Word: superhumanly
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...understanding "Nevsky" is to laugh at it and it is true that some very funny cracks go around the Old South when the crowd there is small. However, a somewhat new experience can be had by giving oneself up to the movie's naive strength. Nevsky is a superhuman hero, completely shove the bourgeois jealousies and physical frailties of mere man, and so is, and should be, repugnant to American audiences. Consequently, the picture cannot be taken seriously or realistically, but as a work of art it is simple, strong, and beautifully organized...
...helmsman, instead of the angry, seven-foot monster wheel of the first Cunarders, which flung men to the deck or threw them across the wheelhouse, there is finger-tip steering with a complex series of superhuman power boosters to swing the 140-ton rudder through churning seas. If the watch officer chooses, a gyro pilot will relieve the helmsman entirely and keep the ship on course. No leadsman need stand in the bow to take soundings, for the navigator has an acoustic-electric fathometer to tell him, at the press of a button, how much water is beneath the hull...
...propagandist. Every movement in it is exciting, but, springing as it does against the tensions of near-standstill, it is exciting as if a corpse moved. Besides restricting motion in his movie, Eisenstein has also fought shy of realism. All of his characters, their faces and their gestures are superhuman rather than human. Most of the action takes place as closely within palace walls as if the cameras had been confined to a theater stage. The lighting, too, is closer to florid Russian theater than to cinema...
...dramatic truthfulness is an unique manisfestation of human genius," Walter stated, but like Goethe's, it is not a revolutionary but a mere "harmonious type of human genius that in every new work makes a conquest in a new sphere, in a new phase of superhuman creative form...
...Marsala blasted out a machine gun-like obligatto in answer to the adept growlings of the slip horn, while the cornetist, feeling no doubt that he was being attacked from both sides, lashed out wildly with punchy, agitated jabs. During these gyrations, the pianist managed the almost superhuman job of bringing order out of chaos. It was a never-ending source of amazement to the bystanders that at the end of each chorus, every man was able to return from his excursions just in the nick of time. Quite often, after a quarter hour's extended treatment, a piece would...