Word: ivans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What greater contrast could there be to Bicycle Thief than Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part I? Semi mythical, heavily "artistic," and at several steps removed from experience, Ivan (1945) appeals to the eye almost exclusively. The most useful analogy for describing this film is that of grand opera. Just as opera subordinates everything to music, Eisenstein suspends verisimilitude and dramatic intensity to give full play to the carefully arranged, visual sequences of this opera of design...
...movie opens with a perfectly framed view of Ivan's crown. The camera lingers on this rich still-life and then retreats to take in another balanced, framed shot of the cathedral of Moscow. Later on, at a wedding banquet, Eisenstein sights down the table as the whole party toasts Ivan. With Rockette-like precision all the goblets rise and stop for a moment, just long enough so that we see all twenty of them lined up evenly in two rows...
Sequence after sequence can only be discussed in terms of painterly composition. There is constant visual counterpoint between the lines of the palace walls and the positions of the actors' bodies; Nikolai Cherkassov (Ivan) moves elegantly and always in such a studied way that the complements the total geometry of the scene. Standing on the ramparts of a fortress he gestures formally to the double, symmetrically snaking line of Muscovites in the distance. His hand, directly in the foreground and at right angles to the leaders of the crowd, effects a marvelously heightened feeling of perspective which, in turn, enhances...
There is no denying that each frame of Ivan results from a true genius for design, but that is the trouble. The beauty of each individual shot tends to make the motion picture as a whole somewhat static. Eisenstein hovers ponderously over each of his symmetrical arrangements and seems to say in a very obtrusive voice: "See what a thing of loveliness I have constructed...
...Odessa steps in a millrace of fluidity. Like Rembrandt, Eisenstein ended his career in a vein of classicism, but unlike Rembrandt, he worked in a medium that does not prosper when it gives up movement for stasis and symmetry--even when that symmetry ascends to such sublime heights as Ivan the Terrible, Part...