merz” (sounds like merde in French, that is, “shit”, but, in fact, a truncated form, of the German word Commerz – commerce – meaning the debris left over from commercial advertising, garbage, scraps of tickets and other ephemera, bits of weathered posters peeled off walls and the like.)  Schwitters’ Merzbau (constructions of garbage) rely on contrast between the component parts of the collage to engender meanings that are in “excess of” or that transcend the bits of junk glued together.  In his First Symphony, Ives has the orchestra play “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” in counterpart to other themes, some of them derived from Bach or famous American hymns – the whole melange ends with a wild discord.  Ives’ point is that none of the musical themes cited is subsumed or integrated with the tunes sounding simultaneously – the point is not harmony but a discord created by the conjunction of oppositions, that is, a form of dialectical montage in music existing in the work of the famously patriotic, anti-Bolshevik composer qua bourgeois insurance salesman.

10.

Like his erstwhile buddy, Hitler, Stalin was a film fan.  His favorite movie was Boys Town starring Spencer Tracy.  Stalin kept a tally of the times that he screened Boys Town – he watched the movie 256 times.  Stalin liked to have company when he watched movies.  If you were seated next to him during a film that he enjoyed, the dictator would seize hold of your arm during favorite scenes, exclaiming: “Look at that!  Just look at that!”  It was a good idea to look closely and respond enthusiastically.

Stalin, of course, recognized the prestige-value in Eisenstein’s movies but didn’t really warm to them.  He was relieved when Eisenstein went to Hollywood and, then, detoured into Mexico.  But the Mexican debacle turned into a scandal.  Upton Sinclair, who was financing the excursion, wrote that he had come to believe that Eisenstein “was some kind of pervert.”  (Sinclair declared that he thought Eisenstein was homosexual, indicating that he didn’t believe he had ever met such a person before encountering the Russian director.)  Some of Eisenstein’s traveling companions got into squabble in a Mexican bordello that resulted in several whores being thrown violently into a swimming pool.  News of this event reached Sinclair in California and, apparently, came to Comrade Stalin’s attention.  Stalin sent a telegraph to Eisenstein in care of the Leftist muckraking novelist, Upton Sinclair.  In the telegram, Stalin summoned Eisenstein back home writing in somewhat idiosyncratic English: “(you) are loose (your) comrades confidence in Soviet Union...thought to be deserter who broke off from his own country.  And afraid the people here would have no interest in him soon.  Am very sorry but all assert it is fact.  Wish to be well and to fulfill your plan of coming to see us.  My regards, Stalin.”  Needless to say, this was a recommendation by the Communist Tsar that it would have been foolhardy to ignore.

Stalin, as we have noted, liked Part One of Ivan and awarded Eisenstein the highest possible honor, the Stalin medal, for this work.  But Part Two, depicting an increasingly paranoid Ivan beset by palace intrigues, appalled the dictator.  Stalin said that the film was “vile” and that Ivan’s secret police, the Oprichniks, were “made to look like the Ku Klux Klan.”  Eisenstein had just suffered a serious heart attack and sent a letter to Stalin saying that, because of this medical emergency, he had not yet seen the finished picture.  He offered to make changes.  Shortly thereafter, Eisenstein was summoned to a personal meeting with Stalin.  If he was nothing else, Eisenstein was fantastically courageous.

We have a transcript of Eisenstein’s ill-fated meeting with Stalin and his lieutenants Cherkasov, Molotov, and Zhdanov, the cultural commissar.  The transcript is unintentionally funny and redolent of some of the court intrigues involving Donald Trump and his moronic advisors – of course, Stalin was far smarter than Trump and his court of sinister sycophants also more intelligent.  Stalin launched an attack on Eisenstein’s portrayal of the Oprichniki, Ivan’s secret police – “you make them look like the Ku Klux Klan.”  Not so, Eisenstein replied, the KKK wears white hooded robes; I show the Oprichniks wearing black.   This didn’t satisfy the Dictator.  “Your Tsar has turned out to be indecisive, like Hamlet,” Stalin lamented.  Molotov said the film was “overburdened with shadows” and self-indulgent. Stalin, then, began to rant about how Ivan was the greatest of all Tsars because he closed the country to foreign influences.  Catherine the Great, Stalin said, and Peter I had been wrong to allow foreigners and foreign elements into Mother Russia.  The error made by later Tsars was attempting to influence foreign lands and, conversely, tolerating foreigners in Russia.  (Here Stalin was reiterating his grievance against the Internationalist Jew, Leon Trotsky, now dead and buried for six years.)  “Ivan the Terrible’s remarkable enterprise was the fact that he was the first to introduce a state monopoly on foreign trade – Lenin was the second.”  

Zhdanov and Molotov then denounced the film.  Zhdanov repeated Beria’s assertion that Ivan “had been portrayed as a neurotic”.  Molotov said that Eisenstein had focused too much on the Tsar’s “inner psychological contradictions.”  Further, Molotov said that there were too many arches and cellars in the film and that the movie should have shown Moscow’s salubrious “fresh air.”  Stalin, then, said that Eisenstein had shown Ivan “repenting” too much and showing too much guilt for his cruelty.  In fact, Stalin said, Ivan was insufficiently terrible, too gentle and forbearing, and that the film erred in not demonstrating that Ivan should have “finished off the five major feudal families – too much screen time, is devoted to Ivan repenting and praying.”

Eisenstein said that he could readily correct these defects.  Furthermore, he said that if he was allowed to complete the trilogy, Ivan would be shown as victorious in the Livonian Wars that annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the Russian empire.  The movie would end with Ivan standing on the shores of the Baltic Ocean and declaring “We stand at the sea now and forever.”  This seemed to please Stalin, although he was still skeptical.  Stalin said that Eisenstein’s health was fragile and that he shouldn’t “rush to complete the film.”  Molotov and Zhdanov agreed.  Eisenstein asked if he should submit the revised script to the Politburo for approval.  Stalin said that there was no need for this measure.  (It was pretty clear that the third part of the film would not be allowed to proceed in any form and that The Boyar’s Plot would also be permanently banned.)

During this 70 minute discussion, the conversation turned to Ivan’s beard.  The beard is too pointed, Zhdanov remarked, possibly considering the phallic significance of the whiskers.  “Your camera lingers too long on the beard,” Zhdanov maintained.  “You seem weirdly fascinated by the beard,” Zhdanov added.  Eisenstein said he would fix this problem.  “There will be less beard in the third part,” he promised.  It’s interesting that Orson Welles, who admired the film, had the same criticism.  “There’s too much of the beard in the film.” Welles declared.  “It’s too rigid.  You could cross it with a hammer...” implying that the emblem of the hooked, stiff beard was like the sickle in the famous hammer-and-sickle emblem for the Bolsheviks.

11.

In Ivan Grosny, Eisenstein’s intent is to communicate meaning on all possible levels.  But the meaning is superficial, that is, a matter of involuted appearances and allusions.  Narratives about totalitarian power, of course, are intrinsically undramatic – the autocrat controls everything; his only gesture is to continuously declare that he is the ruler of all he surveys.  In Part One of the film, Ivan becomes Tsar as a 16 year boy after surviving attempts on his life during the Regency.  Then, he seems to abdicate, but must be again declared Tsar of all Russia – this is after battles in the South in which he annexes servant republics to the Duchy of Muscovy.  Ivan, then, becomes terribly sick, possibly due to poisoning or, as a result of “playing possum” to lure his enemies into the open.  He returns to power and eliminates his rivals.  Thus, the action of the first installment of Ivan is repetitive – Ivan simply declares himself Tsar (or is coronated as Tsar) not once or twice but three times.  The autocrat’s primary gesture, accordingly, is to announce and reaffirm his power.  

In Part Two of the epic, Ivan’s coronation as Tsar is replicated in the sinister sequence in which Vladimir becomes convinced that he will be recognized at emperor and, then, makes his way to the Church of the Dormition (where Russian kings are crowned) with the Oprichniki following him in a menacing procession.  Here Eisenstein replicates in parody form, and almost shot-by-shot, images in Part One of epic showing Ivan’s coronation.  Thus, an autocrat’s biography consists of continuous affirmations of his ultimate power or, in the alternative, shadowy images of threats to his authority – of course, Vladimir doesn’t survive his procession to the Church of the Dormition.  By Part Two of the trilogy, Eisenstein recognizes that the only real drama existing in the life of a tyrant is his deposition, how his enemies scheme against him and plot his ultimate downfall or, in the alternative, the autocrat’s madness.  Of course, Stalin must have sensed this turn in the narrative as well.  And, so, as a consequence, the third part of the film simply could not be produced.

Without an actual subject (defined by Eisenstein as a real conflict), Ivan is static – the film is inspired, not thematically but rather on the basis of its fantastically elaborated surface.  Where real inspiration flags, a great artist will often direct his energies into decoration and, I think, this is what happens in Ivan Grosny.  Consider that each major character is provided with an animal totem.  Ivan, for instance, is correlated with the imperial eagle.  (Eisenstein carefully annotated the animal influences on characters by citing 18th and 19th century texts on physiognomy.)  Some characters appear to be bears or otters or rodents. Eisenstein was influenced by Frazier’s The Golden Bough and he constructs sequences in the film to show that the King is a sacrificial victim – the King with ultimate power must be regularly assassinated.  The King can only revive, like the natural forces that he represents, if he is periodically and ritually killed and, even, in a sacrificial sparagmos torn into pieces.

Eisenstein was reading Freud and Otto Rank at the time that he made Ivan.  In his notes, he remarks that Vladimir, who has an oedipal relationship with the sinister Evrfosinia, sprawls on her lap, looking away from her – exactly, Eisenstein writes, as a Freudian patient is encouraged to make revelations as to himself when lounging on a couch, reclining and not looking into the eyes of his therapist.  Evrfosinia, Vladimir’s mother, strokes the hair of her “reclining” patient to calm him.  Later, Vladimir enacts the same scene with Ivan who now appears in the posture of his mother.  He reclines with Ivan at his back and the Tsar flirtatiously strokes his hair.  This replicates the scene of Freudian therapy and causes Vladimir to “blab out” his scheme to become Tsar – of course, with disastrous consequences.

An excellent example of Eisenstein’s use of mise-en-shot involves scenes set against one of the most remarkable sets ever designed, the enormous mural painted across the ceiling of Ivan’s reception chamber.  (This is the scene in which Ivan announces that he will subordinate the Boyars and constitute a paramilitary secret police in the form of the Oprichniks.)  The mural in the reception chamber, for which there was no historical model, is an enormous angel with head emitting fiery rays and his feet trampling on a globe representing the world.  The angel is so colossal that its body bends around a corner to represent the enormous head dangling down on one end wall.  Splayed across the opposing end wall, we see the angel’s feet trampling on the globe.  Eisenstein deploys his action against this vast painted surface which poses a kind of puzzle to the viewer – why is the figure’s head upside-down?  What are the feet trampling on the globe?  How can we combine these elements to create a coherent space and a legible angelic figure?  These sorts of riddles provide interior tension to each scene staged with the mural as a backdrop.  (There is also a remarkable montage effect: in a flashback, we see the young Ivan’s feet dangling down from a throne that is much too large for him; Eisenstein, then, cuts to a shot of the angel’s feet crushing the earth – the little helpless Ivan has become a celestial figure, a power that tramples the entire planet.)  It’s hard to say exactly what the bizarre juxtapositions in this sequence are intended to mean – other than to impose their undeniable graphic effect on the viewer.  But this sort of pictorial strategy is exemplary to the effects that Eisenstein contrives, often for no apparent purpose but to amaze and confound his viewers.  (Consider in this context, the weirdly low arches forming thresholds to the spaces in which action unfolds – note that everyone is constantly crouching to enter zones in which Ivan is present, thus, embodying gestures of submission to the all-powerful Tsar.)   In the absence of any real or plausible narrative, Ivan seems a monstrous exercise in set decoration, an example of obsessive adornment and garish excess.  

The motif or mirroring structure of Eisenstein’s film is also demonstrated by scenes within scenes.  In this regard, consider the scene involving the three heroic Israelites, represented in a medieval mystery play staged in the cathedral as being roasted in Nebuchadnezzar’s oven.  Here an equation is developed between the Biblical tyrant and Ivan by way of play within the play specular to the film’s principal action.  Another example of this formal device is the bizarre Kabuki-dance performed at the all-male banquet (orgy?) by Fedor Basmanov.  Basmanov, who is a significant figure in the second half of The Boyar’s Plot, was widely reputed to be the bisexual Ivan’s male lover.  Indeed, in Russian historiography, Basmanov is said to have been a malign influence on the Tsar and a cause of his increasingly irrational violence and paranoia.  Many Russian writers indicate that Ivan’s regime can be divided into an earlier benign phase and, then, vicious decadence during his latter rule in part embodied in the Tsar’s affection and sexual preference for Basmanov.  The banquet scene is designed as a spectacle and shot in technicolor – garish pinks and reds.  Basmanov’s performance, prancing about with a Kabuki mask of beautiful maiden, is Eisenstein’s coded reference to Ivan’s alleged homosexuality – something that would have been apparent to Russian viewers even including the rather obtuse Stalin.  The orgy/banquet scene is designed as the occasion in which Vladimir is moved to publicly declare his regicidal intentions and, thus, seal his fate, but it must be observed that Eisenstein’s development of the sequence far exceeds anything that could be justified from a plotting or narrative point of view.  

12.  

Kristin Thompson is someone that you should meet.  For many years, a professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin, she now lives in Trempeleau on the banks of the mighty Mississippi.  Dr. Thompson is the author of a notable book on Eisenstein’s Ivan Grosny named Ivan the Terrible, a Neo-Formalist Analysis (Princeton, 1981).  Thompson is married to David Bordwell, the dean of film studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, also a very important critic and scholar.  (Bordwell and Thompson’s books on narrative in cinema and the history of movies are standard textbooks in most contemporary film studies classes.)  Trempeleau, of course, is important for the sun shrine erected as an outlier temple to the great complex at Cahokia near St. Louis – this shrine was first excavated in 2016.  Remarkably, Kristin Thompson is also a world-renowned expert in Egyptian archaeology, the founder of the so-called Amarna project which focuses on the life and times of the emperor Akhnaten, often regarded as the progenitor of monotheism.  (Like the ancient Cahokians, he was also a sun-worshiper.)  

Dr. Thompson regards Eisenstein’s Ivan Grosny as exemplary of a film characterized by “excess”.  By “excess”, Dr. Thompson means that sequences in the film are designed to estrange or alienate the viewer.  Things and circumstances are viewed from perspectives that intentionally defamiliarize them.  Some examples of “excess” that Thompson cites are narrative sequences that simply last too long or, alternatively, are too short for their plot importance.  Scenes linger inordinately or zip by with such alacrity that we can’t quite decipher what is going on.  Redundancy is an aspect of “excess” – in Ivan the Terrible, the protagonist is crowned not once but three times, all in elaborate sequences – and a pretender (Vladimir) is fatally crowned as well, albeit in parody form.  Visual motifs may assume an importance far beyond their narrative significance – for instance, Zhdanov, Molotov, and Stalin told Eisenstein that the film was grotesquely “overburdened” with shadows, or “with too many images”.  (In his diary in October 1946, Eisenstein responded to this accusation by saying that he made films for those who “could read cinema” and not for visual illiterates who attended movies to be amused by “anecdotes.”  Needless to say, he kept this response to himself.)  Film “excess” occurs when visual patterns become predominant and, in fact, congest or occlude a movie’s narrative progress.  An example in the film is the council chamber decorated with the enormous contorted angel – the viewer is intrigued by the figure of the painted angel and may be seduced away from considering the narrative content in the sequence.  In her neo-formalist study of Ivan Grosny,  Dr. Thompson suggests that Eisenstein’s direction of the film is designed as an obstacle to understanding the narrative (or, perhaps, as a screen to conceal the movie’s relative paucity of narrative) – there is too much in the film for the viewer to digest.  Exactly as Eisenstein’s film theory predicts, the clash of images (mostly foreground figures against heavily adorned background architecture) yields an excess, a stately, paranoiac aura that suffuses the movie and that is thematic.  Ivan’s totalitarian rule is mirrored by Eisenstein’s over-emphatic, coercive, and totalizing style.  

Of course, Dr. Thompson’s ideas as to “excess” are, perhaps, over-powerful.  Aren’t movies, by definition, “excessive”?  Indeed, the popular cinema in the 21st century, clogged with elaborate comic-book extravaganzas and violent CGI-laden blockbusters is intentionally “excessive” and escapist.  (Some critics have said that cinema has bifurcated into modest and realistic psychological dramas opposed to colossal or gargantuan films that embody the “cinema of spectacle” – but, in fact, this bifurcation can be traced back to the earliest movies in film history.  Around 1900, Lumiere and Edison produced documentary-style pictures reporting on the world – trains arriving in stations, kings in royal processions, images of industrial processes and travelogues; yet at the same time, the cinema of spectacle existed in nascent form – Edison made a movie showing the electrocution of an elephant and the French magician, Georges Melies, produced pictures showing macabre stunts, beheading and comical dismemberments, as well as trips to the moon.)  A Marvel comic-book movie is intentionally “excessive” – the fights last too long, the explosions are orgasmically prolonged, the people are too pretty, too muscle-bound, too much afflicted with super-powers.  Thompson’s orientation is to the conventions of classical Hollywood narrative films – she and Bordwell have written the best accounts of the stylistic norms in Hollywood pictures of the thirties, forties, and fifties, in fact the era that produced the narrative techniques that still govern most cinema today.  When viewed against, classical Hollywood narrative, for instance, the stylized but, nonetheless, realistically plausible conventions in film noir, Eisenstein’s Ivan is certainly strange and “excessive”.   But I would argue that Ivan, in fact, is weirdly more similar to a CGI-based comic book movie than a film like Moonlight, for instance, or any number of carefully directed dramas or romantic comedies prevalent today in the “serious cinema”.  

(And I don’t wish to be unfair to Dr. Thompson who is certainly well-versed in pop-culture and, indeed, recent films devised along the lines of movie-blockbusters.  For instance, she is the author of a treatise on the Lord of the Rings pictures called The Frodo Franchise.  Her ideas of as to “excess” and the European art film may well have given rise to her interest in successful pop-culture films like Peter Jackson’s Tolkein trilogy.)  

13.

Eisenstein read Otto Rank’s psychoanalytical treatise on the trauma of birth as powerful influence on human affairs.  He admired the work and desired to incorporate some of its motifs in the picture.  The film climaxes (if this term can be used) with Vladimir’s murder in the cathedral.  Eisenstein instructed his director of photography to shoot the interiors representing the Church of the Dormition as a “womb”.  He said: “I want you to suggest the space inside of the mother’s womb.”  The cameraman, Andrei Moskvin (Eduard Tisse shot the exteriors of which there are very few in Ivan II) was said to be imperturbable.  He nodded and said something like “you got it, boss.”  Eisenstein, then, demanded that the choral singing in the scene be manipulated into a surging pulse that suggested the “pangs of birth”.  Is this visible in the film?   The viewer will have to decide for him- or herself.  Certainly, one can readily interpret the low, fissure-like thresholds with which the film is replete as representations of the birth canal.          

14.

Certain similarities exist between Orson Welles Citizen Kane and Ivan the Terrible.  Jerry Thompson, a journalist, investigates the life of Charley Kane, aiming to find some key to the publishing mogul’s life to complete a “March of Time” newsreel.  Near the end of the film, Thompson says: “Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and, then, later lost it all.  Maybe, ‘Rosebud’ was something he couldn’t get or lost.  No, I don’t think it explains anything.  I don’t think any word explains a man’s life.”  Kane tells Mr. Bernstein: “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a very great man.”

Like Kane, Ivan’s childhood is disfigured – in the Tsar’s case, marred by violent court intrigue.  His mother is poisoned by Evfrosinia.  His two best friends become his enemies and, ultimately, conspirators.  He is thrust into greatness that ultimately destroys him and, in Eisenstein’s vision, gains the whole world but loses everything.  At the end, Eisenstein’s make-up turns Ivan into a monster just as Welles’ becomes increasingly monstrous as layers of cosmetic turn the handsome 25-year old enfant terrible into a lurching and grotesque old tyrant.  David Thomson notes that Eisenstein would have made a great horror director.

15. 

When my brother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) he fell into despair.  I visited him in his beautiful home on a wooded acreage near Port Orchard, Washington.  My brother collected beautiful things and he had a bed that was built to look like sleigh.  But, when I saw him, he had put the bed in storage and was using a clinical-looking hospital bed.  My brother was sitting on the edge of the bed in his bathrobe.  He had a large collection of DVDs, hundreds of them arranged on shelves against the wall.  My brother said: “I can’t go out any more and, so, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands.  I guess it’s time to finally watch Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.  You know, I’ve been avoiding that movie for most of life.”  I agreed that he should watch the DVD of the film.

After my brother died, I received eight large packing boxes full of DVDs. In one of them, I found the Criterion Collection DVD set containing Ivan the Terrible.  The DVDs were still in shrink-wrap plastic and hadn’t been opened.  

July 17, 2022