-by Devdutt Trivedi
Ivan the Terrible is Eisenstein’s most personal film which although not explicitly so, is as political as his well known silent works such as Battleship Pottemkin (1925) and Strike (1925). His portrayal of the 16th century Czar is both a justification of dictatorship as it is explicitly critical of it. The film is a metaphor for Stalin’s rule that was produced by the Stalin founded Mosfilm in Moscow. The first part of the film both pleased Stalin but also carefully portrayed every dictatorial device used by the Ivan, the 16th century autocrat who in the name of the abstraction of Russia, destroyed its people, much like Stalin who in the attempt to overthrow the Czarist rule with the people’s revolution established a much more tyrannical .
Eisenstein is commenting on Ivan as a product of Russia’s continuing history, being fully aware that he is responsible for Russia’s present state because of his participation in the Russian Revolution and formation of a Communist State through his early works.
Eisenstein completed the screenplay in 4 months in 1941. He used several hundreds of drawings to decide upon the visual aspect of the film after which the film was passed through several layers of censorship before filming began. The film was meant to be a trilogy with parts I and II being shot in 1943-44 when Second World War was its height and Russia was captured by Hitler. Anti-Fascist propaganda was at its height with hatred of Nazis being shared across Russia and Europe. At this point, the Mosfilm office was shifted from Moscow to Kazakhstan where Eisenstein shot the film at night to conserve electricity. Day shoots if any were only possible with electricity from a nearby factory. In June 1944, Eisenstein moved back to Moscow. The first part was censored in 1944, with several important parts slashed after which it won the highest civilian prize at the time, The Stalin Prize. However the second part of the film was banned for the tyrannical excesses it showed, and production of the third part was stopped. Eisenstein, who had a second fatal heart attack in February 1948, did not live to see the third part being completed.
Eisenstein’s make up of Ivan was made, after consulting different paintings of the period and allocating different make-up techniques on the Assyrian King, Nebuchednazzer who lived between 605 and 562 BC. Eisenstein shot during the day taking electricity from a weapons factory and would completely withdraw from filming or redo sequences when he was unhappy.
The most important sequences from the first part that were cut were the ones that showed Ivan’s childhood, the death of his mother at a young age following his emancipation into the world of violence and guilt that was a reaction to the father figure. Eisenstein wanted to show the ‘paranoid powerlessness’ of childhood that would explain Ivan’s later actions. Ivan is absolutely alone in the eyes of power, and this fear of loneliness can be related to Eisenstein’s relationship with his own father who insisted in his conversations with the young Sergei, that Man was meant to be all alone. Eisenstein in his autography would talk about the nature of tyranny with reference to his own father:
The prototype of tyranny. The tyranny of the father and his family.
In a similar vein, during the scripting of Ivan, Eisenstein often made the mistake of writing the Russian word for father instead of czar.
The film was even more conventional than Eisenstein’s Hollywood epic Alexandr Nevsky and was a parody of Stalin’s rule, where the masses are subordinate to the childish fantasies of the ruler tyrant and emerges worse than the very enemies he had conquered. Whereas in Battleship Pottemkin, the masses become the heroes to oppose Western bourgeoisie tradition around the grand narratives, and their conservative discourse on class, in Ivan the Terrible the masses are terribly subdued, seduced by the demi-God status of Ivan, and eventually tricked to a state of tragic pathos. The film which begins as an ode to Stalin ends as a parody of him. Stalin was more than aware of this and after giving Eisenstein the Order of Lenin for both Alexander Nevsky and Ivan The Terrible Part I realized that in Part II, the master of montage had failed to live up to Stalin’s command of depicting Ivan as a cruel man only as long as he would show why he had to be cruel.
The bodyguard soldiers or Oprichnik under Ivan, who rise against the Boyars, can be linked to the Bolscheviks and their inability to destroy social class to only produce an even more tyrannical society. The murder of Ivan’s wife Anastasia at the end of the first part adds to Ivan’s Hamletesque quality (Stalin found this Hamletesque quality historically inaccurate while grilling Einstein on the problems in the film) pointed to the emergence of a feudal elite led by the Tsar’s own aunt, Princess Euphrosyne Starinsky, who covets the throne for her own son, Prince Vladimir. Eisenstein uses the services of his rival film maker Vselovod Pudovkin, who opposed Eisenstein’s rationalized image-volume juxtapositions for a much more subjective approach to montage, plays rebel Nikolai who refuses to be part of the Tsar’s mechanism.
Ivan takes his violent political perversion to a new level in the un-filmed third part where Ivan forces Fyodor to kill his father and then claims that he has the potential to betray Ivan and has Fyodor murdered for being a potential traitor. The shot portions of the third part build up Eisenstein’s theatrical scenario to Expressionistic heights, with light and shadow being used in the extreme, in a similar way to Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations. Mikhael Romm, the Chairman of the Film Union was not allowed to play the part of Elizabeth in the third part as the board declared that it could not have its chairman play the part of the woman.
The contradictory character of Ivan who is rational and mad, progressive and violent highlights the empty abstraction of the Russian state, to show how Left and Right ideologies meet through abstraction possible only through film. Ivan’s intentions for a united Russian identity along with masses results in his fascistic murder of the people he hoped to liberate, using methods far worse than his enemies. According to Joan Neuberger, director of the Center for Soviet Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Eisenstein’s portrayal of Ivan goes much more his evil persona that reveal a completely human side to him, which is why the masses continue to love him and maintain his larger than life posture.
Courtesy
J. Hoberman
David Bordwell
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Joan Neuberger
The Criterion Collection