Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Ivan the Terrible - Pt. 1
Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie''s plot.
I don't really know where to begin in writing about Sergei Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible," the culmination of the career of one of the greatest masters and creators of cinema, so I'll begin with its predecessor, "Alexander Nevsky." "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) is a great film in its own right, with one of the most amazing battle sequences in the history of world cinema. It also has a magnificent musical score by Sergei Prokofiev that is one of that master's greatest works. It has stunning cinematography from Edmund Tisse, and, in the title role, it has a more-than-charismatic performance by Nikolai Cherakossov, "Alexander Nevsky" is fairly simple-minded celebration of Russian patriotism and the historic victory over German invaders.
"Alexander Nevsky" is a propaganda film and pleased the ultimate authority, Josef Stalin. All prints of Eisenstein's previous film had been destroyed on Stalin's orders, but Eisenstein was awarded the Order of Lenin for making "Alexander Nevsky" and Eisenstein was made the head of Mosfilm and supervisor of all Soviet film production. Ironically, "Alexander Nevsky" was withdrawn from circulation at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, then re-released after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1940.
In 1941 Eisenstein was assigned the project of making a film about Ivan IV, the Grand Duke of Moscow who, in the sixteenth century, was the first Czar. He reassembled the "Nevsky" team (star, composer, cinematographer) and produced a great if troubling masterpiece.
During a war in which a foreign enemy was seeking to dismember the unity that Ivan first achieved, any historical film had to be patriotic. However, the rulers of the Russian Empire of the time had overthrown the last czar and murdered his family. If this did not make the subject tricky enough, there was the river of blood that earned Ivan IV the epithet "the Terrible." Ruthless destruction of his Ivan's enemies also typified Stalin, and resonances of the Ivan's and Stalin's secret police are so obvious in the second movie that it was not shown until Stalin had been dead five years and Eisenstein ten.
All this is to say that "Ivan the Terrible" is not just a movie about political maneuvering but was necessarily very political. Part One is much darker than "Alexander Nevsky," but has mostly "safe" targets (that is, enemies communist ideology saw as enemies: the church, the land-owning feudal aristocracy, and foreigners plotting against the unification of Russia). The psychological aspects of Ivan's character are largely postponed—not by Eisenstein's intentions but directly by Stalin. The scenes of the lonely childhood of the Grand Duke were cut from Part One, and partly integrated as a flashback in Part Two.
Part One begins with a spectacular coronation of the czar in 1547. His regalia and anointing occupy the first ten or so minutes of the film. Then he declaims a fervently nationalist coronation speech, recoils in fury at an insulting message from the Tartar khan and sets off to conquer the Tartar capital, with the ambitious friend Prince Andrei Kurbsky (Mikhail Nazvanov) whom Ivan does not recognize is in love with the Czarina as its leader. The elaborate preparations include a reprise of the stripped-to-the-waist Christ figures of "Que Viva Mexico." The battle is perfunctory in comparison with the battle on the ice in "Alexander Nevsky"—or with the coronation.
Back in the Kremlin, Ivan's aunt Euphrosinia (a formidable Serafima Birman) is plotting with other (feudal) aristocrats against the centralization of power and reduction of their privileges. Ivan is on his deathbed, more concerned that the boyars will not pledge fealty to his infant son than that he is dying. He rises from his deathbed to do what is close to a mad scene, collapses, and then recovers to the dismay of the nobles, including the princes of the church.
Euphrosinia poisons the Czarina herself and the czar withdraws from the company of his enemies, going off to a rural retreat to pout. Part One ends with a mass procession through the snow in which the common people beseech the czar to return. The visual compositions in every shot are striking, but the czar in profile at a window with the line of supplicants stretching as far as the eye can see across the fields of snow is genuinely amazing (even without the stirring choral scoring of the czarist anthem). It is an amazing picture and the high point of fascist art.
The recent death of Leni Riefenstahl has reopened the question of whether a movie can be fascist propaganda and great. In regard to Riefenstahl, I think "Olympia" is great art, but not fascist propaganda, and "Triumph of the Will" is great propaganda, but not really great art. Some might question my categorizing the work of the greatest Soviet film-maker, working on a project personally assigned by the head of the Communist Party, during a war against Hitler as "fascist." However, what has been identified (most forcefully in From Caligari to Hitler) as "fascist" are the worship of power(/powerful males) and treating masses of human beings architecturally (for visual effect rather than as people). "Ivan the Terrible" is an extended celebration of absolutism and the destruction of enemies of a leader forcing centralization of power. The common people love the absolute ruler and beg him to return, but they are as abstract as the "universal class" in the name of which Stalin ruled and murdered and murdered and murdered and murdered some more. The crowds, particularly at the climax of Part One, are deployed architecturally. And the result is stirring, even to someone as skeptical as I am about absolutist power and mindful of the reigns of terror of both Ivan and Stalin. "Triumph of the Will" is a more accurate title for "Ivan the Terrible, Part One" than for Riefenstahl's rapturous celebration of Hitler's rally
Eistenstein's Ivan's will to power is presented as self-sacrificing (lonely is the head that wears the crown and all), not as personal ambition. Although I consider this propaganda and gross simplification, I still find it hard not at least to sympathize with Eistenstein's Ivan. His enemies are caricatures, though Euphrosinia has the fascination of single-minded villains.
OK, "Ivan the Terrible, Part One" is unnerving. The acting is operatic rather than realistic (not at all in the Stanislavsky tradition, socialist realism, or any other kind of realism). Or perhaps the acting is exaggerated in the way of silent films. The dialogue might as well be on inter-titles instead of being declaimed, though Prokofiev's score is very important to the film's effects. Some find the movie static, though I think the combination of juxtapositions of what John Ford called the most interesting object to photograph (the human face) and the movements with looming shadows and Byzantine mosaics in the background are breath-taking. The visual compositions throughout the movie are extraordinary, with long-shots and close-ups both being spectacular. (The lighting is as expressionist as the sets are.) The ornate costumes, extreme makeup, and epic beards are used to great effect. The human dramas (all tragedies) are still to come in Part Two! Part One ends in triumphant vindication (as fascist art should).
Both parts of "Ivan the Terrible" and "Alexander Nevsky" are available together on a Criterion set. I have a far inferior VHS, but recently saw both parts on TCM with a far cleaner image than what I've seen in theaters and on tape.
Part One Of Sergei Eisenstein's Two-part Epic Chronicling The, Life Of The 16th Century Tsar, Ivan Grozny, Is One Of Film's, Most Artistic And Absorbi...More at HotMovieSale.com
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