Ivan the Terrible

Shown: 24 February 2001
Introduced by Phill Walkley
Part of European Masterworks Day

USSR 1944 (subtitles)
99 minutes
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Leading players - Nikolai Cherkasov and Lyudmila Tselikovskaya

Synopsis

Sergei Eisenstein's 1944 film of Ivan the Terrible demonstrates many of the talents which brought him fame in the cinema. In it he showed that cinema is one of the most important media of the 20th century. Eisenstein was fortunate, like Pudvkin and other great Soviet directors, in having state support and large far-reaching audiences ready to appreciate political cinema. As a director he used that position to show the possibilities of the medium in a new light. In Ivan the Terrible his remarkable sets and lighting emphasise the claustrophobic sense of terror pervading a place where so many factions seemed housed in one building, with its Muscovite halls, rooms, corridors, steps and low- stooping entrances, while the battle scene is reminiscent of the Babylonian onslaughts of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.