A Film Canon

 

 

This extraordinary film presents Tsar Ivan IV's (Nikolai Chersakov) unification as a type of Stalin's collectivisation and liquidation. As such, it is suffused with religiosity, if not religion per se, the two central crises involving Ivan's incorporation of the language, imagery and gravity of the Russian Orthodox Church into his own struggle to create a "third Rome". In the process, terror is reduced to the mere by-product of a martyrdom that rivals Christ's, producing a sublime pathos that outstrips the fate of any of its victims, while ensuring that Ivan's own motivations for performing that terror are externalised, transformed into a divine dialectic imperative that leaves him as disoriented as anyone else. To this end, Eisenstein imbues every space with the sickly, claustrophobic aestheticism of Russian Orthodoxy - especially Ivan's 'palace', which is little more than a gigantic, labyrinthine crypt, studded with frescoed eyes; a reification of his paranoia. The same static, ornamental quality applies to the characters themselves, who tend to be fragmented into so many eyes and tongues, producing the disparity between speech and sight responsible for that paranoia, and inducing Ivan to compensate, visually, for his detractors' ability to remain just out of earshot; or, alternatively, to navigate the elusive presence of a visual whisper, analogous to the percussive elements of Prokofiev's score. The result is a plastic irrealism that approaches animation, particularly in the concomitant disparity between figures and their shadows, which finds most poetic expression in Eisenstein's orchestration of a scene so as to ensure that Ivan's shadow is much larger, and his face much smaller, than a globe of the world, confirming that the pervasive pathos stems from the contrast between his plight and his potential; or, more accurately, between his fulfilment of a crucial moment in the dialectic, and his inability to fully contextualise, or appreciate, that moment.