Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 96

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Popular Culture Review

Eisenstein’s attention to composition has never before been so evident,
despite the fact that it has always been dominant in his work. His phenomenal eye
for framing and for the right camera angle wonderfully sustained the action of The
Battleship Potemkin, for example: one need only recall the legs of the soldiers
descending the huge Odessa Steps. But in his previous films the plastic demands
of the image didn’t have an effect on the action itself In Ivan the Terrible, by
contrast, it is fair to say that the action is transformed to its very core by the style of
the image. From this point of view, one could call Ivan the Terrible decadent. But
this would be to judge the film only by its chosen form and not by the quality of its
means, which don’t seem to me to be inferior to, or less assured than, those of
Eisenstein’s other works.
The pictorial influences on his most recent film are numerous. The
historical period of the action—Donatello has just died (1466), and the Russian
court has established relations with the various Italian states—allowed Eisenstein
to make allusions to the Italian Renaissance, which had always had a strong influence
on him. As for the Byzantine references, they are even more numerous: the battle
for Kazan,"® for instance, is treated as a painterly miniature on a surface without
perspective; the characters, who are either carefully isolated or arrayed in serpentine
lines, seem to be pinned to the hill, upon which we can see the czar’s tent. The
pictures are composed with extreme care and contain, as it were, plastic, internal
rhythms that then echo one another from image to image. Thus the wondrous eye
of the icon has its reverberation in the half-moon windows that light up a hall.
Everything in this film is calculated and conscious, subject to an extraordinary
system of references, contrasts, harmonies, and counterpoints. But it would be
wrong to say that Ivan the Terrible is therefore nothing more than an album of
artistic photographs. Eisenstein’s art has always been rather static within the image
itself. The photographic dynamics come from the editing, which does not limit
itself to conferring a rhythm on the successive shots, but which also connects the
motion there is inside each shot to that of the shots preceding and following it.
It is true that Ivan the Terrible deliberately turns its back on what used to
be the best tradition in Russian cinema, a tradition that Eisenstein himself helped
create. It is also true that this film returns to the most conventional aesthetics of
silent film—the aesthetics of German expressionism in particular—thus renouncing
fifteen years of realistic cinema. Contrary to Fritz Lang, who evolved from the
total artificiality of The Nibelungen to the violent realism of Fury (1936), Eisenstein
followed a course that led him in Ivan the Terrible to deny nature even the briefest
of appearances. But we must make a distinction between the value of the style as
such and the quality of its individual execution. One may detest opera, one may
think that it is a dying art form, while also recognizing the quality of Wagner’s
music. One may detest verse drama, one may think that it is a moribund hybrid.