The Terrible Twos | Metro Cinema screens both parts of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible this weekend.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PARTS I & II
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Starring Nikolai Cherkasov, Serafima Birman, Mikhail Nazvanov. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Mon, Apr 24-27.
****
Halfway through watching Sergei Eisenstein’s two-part historical epic Ivan the Terrible, I decided to poke around the I nternet and see what kind of reputation it has today, more than a half-century later. I knew going in that Eisenstein was the most prestigious filmmaker in Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and that Ivan is consistently held up alongside 1925’s Battleship Potemkin as his very best work. I also knew that it bears high praise from film historian David Bordwell and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the latter of whom named it one of the three best films of all time.
Then came the Internet Movie Database like a bucket of semi-cold water. Not only is Ivan the Terrible missing from the IMDb’s top 250 films list, but IMDb readers collectively awarded it a paltry 7.7 stars out of 10. (I assumed this was a film you gave top marks to, out of sheer respect.) The answer to its FAQ question, “Have critics praised this film unanimously?” is a blunt “No,” followed by a list of quotes from negative, often scathing reviews to back it up. Rounding out the FAQ is a quote from Eisenstein himself, musing that he should have died immediately after making Battleship Potemkin — “I’ve made a mess of my own biography!”
Harsh. But having now seen the film in its three-hour entirety, I can say that it’s all a bit too harsh. Certainly, the plot in Part I can be opaque to the point of impenetrability. Some of the acting is overwrought and melodramatic too, even for the 1940s. That goes double for the facial expressions. Yet as a historical document — of both filmmaking under Stalin and the Russia of the 16th century — it’s a fascinating thing, and captivatingly beautiful as only these old films can be. Eisenstein moves at a slow, magisterial pace, overloading every shot with ominous detail: the freakishly long shadows everyone casts; the gnarled, too-low architecture that makes the meddling aristocrats move like hunchbacks; or the way he lights people from below, so everyone looks like they’re telling ghost stories around a campfire.
Part I covers a huge stretch in Ivan’s reign, beginning with his controversial coronation as czar of all Russia. He vows to unite the country behind him, purge it of its negative forces (cue grumbling from the boyars, the heavily bearded aristocrats whose power Ivan severely cuts back), and reclaim the territory that’s been slowly taken from it. From there he gets married, invades the city of Kazan, and falls deathly ill back at home — all within the first hour.
By the second part, Ivan has declared an all-out battle against the boyars, and the rapid-fire plot slows right down as the increasingly weary czar fends off an assassination plot and tries to determine who in his inner circle, including the rest of the royal family, he can really trust.
Make no mistake about it: this is all clearly set up as a Stalinist propaganda film. Ivan is a strong, fearless leader bent on modernizing Russia and making it a world power to be reckoned with — sound familiar? Not coincidentally, it’s when things get morally interesting in Part II, when Ivan grows more obsessed with manipulation and holding onto his power, that Stalin abruptly decided he didn’t much like the film’s political parallels anymore; as a result, Part II wasn’t released until after his death a decade later. (By this time Eisenstein was also dead, and his planned third instalment was never finished.)
More importantly, though, is that it’s fun propaganda. Eisenstein doesn’t beat the Soviet allusions to death, and there are clear nods to more cerebral things like Julius Caesar, and especially Hamlet in Part II, thrown in for good measure. Nikolai Cherkasov does good work grounding the whole thing as the paranoid, perpetually bug-eyed Ivan, with long ratty hair and a beard that’s pointy beyond belief.
And I promise that you won’t come out of it feeling any more sympathetic to Stalin — what more do you want?
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