Word: eisensteins
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...magazine started right in by denouncing historical movies, because their "unmeasured enthusiasm for 'historism' " ignores "the spiritual riches of Soviet man." Chief target was Russia's foremost film director, Sergei Eisenstein, whose Ivan the Terrible, Part I got critical raves when released in Paris last March. Ivan, Part II, said Kultura i Zhizn, would not be released because it was "antihistorical and anti-artistic," actually dared to show Ivan "not as a progressive statesman, but as a maniacal villain raging in a circle of a gang of young madcaps...
Before he can hope to make another film, Eisenstein may have to eat humble pie, like the magazine Sovietskoe Iskusstvo (Soviet Art), recently denounced by Pravda because its critics were too polite to Soviet artists. Last week Iskusstvo crawled for three whole columns: "To our sorrow, very often an objective critical analysis of a work was replaced by out-of-place praise. In articles about some plays, Carmen for instance ... we wrote in delightful tones. But it was a quite ordinary performance...
...Paris, the swank Normandie Theater on the Champs Elysées was the scene of the biggest cinematic hullabaloo since the opening there of Hollywood's Air Force. The occasion: the first night of Ivan, Part I. Outside, would-be spectators created mob scenes comparable to those in Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World. Inside, however, the audience was sharply divided. Parisian sophisticates, perhaps not yet grown up to Eisenstein's post-sophisticated refurbishing of primordial cinema devices, booed and stomped and hissed at the all but Shakespearean intensity of the great static closeups...
...most of the critics raved. Cried Combat: "Eisenstein has found again his incomparable style." The conservative Paris-Matin found "a power and color that not even American films have ever given us." Even Figaro, which panned the film for "extravagance, exaggerated looks and declamatory gestures," recognized "Eisenstein's accomplished art." The Socialist weekly Gavroche went all out: "This film crushes with its monumental mass everything that French screens have known since the beginning...
Such boos and bravos were old stuff to Eisenstein, who has taken plenty of both. When the latest wave lapped at his hospital sheets, his most urgent "deathbed" concern was: "I would like to get a copy of Harvey quickly. Couldn't someone fly it over at once...