Word: eisenstein
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like most Godard movies, Masculine Feminine is hard to watch and hard to stop watching. Time and again Godard shows that he is a great bad director. Great because he is superbly endowed with what Sergei Eisenstein called "the film sense," bad because he is so painfully lacking in common sense...
...Eisenstein's "Ten Days that Shook the World," and Jean Vigo's "Zero for Conduct...
...Among those who perished were my close friends, and nobody would succeed in convincing me that they were traitors. Sergei Eisenstein [the famous Soviet movie director] told me of his meetings with Stalin, who spoke of the necessity to extol Ivan the Terrible and added that Peter the Great didn't cut off enough heads." Summing up his thoughts about Stalin, Ehrenburg says: "If he just read the list of all his victims, he would not have been able to do anything else...
Ivan the Terrible is the most painstakingly constructed of Eisenstein's films, and the most difficult. His first effort in color appears midway through Part II. He planned all the scenery himself and sketched each shot before he took it, plotting out every shadow and ornament. By now Eisenstein was almost a captive of the montage idea, and the plot is impossible to follow. He gave the film immense scale and ponderousness at the expense of pace; it is practically a series of paintings. The conspiring boyars stare malignantly from the shadows, Ivan stands, kneels, and writhes before fearsome religious...
...Eisenstein followed a complicated color scheme, attempting to define and use the emotional associations of particular colors. The color in Part II looks convincingly abstracted from reality due mainly to the crude chemistry of early Soviet color film. Sitting through Ivan requires patience...