So this is a movie by Sergei Eisenstein, who you might remember from such films as Battleship Potemkin. Based on knowing literally only that about him, I was expecting this to be a silent film, so when someone talked, it kind of blew my mind. But yeah, this is from 1944, and it talks.

So in itself, the movie is deliberately highly stylized.[1] Compositions are painting-like, acting is stagy, movements are almost balletic, speeches are declaimed, there’s a lot of use of dramatic shadows (like when Ivan enters a room, and his enormous shadow falls over the conspiring nobles huddled there), and the musical score (by Prokofiev!) is suitably ceremonial. Like, you know how directors will sometimes set scenes to classical music? Eisenstein was able to ask a legit classical composer to just write him some new material for the film, and boy howdy did he get good use out of that.

The story it’s telling is of course the story of Ivan the Terrible, the details of whose reign you are no doubt familiar with, so don’t need me to recap. (Full list of things I knew about Ivan the Terrible: he existed, he was probably terrible in some way but maybe not as terrible as the name makes him sound?) But so it starts with his coronation as Tsar, and then follows a kind of rise and fall arc as he comes to absolute power and gets everything he wants, but then loses everything due to the intrigues of the nobility and goes into exile… but then at the end is recalled by the demands of the populace, and with the loyalty of his new “iron men” plans to rule with absolute power.

I BET PART TWO IS REALLY HAPPY AND EVERYTHING GOES SUPER WELL. (No spoilers for history!)

So of course in addition to the historical drama in the movie, there’s inevitably some historical drama around the movie itself. 1944 is Stalin’s Soviet Union, right, and Ivan was one of Stalin’s heroes upon whom he modeled himself. So this film won prizes and was well-received… but the second film pissed Stalin right off, and it got banned and wasn’t released until 1958 after Stalin’s (and Eisenstein’s) death, and the planned part three of the trilogy never got made. I haven’t read up on that too much yet, because I don’t want to be spoiled more than I have to be, but I’m kinda curious as to whether it was deliberately anti-Stalin or just triggered his paranoia.

Anyway, good movie, definitely in the historical epic mode, but more interesting than usual for that genre.

OH ALSO, WHY ARE DOORS IN MOSCOW LIKE HALF-HEIGHT? Everyone has to keep stooping to go into rooms, it’s very weird.

  1. I’m kind of reluctant to talk about this, because one of the reasons I picked this to watch is, the Criterion Channel on Filmstruck has this “Observations on Film Art” series; they’re short (10-15 minutes) things where film studies professors analyze some aspect of a film — the sound in M, the shot composition in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the use of deep focus in The Rules of the Game, etc. — and the most recent one is “Staging and Performance in Ivan the Terrible, Part II”, which sounded interesting enough to get me to watch these movies so I can see what they have to say about it. But also means that I’m making comments about this movie before I listen to actual knowledgeable people say smarter things, which is a bad time to go on the record with your hot takes. ↩︎