A Film Canon

Completed in 1946, but unreleased until 1958, the second part of Eisenstein's projected trilogy quickly abandons Ivan's annexation of Poland - and validation of Stalin's expansionist agenda - for his absorption of religiosity, and its logical conclusion in terror and surveillance. As in the earlier film, terror is merely inverted vulnerability, such that the Tsar simultaneously plays the role of absolutist and orphan, while his victims are, in turn, both political enemies and every adult capable of taking advantage of an orphan's vulnerability. In this way, their peculiarly religious rhetoric -  which reaches liturgical proportions in a service equating the court with the "fiery furnace of Babylon" - partakes of the same contradictions, such that Ivan's only (ostensibly) possible response - to consummate the uneasy identification between himself and these detractors by becoming exactly what they accuse him of being ("From now on I will be just as you say I am. I will be Terrible") - finds more specific expression in his willing adoption of the demonic mantle of Nebuchadnezzar; or, rather, his fusion of Nebudchadnezzar with the Christ-like elements of his identity elaborated in the first film, producing an incarnation of holy terror. Hence the ambivalent relation between Ivan and his bishop - whom he perceives more as a particular kind of friend than as a source of religious guidance - as well as the unsettling uniformity of his inner circle, which increasingly represents so many variants on his omniscient self. However, his apotheosis comes with the final Technicolour segment, whose lurid greens merely clarify the fiery, infernal backdrop against which they occur, and whose extended musical demonstration of the powers of terror provides a chilling inversion - or consummation - of the liturgical sequence, as well as drawing attention to the artifice, theatricality, and even camp, that it tends  to generate. Nevertheless, the final impression is of a sophisticated engagement with, rather than condemnation, of terror, making Stalin's objections seem more related to the implicit allocation of vulnerability, than of immorality.