I love this:

I was wrong about Sergei Eisenstein. What I’d seen of his work had led me to believe he was only of historical interest: a master of technical innovations that have since been so thoroughly absorbed into cinematic grammar that they no longer seem remarkable. The person who invented the wheel undoubtedly changed the world of transportation forever, but that doesn’t mean you’d like to spend two hours cruising along in Caveman Ug’s first cart. Watching Ivan the Terrible was a bit like discovering that, just before he died, Caveman Ug also built a Ferrari.

Because, yeah. Whereas Battleship Potemkin is a groundbreaking piece of cinematic history for the influence it had on other movies (though I think still very enjoyable to watch!), Ivan the Terrible is just a unique movie that doesn’t really have any imitators at all.

So for instance, I watched the little featurette about its staging, and it talks about how one of Eisenstein’s things in these movies was “expressive movement,” and how that means that characters move in these deliberately non-naturalistic ways, with isolated movements where they are sinuously flowing or jutting their face forward sharply in a manner reminiscent of a live-action cartoon; and about how the staging is relentlessly frontal, with characters in dialogue speaking to each other sideways rather than with over-the-shoulder reverse shots. And it went on to say that nobody else has really made movies like that, and that in a certain light the heirs to that technique are like the fight scenes of Bruce Lee. (The blog post I’m linking to here also compares its static compositions to The Passion of Joan of Arc, which isn’t wrong.)

And so whereas the first movie was very much in the historical drama genre, this is not. The movie is set entirely in claustrophobic interiors, and it’s like this psychological horror film as the web of paranoia and betrayal draws ever tighter around the characters. And about two thirds of the way through the movie, it suddenly bursts into color and there is a banquet scene, lit almost entirely in lurid incarnadine, that suddenly breaks out into a song and dance number. For real. I swear that someone even breakdances in it.

And at this banquet, the idiot son of the woman who’s been scheming against Ivan gets drunk, and — to prove that he’s Ivan’s friend — naively tells him all about a murder plot designed to put him on the throne as a puppet, giggling about how he doesn’t want to be Tsar and just wants to drink juice wine all day. (I confess that I was thinking of Buster and Lucille here.) Ivan dresses the idiot up in his tsar robes, has him lead a procession out of the feast, and sure enough, the murderer strikes Buster down, thinking that he was Ivan. His mother comes forward in triumph, only to collapse in horror when she realizes what her plotting has actually led to, and the movie ends with Ivan standing over a weeping, crooning woman while her son’s body is dragged away.

So yeah, it’s pretty cheery! Hard to believe Stalin thought it might be seen as critical of autocratic dictators! It really is a damn shame the third part was never made, though, because it’s sort of a lost masterpiece in potentia, based on the first parts.