Film Review
The final great work from the legendary Russian filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein is both a compelling portrait of one of the most important
figures in Russian history and an insightful reflection of the era in
which the film was made. Like Eisenstein's earlier
Alexander Nevsky (1938),
Ivan the Terrible was a propaganda
film, intended as an appeal to Soviet unity at a time when
fascism was proving to be a serious threat to communism. When the
film was being made, Soviet Russia was under attack from the German
armies and the fall of Moscow looked to be imminent.
Ivan the Terrible
was to have been in three parts.
Part I was completed in 1944 and
was so well appreciated by the Communist Party that it was awarded the
Stalin Prize First Class. Whilst celebrating this achievement and
the completion of his work on
Part II,
Eisenstein suffered a heart attack. Recovering in
hospital, the director learned that his Communist sponsors were so
offended by
Part II that
they had no choice but to ban the film unless some drastic alterations
were made. Eisenstein agreed, but the only change he made was to
re-shoot, in colour, the final sequence of the film (in which Ivan attempts to justify his
actions). Although Eisenstein did subsequently manage to patch things up with
Stalin, the film's ban remained in force for another twelves years. It was not until 1958,
five years after Stalin's
death, that
Part II could be
seen. Eisenstein had already begun work on
Part III, but only about 20 minutes
of material had been shot, and most of this was destroyed by the
Communists.
It is not hard to see why
Part II was
so inflammatory. Whereas
Part
I portrayed Ivan as a great popular leader, driven by noble
ambitions to reunite his lands and his people,
Part II showed him as a merciless
tyrant, increasingly paranoid and resorting to morally dubious methods
to achieve his political objectives. This would not have been
such a problem if it were not for the fact that the Soviet leader Josef
Stalin closely identified himself with the Tsar Ivan.
Consciously or otherwise, in making
Ivan
the Terrible Eisenstein had been making a critique of Stalin
which was dangerously close to the knuckle.
You may wonder
why the
Communist leader was so inclined to identify himself with the Tsar, given
that the first objective of the Russian Revolution was to
bring a decisive end to Tsar rule. That Stalin saw
himself as a Tsar implied that the Revolution was a failure. All
it achieved was to replace one autocracy with another having arguably
less legitimacy. So, as well as equating Stalin with one of
history's most notorious tyrants, Eisenstein's film also pretty well
admits that the Russian Revolution was a waste of time. It's
surprising Eisenstein didn't end his days in a gulag.
Few would deny that
Ivan the
Terrible is among Eisenstein's finest accomplishments; it is
quite possibly the greatest film ever made in Russia. In contrast
to the biting realism of the director's earlier films, this is highly
stylised work which brings an exaggerated form of cinematic
expressionism to the classical theatrical tradition of Greek and
Shakesperean tragedy. Each shot is meticulously composed, with
lighting carefully arranged to create the most spectacular dance of shadows
on the characters' faces and on the walls of the sets. The style
of acting is deliberately exaggerated, more akin to what you would
expect in a silent film. And the costumes are elaborate and
ornate to a level that is several levels up from kitsch. All this
creates a universe that is alien from one we can recognise, yet the
experience of watching the film is so intense that you
cannot help being drawn into another world, another time, far remote
from our own, and hence so utterly awe-inspiring. As a piece of
cinematic art,
Ivan the Terrible
is an extraordinary achievement, and quite unique.
As well as a great filmmaker, Eisenstein was also a great intellectual,
and his films are laden with abstruse symbolism and deep philosophical
undertones. One favourite theory of his was the dialectic
reasoning that had been popularised by Marx and Engels. In his
earlier films,
Battleship
Potemkin and
October (1928), Eisenstein had
explored the use of dialectic montage, whereby starkly contrasting
images - representing the opposing forces of thesis and antithesis -
are brought together to form a recognisable end-product, the
synthesis. For Eisenstein, Tsar Ivan proved to be the
perfect subject for dialectic analysis, although here his approach is
somewhat subtler.
In this film, Eisenstein portrays Ivan as a man with a dual nature -
the ordinary, compassionate human being, versus the ambition-driven
leader looking for his place in history. In
Part I, it
is the former aspect of Ivan's nature that is dominant. He is
shown as a sympathetic hero, driven by honourable motives to bring
about drastic changes to his country. By the end of
Part II, we see a totally different
Ivan, a man who has been totally consumed by power and transformed into
a monster. In one scene (the banquet sequence in which Ivan manages to thwart
an assassination attempt), the Tsar looks like a primitive representation of the Devil; the
garish colour photography, dominated by red, suggesting a scene from the
very depths of Hell. Ivan even admits that, to be an effective
leader, he has no recourse but to fight evil (namely his opponents) with evil.
The strongly opposing dialectic forces at work are the two sides of
Ivan's nature (idealism versus power lust), which ultimately result in the creation of a tyrant.
Another dialectic conflict is the one between Ivan the man and Ivan the myth,
seen most noticeably in a memorable sequence in
Part I where Ivan the man is
dominated by a huge shadow projected onto a far wall. First we
see Ivan the man dwarfed by a shadow of a globe. Then, we see the
shadow of Ivan, growing until it towers over both Ivan the man and,
more crucially, the shadow of the globe. The writing is on the
wall, you might say. Ivan is destined to become a man who will
leave a huge imprint in the history of mankind. But it is not the
imprint he would have wished.
As the globe-and-man shadow play predicts, in the course of the two
films, Ivan is gradually transformed from a likeable idealist into a
brutal and calculating despot, totally devoured by megalomania.
The nobility and compassion of his youth give way to an obsessive need
to control everything; he is suspicious of all around him and he soon
loses his moral judgement. The irony is that, without great
power, Ivan cannot realise his noble ambitions, but once such power has
been harnessed, he can only fail to put it to good use. The
conclusion: absolute power is ultimately useless. Not quite the
message that Josef Stalin and his cronies would have wanted to hear.
© James Travers 2008
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