The Favorites - Ivan the Terrible, Pt. II (#73)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Ivan the Terrible, Pt. II (1946/USSR/dir. Sergei Eisenstein) appeared at #73 on my original list.

What it is • The Ivan the Terrible films are among the most unconventional biopics of all time: more about gesture and expression than action. Eisenstein stylizes his live actors and physical sets into grotesque cartoons (J. Hoberman notes that the film "approach[es] animation...Nikolai Cherkasov’s stooped, skinny Ivan might equally have been modeled on a Disney vulture"). Even so, Ivan the Terrible Pt. I (1944) comes much closer than Pt. II to conventional biopic format. Its story documents a series of notable events in Ivan's life, from his coronation and victory in battle to the loss of his wife and triumphant return to Moscow after a temporary abdication. The first film also depicts a notable physical transformation, with Ivan slowly morphing from dashing, fresh-cheeked young man to bearded, wizened old(-looking) man. The second film, on the other hand, zeroes in on one specific story, narrowing its scope in both time and space (other than the dazzling checkerboard-court sequence in Poland that opens the movie). The aristocratic boyars who plotted against Ivan throughout Pt. I are now closing in on him in Moscow and only through his diabolical cleverness and dedication is he able to outwit their attempts to humiliate and eventually assassinate him. Although Ivan's wit and charm, contrasted with the devious sobriety of his opponents, secures him as a sympathetic protagonist, he also seems quite grotesque - calling him a "good guy" would certainly be stretching it. This was ostensibly why Joseph Stalin, who had endorsed the first movie, suppressed the second, chiding Eisenstein and Cherkasov for obscuring the motivations for Ivan's "terrible" actions (something Stalin knew a bit about, and must have taken personally). However, Stalin and the censors in his employ also seemed perturbed by the film's avant-garde nature, which takes the experimentation of the first film to new levels. Pt. II mixes garish, hellish colors with stark black-and-white, playing with light and shadow across Ivan's face so that he looks more like an axe murderer than a noble head of state, and distorting its human forms until they exist more as tactile shapes in their own right than easily-understood signifiers. In short, Ivan the Terrible Pt. II is as concerned with form as content, conceiving form as content in a way that simply didn't compute with Soviet preferences for social realism.

Why I like it •

The Battleship Potemkin

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The Battleship Potemkin could be subtitled "A Story of the Sea." For while the men who scurry about its frame - those anonymous and amorphous masses - instigate the action, it is the ambiguously gleaming waters around the ship, and the ship itself, that most reflect the narrative arc. When the film begins, the sea is forbidding, isolating, intimidating: a mass of impenetrable emptiness encircling the starving and discontented battleship. Its shimmering presence heightens our impression of the sailors as imprisoned by their circumstances, and zeroes our focus in on the ship that holds them; after all, there's nothing else to look at, for them or for us.

Yet the film concludes with another shot of these waters and suddenly our interpretation is quite different. At this point the battleship Potemkin steams toward the squadron sent to shoot it down, only to discover that the other ships have been overtaken by sympathetic sailors, more interested in saluting than shooting the mutinous barge. And suddenly the sea is an open field, a liberating space upon which anything is possible. Its shimmers seem friendly winks, its little waves infinite possibilities, its wide-open landscape a heroic horizon. Eisenstein's title tells us that the ship is waving the flag of freedom and it's as if this banner is clearing the air, swatting away the mosquitoes of reaction and the haze of oppression, parting the waves as crisply and cleanly as the ship's bow itself.

October

Years ago, I saw a few brief scenes from October which engendered in me a passionate desire to see the whole movie. One moment stood out especially - Eisenstein cuts between a group of cartoonish bourgeois women beating a man with umbrellas and a drawbridge going up, with a cart and dead horse hanging from the precipice. Eventually the cart tumbles down the broad, erect face of the bridge, which is beginning to resemble a skyscraper. The horse finally plummets as well, over the other side of the bridge, into the water. The cutting, the movement onscreen, the vividness of the photography: all added up to one of the most rhythmic, hypnotic, and startling uses of cinema I'd ever experienced. Another sequence which stayed with me was the juxtaposition of Kerensky with the mechanical peacock - again, the cutting between the two figures, the movement within the frame, created a marvelous sense of tension and release, almost musical.

I sought out October for a while, trying to order it through a video store without luck (though the clerk informed me that Coppola had decided to become a director after seeing October for the first time). Finally I saw it on a big screen ... and was disappointed. What was brilliant in short snippets didn't quite hold together in long form. There was not enough of an arc to tie in all the effective moments, and the didactic, propagandistic aspect which was easy to overlook for a few minutes became overbearing over the course of two hours. The lack of central characters also had an unfortunate effect - while relatively anonymous ensembles are a regular feature of Eisenstein's silent work, they're usually smaller in number and more distinctive in appearance and behavior; here, the drama is dispersed too widely, and becomes diffuse.

Upon re-viewing the film for the first time in years tonight, my opinion largely remains the same. However, and this is a big however, the final half-hour is excellent and ranks with Eisenstein's very best work. It's a strong finish, not quite enough to make me see the whole film as a masterpiece, but powerful nonetheless. Here Eisenstein ties his bombastic, electric montage agitprop to a more focused narrative (after spanning months and several locations, he settles on the night of October 25 for the last 30 minutes) and a more humanistic aesthetic - several faces begin to emerge from the crowd, lending the "symbolic" proletariat a soul. There's also a fascinating ambivalence in Eisenstein's use of art, particularly sculpture, which manages to represent both the overbearing power and privilege of the upper classes and the romantic spirit of the revolutionaries. All in all, it's a rousing finale and remains one of the more effective depictions of revolution onscreen.

This post was originally published on The Sun's Not Yellow.

Ivan the Terrible

Over the course of two films, released fourteen years apart due to Soviet censorship, legendary director Sergei Eisenstein chronicles the infamous Russian tsar's ascension to and assertion of power. Ivan (Nikolai Cherkasov) begins as a handsome young prince, crowned at the opening of Part I while the corrupt nobles whisper conspiracies under his very nose. By the end of Part II, Ivan is a wizened, shrewd tyrant, foiling an assassination plot by using a simple-minded relative as bait. In between, he leads troops into battle, throws decadent parties, loses a wife to poison, and is betrayed repeatedly until his paranoia makes him wise beyond his years - and authoritarian beyond his foes' wildest expectations.

The film is a masterpiece - the above plot description guides the action, but the essence of the movie is in the extreme close-ups Eisenstein lavishes upon the bizarre faces of his players, the lavish yet cleverly designed set pieces (dinners with huge white, and later black, swan statues; a diplomatic detente in which the figures are placed on the checkered floor like chess-pieces), and the magnificent score contributed by Prokofiev. One should not expect a historically accurate recreation, a politically correct manifesto, nor even an especially straightforward narrative; to enjoy the movie one has to appreciate the campy effects Eisenstein employs and recognize that their campiness is not really unintentional. Even Ivan the Terrible seems in on the joke, half-flirting with an effeminate usurper just to get his way, wickedly grinning as he poses for Eisenstein's flamboyant camera. Part II is even better than Part I, if only because it further abandons the dutiful rollout of Ivan's rise to power for the immersion in his decadent, paranoid, baroque milieu.

Eisenstein had been one of the signature pioneers of Soviet silent film, when his films focused on the power of "montage" - rapidly cut sequences which often employed visual metaphors and rhyming images. Ivan the Terrible employs a wider variety of tricks, but the execution is still tight, controlled, and rhythmic - not in a cold fashion, but bursting with enthusiastic passion. As Stalin clamped his iron fist down on the Marxist state and narrowed the range of the arts, preferring drab socialist realism to inventive avant-garde agitprop, it was hard to see where Eisenstein fit in this totalitarian vision. He was freed up to create Alexander Nevsky, a heroic history film and his first collaboration with Prokofiev, in the late 30s. But the film's anti-German slant became a mark against it with Stalin's ever-shifting political line and it was a good five years before Eisenstein was cautiously given permission to proceed with Ivan, seen as a tribute to the latter-day despot. How times change! Suddenly ostentatious monarchism, nationalistic xenophobia, and subservience of the masses to the rule of one man were celebrated in the name of the Leninist revolution. Apparently, Stalin approved of Part I, was dismayed by Part II (whose release was delayed until after his death), and canceled Part III. Eisenstein's career was over, he died at fifty, and the Soviet cinema entered its deepest deep freeze, only to be alleviated with Joseph the Terrible's own demise. Today, some see Ivan the Terrible as a Stalinist apologia, while others find in it a subversive attack on the dictator. Perhaps both viewpoints are correct, which only adds to the attraction of this warped classic.

This review was originally published at the Boston Examiner.

Strike

The title of this post does not refer to my (unintentional) absence from this blog - though 5 days is by far the longest sabbatical I've taken since starting up in July. It's not that I don't have anything to write about it - indeed, I've pretty much got the rest of December mapped out: a "paranoia" series featuring The Parallax View, The Conversation, and the 90s Will Smith movie Enemy of the State (which is bizarrely a semi-spin off of The Conversation); the conclusions to the Auteurs and "Twin Peaks" series; a few write-ups on recent DVDs I've purchased or received as gifts (my 25th birthday passed not so long ago) - Some Came Running, Kiss Me Deadly, and the long-promised Disney World War II cartoons; and perhaps a series of shorter-than-usual reviews on films I've seen in the past few weeks but didn't take the time to write up: the weirdly enjoyable buddy flick Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the amazing Bing Crosby alcoholic performance in The Country Girl, and maybe even the intriguing but as-yet-unseen Notes from Underground, a modern update of one of my favorite novels, starring Sheryl Lee whom I've yet to see in anything other than a David Lynch project (she of course is the reason I discovered and Netflix'd the movie, way back in August). So anyway, as you can see, there's plenty on the back burner which will be tackled before I take an even longer break for Christmas and New Years, returning in 2009 for all kinds of fun & games which I'll avoid previewing now. Why the avoidance of blogging if I have all this raw material? Blame it on the aftereffects of whatever that chemical is in the Thanksgiving turkey - I was too tired to engage. Or something. At any rate, if my absence was a "strike," it's now coming to an end with - appropriately enough - Strike, the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein debut.