Ivan The Terrible

Ivan The Terrible is a difficult beast to consider. 

As an aesthetic object, it gives me great pleasure. The sets are beautiful. The costumes majestic and imposing. The lighting impeccable.

But, as a film with a message, the complexity of cold war thinking has left me confused. 

Part of the problem has been balancing director Sergei Eisenstein's seemingly contradictory attitudes towards Joseph Stalin, attack and glorification. Another problem lies in Eisenstein's attempts to combine contemporary high and low brow cinema with its pained angles and grand melodrama. 

Thanks to the scholarship of Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, who contributed some fantastic scholarship in the  Criterion DVD editions, we now know that Ivan was a very courageous gesture, in its ambivalent and measured critique of Stalin.

Part I garnered Stalin's approval, but Part II, which shows Ivan in growing sexual delirium, was banned for over a decade following a Kremlin meeting with Eisenstein and Stalin himself. It appears that Eisenstein agreed to make some cosmetic changes but then edited the film to suit himself but them edited the film to suit himself before dying shortly after. 

Even if he never got to finish Part III, what Eisenstein left behind in parts I and II is one of the most complex and nuanced works of soviet cinema, an acceptance of both giddy pop art and morbid medieval history. 

The actors Eisenstein uses often look odd. Their features are sometimes exaggerated by lightning from below. His camera angles are strange and suffocating. Ivan's opponents are seen as grotesque characters. It is impossible not to look at those faces and not immediately think of the Danish silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc made by Carl Theodore in 1928.

Ivan is also reminiscent of Joan of Arc in its creeping, brooding set design. 

Eisenstein's sets are unwieldy and large. Some are unadorned, shadowed walls, arches, nooks, staircases. Others, like the throne room, are covered in paintings of religious icons. The spaces have a curious dimensionality. Some spaces are clearly flat while others show the actors moving through seemingly-flat spaces. In many shots he uses real shadows to show Ivan's head, with its wicked pointed beard, dwarfing the members of his court. 

Part I is serious and historical, while Part II is bombastic and loud and self-consciously over the top. I wasn't drawn into the plot personally, and I don't think many other people will be. The strength of its film is in its history and its spectacle. 

Yet, Ivan The Terrible is routinely included in a list of great films and to hail it is more a duty than a pleasure.