-Devdutt Trivedi
Alexander Nevsky, raised to classical status because of its use of Prokofiev’s music in the ‘Battle on Ice’ sequences, is also Eisenstein’s most important sound film. The film was completed in 1938, a propaganda piece for Stalin to counter Hitler’s attack of the Rhine at the same time, by using Russian folk forms to depict a historical encounter between Russians and the Teutonic Knights of the 13th century. Although the Teutonic knights, who also had a German origin, obviously represent the Nazis to fulfill the function of Stalinist Propaganda, Eisenstein manages to be critical of his own country; a Communist state also ruled by a monarch Stalin.
Eisenstein was known primarily for his two ‘inventions’, approaches to film craft that would be influential to post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first was montage, the juxtaposition of images, to not just arrive at meaning, but to create relations between the images that point to the audience’s subconscious, and the other was the subconscious resonance to the spectator to the performance from the action. Eisenstein was impressed by the experiments of Walt Disney where the unity of sound and image reinforce the movement in the image, specifically though the timing of cuts to music. This very Russian engagement finds its much more sophisticated predecessor in Vselovod Pudovkin’s Deserter (Dezertir, 1933).
Eisenstein continues his experiments with the idea of the shot; the totality of the shot serves as a whole with contractions and expansions in space. Eisenstein believed that language only helps ‘label the emotions developed by cinematic means.’ His use of animals remind one of the exemplary use of animals particularly in the montage sequences that he labeled as ‘intellectual montage’, where one set of images leads to another space which comment on the nature of the first, become motifs that would constitute the works of masters of cinema throughout the world influenced by this period of Eisenstein’s work. Russian masters such as Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovski show an influence of both Nevsky and the Ivan the Terrible diptych as Eisensten rejects film as sum of its parts, and instead highlights the poetic image, where stasis leads the image to a realm of heightened awareness. These parallel Eisenstein’s own studies of religiosity and spirituality in Mexico. The animals become totems in the works of Parajanov and more recently in the films of the experimental Indian film maker, Amit Dutta.
Eisenstein uses the volume of the image to refer to that very Tarkovskian formulation, the elements, in the case of the landscape sequence in Nevsky, the earth and the sea. The Russian people are rooted to the land and from the image of the common land people emerges the hero, Nevsky who is also the modern man. With this logic Eisenstein captures that very right-wing formulation, the family, in this case the Russian family and its relationship in formulating modern Russia. In other sequences Edward Tisse composes empty shots with landscape and sky with Nevsky’s army approaching the camera at a distance, with the ground forming a typically Eisensteinian diagonal, so that the soldier’s become the totality matter in the Bergsonian sense, occupying the volume of the shot.
Similarly the actor is thought of around his armour (matter) and the movement he produces in the volume of the shot. The perception of volume is limited by action in the form of movement so that space is perceived in the form of time.
Eisenstein’s El Greco like compositions find their climactic point in the famous battle on the ice where the Russian master’s attempt to formalize the battle sequences will influence both Laurence Olivier in Henry Vth and Orson Welles in Chimes At Midnight. Eisenstein’s reference for constructing this form of historical drama combined his formalist approach with the generic Russian historical drama of the time: Vladimir Petrov’s Pyotr pervyy I (Peter the Great I, 1937).
According to David Bordwell the earlier sequences at the political court, Eisenstein gives a sunny, bright imagery to represent the middle ages instead of its popular perception as being part of the ‘Dark Ages’ in the visual sense, where the masses are given the illusion, much like in Stalin’s time, of the illusion of choosing a leader. The individual shot, Bordwell states, becomes an arena. History and politics give Eisenstein materiality to experiment with his spiritual abstractions making him among the few experimental film makers in the industry such as Fritz Lang, Abel Gance and G.W. Pabst.
The final sequences of the film observe Alexander preside over the celebration where in according to Bordwell, the character of Nevsky is responsible for both military justice and banal justice. Eisenstein in these sequences continues his preoccupation with familiar themes, the mother complex (which would be a theme in Ivan The Terrible) having earlier shown his concern for the symbol of children being violated, continuing a similar concern in his iconic Odessa step sequence from Battleship Pottemkin(1925).
Eisenstein chose the film because he felt that ‘nobody knows about Nevsky and so nobody can possibly find fault with me.’ His rival Pudovkin praised the film stating that Eisenstein had with Nevsky fulfilled the ‘spirit of the popular epic.’ Stalin was pleased with the film on its completion and pronounced Eisenstein ‘a true Bolshevik.’ The film won both The Order of Lenin in 1938 and The Stalin Prize in 1941.
Courtesy
Criterion Collection, Russell Merrit & David Bordwel