Step by step, page by page – the historical records open up before us not only a profound rationale, but also a simple and historical necessity for Ivan to act in the way he did, in his dealings with those who sought to ruin, sell off cheap, or betray their fatherland for their own selfish ends. The fatherland, which the great statesmanlike mind of Ivan the Terrible had gathered up, strengthened and victoriously led into battle. It was not my intention to whitewash him in the collective memory, or to turn Ivan the Terrible into Ivan the Sweet.
As early as 1933, Sergei Prokofiev had wanted to write a ‘heroic and constructive’ opera on a Soviet theme. Eventually he found this in a story by Valentin Katayev, I, Son of the Working Class, a peasant drama of the Civil War played out in 1918 when the Communists in the Ukraine still had to contend with German troops as well as counter-revolutionaries.
In Prokofiev’s opera Semyon Kotko, the Germans are characterised, as they had already been in Alexander Nevsky, by viciously dissonant harmony. Although less successful when consciously attempting the broad gestures required to express bluff, optimistic Communist emotions, the work also finds room for some lyrical love music and some vividly colourful ensembles.
But, as Dmitri Shostakovich wrote in his memoirs: ‘As … Semyon Kotko deals with the occupation of the Ukraine by the Germans in 1918, it had no chance in the improbable but inescapable context of a Moscow-Berlin axis. It was put into production at the Stanislavsky Opera Theatre by Meyerhold. It was his last work in the theatre. In fact, he never finished it; he was arrested in the middle of it, and he was no longer Meyerhold but Semyonich. That was his alleged underground saboteur’s nickname. That’s quite ridiculous. It was probably the interrogator who invented the name, having read something about Semyon Kotko in the papers. The director was arrested but the work went on as though nothing had happened. This was one of the terrible signs of the age; a man disappeared but everyone pretended that nothing had happened. A man was in charge of the work, it had meaning only with him, under his direction. But he was no longer there, he had evaporated, and no one said a word. The name Meyerhold immediately disappeared from conversations. That was all … Prokofiev turned to Eisenstein, his friend. The word “friend” is used as a convention here, particularly when it’s used for two men like Eisenstein and Prokofiev. I doubt that either of them needed friends. They were both remote and aloof, but at least Prokofiev and Eisenstein respected each other. Eisenstein had also been a student of Meyerhold’s, so Prokofiev asked the film director to bring the production of Semyon Kotko to completion. Eisenstein refused. The political climate had changed by then, and in that wonderful era attacks on Germans, if only in an opera, were forbidden. The opera’s future looked doubtful. Why get mixed up in a politically dubious venture? So Eisenstein said, “I don’t have the time.” He found time, as we know, for Die Walküre …’1
The Bolshoi Theatre had, in fact, invited Eisenstein to stage Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre ‘in the mutual interests of German and Russian cultures.’ He eagerly accepted the new challenge as it presented him with an opportunity to apply Wagner’s idea of combining theatre, music, literature and myth into one medium, which concurred with his own vision of film as synthesis; film had become the new Gesamtkunstwerk.
Eisenstein wrote a long enlightening article, with only the occasional sloganising, on his ideas behind the staging of Die Walküre. ‘After a period of intensive “retheatricalisation” of cinema, which is just as great a bastardisation as the mechanical “cinematographisation” of theatre, there comes a new, beneficial cross-fertilisation of film and theatre … I devoted the whole conception of the last piece, The Magic Fire, to searching for ways of combining the elements of Wagner’s score with a changing play of coloured light on stage. Despite the extremely limited technical resources and the far from perfect lighting and the lighting equipment of the Bolshoi’s stage, which drastically reduced the range of colours available for the fire, we nevertheless achieved an extremely convincing rendering in colour of Wotan’s Farewell … One way or another, I take the first practical steps in chromophonic – a synthesis of sound and colour – counterpoint on the stage of the Bolshoi for myself.’2
Like George Bernard Shaw’s socialist interpretation of the tetralogy in The Perfect Wagnerite, Eisenstein saw ‘hatred of private property’ as one of the themes of The Ring. He quotes from Wagner’s The Art-Work of the Future: ‘The task of the contemporary state is to preserve the inviolability of property throughout the ages, and that is precisely what has impeded the creation of a free future.’ Put simply, the price of economic power is the renunciation of love, and that the possession of the ring and its wealth will ruin those who aspire to possess it can be seen as the over-riding theme of The Ring. But Eisenstein concluded that ‘Wagner’s characters are not abstractions or mouthpieces for proclaiming the author’s programmatic statements. They are intriguing, multifaceted living beings who, in addition to their philosophical significance, also embody a complex of human emotions which are revealed in the element of Wagner’s incomparable music. And so they can be interpreted in different ways.’3
Die Walküre is the least ‘political’ of the four operas, and Act One is the only act in the whole cycle consisting of mortals rather than gods – a triangle of husband, wife and lover. Eisenstein attempted to give his production a humanist, and by implication, an anti-Nazi interpretation. The first act was dominated by a ‘Tree of Life’ that took up the entire expanse of the stage. (Eisenstein worked very closely with the designer Peter Williams aka Pyotr Vilyams.) The tree motif continued throughout the following two acts. ‘Wotan’s appearance was preceded by toppling pine trees. Then, near the curtain, they rose up from the ground once more, joining the Valkyries’ final upward flight and their divine father’s furious departure. I had identified the Valkyries with pine trees. Probably because I first heard their frenzied flight on someone’s piano among the giant pines in the forests of Finland … And I came to know the structure of leitmotif and counterpoint among the bases of even greater trees – the famous Redwoods around San Francisco.’4
Eisenstein would have liked The Ride of the Valkyries, which opens Act Two, to ‘envelop the entire audience via a system of loudspeakers, reverberating “as if in flight” from the rear of the stage to the back of the auditorium and back; and roll around the auditorium, up the steps and along the aisles and corridors. But I was not able here to overcome the traditions of the opera theatre!’ (Eisenstein was here anticipating The Ride of the Valkyries as used in the stereophonic Dolby system by Francis Ford Coppola, an Eisenstein devotee, in Apocalypse Now, almost four decades later.)
Die Walküre opened at the Bolshoi Theatre on November 21, 1940, and was greeted coolly by both the public and the critics. The coolest reception of all was given by the Germans. Alexander Werth, the English historian, on leaving the premiere, overheard two officers from the German embassy remark: ‘Deliberate Jewish tricks,’ and that it was ‘a terrible example of Kulturbolschewismus (cultural Bolshevism).’5
Eisenstein was not only disappointed by the reception but by some of the effects. ‘There was no dazzling sunlight to hasten the joyous song of love into the audience; instead a yellow spotlight shone from behind a curtain, saturating the auditorium with light. And the wind machine beneath the stage always failed to blow – they never once fanned the tongues of fire, which hung limply in the blue and scarlet light, looking more like streamers above a butcher’s shop than the play of fire that was supposed to protect Briinnhilde’s sleep, until Siegfried came to wake her … what I derived of infinite emotional value from this work, with its burning aspirations, inspired strivings and tragic achievement, was condemned by insuperable technical difficulties to crawl where it should have burst into the heavens …’6
He had hoped to have been able to complete The Ring, and had already made sketches for Das Rheingold – the drawing for the opening scene shows a submerged and inverted Paramount-like mountain, the water being ‘Disney-like blue’ – but he abandoned the idea of proposing it to the Bolshoi administration. However, his experience with working on an opera was another factor that influenced his conception of Ivan the Terrible.
Eisenstein returned to his work as Head of Productions at Mosfilm. (Yelena Sokolovskaya, the director of Mosfilm, had been arrested, a victim of guilt by association, because her husband, a member of the Central Committee, was suspected of being anti-Soviet.)
According to Mikhail Romm, Eisenstein enjoyed walking around the studio ‘generally playing the part of the Artistic Boss of the studio.’ Romm, who won five Stalin prizes in his career, was at Mosfilm filming Dream at the time. ‘In the course of the production, he [Eisenstein] visited every set and watched part of the shooting of almost every sequence,’ Romm recalled. ‘If he was pleased with what he saw, he made a joke. If there was something he disliked, he still made a joke, but it was much more caustic. Often he left the poor director guessing if he was pleased or otherwise. This of course was typical of Eisenstein’s general personality. His own thought processes were extremely complicated, and it was usually a tough exercise in intelligence and imagination to understand his real meaning. For anyone who made the effort it was a great pleasure to talk to him and to hear what he had to say. But, unfortunately, his erudition and his sharp wit were poor helpmates to clarity.’7
Meanwhile, Eisenstein was at work on a scenario by Lev Sheinin called The Beilis Case about Mendel Beilis, a Jew from Kiev who had suffered a long trial on the charge of ritual murder of a Russian boy. There was also the possibility of a film on Lawrence of Arabia, whose psychology greatly interested Eisenstein. ‘True, the only colour here is in the green of the Prophet’s flag and the green turbans of the generals. And also the remarkable description of the old Arab woman, who had never seen blue eyes before and asked the intelligence officer whether his eyes were blue because the sun shone through them … And in order to treat the material more freely, the film was not to be too factually biographical …’8 A colour film about Giordano Bruno was also proposed. ‘Italy … Renaissance costumes … Burning at the stake …’9 Eisenstein mused with relish, but it too got no further than the proposal stage. Nevertheless, the committee was determined he make a big colour film. Following the Bruno idea, there was a suggestion about Tommaso Campanella – The colourful past was inevitably sought on the border between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’10 – and one about the Black Death. Eisenstein was fascinated by one episode – a banquet held in the midst of a raging plague. ‘It would be a film about the colour black, the blackness of the plague inexorably spreading everywhere, swallowing everything in its wake, the engulfing blackness of the funeral cortège smothering the motley colours of the carnival.’11
One idea which came closer to fruition was a proposed biopic of Pushkin to be called A Poefs Love. Pushkin had fascinated Eisenstein ever since he had seen an amateur performance of Eugene Onegin during his childhood in Riga. Later he had read and re-read Pushkin’s poems and, while he was busy with Die Walküre, he sketched out the life story of the writer for a film which was described in the language of colour. ‘I devoted the summer [of 1940] to Alexander Sergeyevich. I reached the point where I felt I knew my hero well enough to call him by his first names …’12
Esther Shub recounted Eisenstein’s words to her about wanting to make a film about ‘a great lasting and wonderful love’, and simultaneously to rehabilitate Pushkin by killing off once and for all his Don Juan image and replacing it with that of the genuine, intensely passionate lover. Shub had advised him to read Yuri Tynanov’s A Nameless Love, which suggested that the nameless love of Pushkin’s life was Yekaterina Karamzina, the wife of the famous Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin. ‘Did she really, in the spring of 1940, see herself playing Karamzina to my … Pushkin?’ Eisenstein commented, echoing his earlier remark that she saw herself as George Sand to his Chopin. ‘A picture of such love. A love hidden and illicit. But illicit rather than hidden. But of such strength. And inspired.’13 Sadly the film proved impossible to make because of the inadequacy of the technical equipment available for colour filming. ‘We were not prepared from the technical point of view,’ he commented. ‘My first colour film to be worked out in detail [was] “archived” as soon as it became clear that the technology was still in its infancy.’14 Around the same time, in France, Jean Renoir was hoping to make La Régie du Jeu in colour, but the cost of the process was exorbitant. Technicolor was still rare enough even in Hollywood. Yet Eisenstein still dreamt of making a colour film.
In the outline of A Poet’s Love, he had pictured the monologue in Pushkin’s play, Boris Godunov with Tsar Boris, clad in thick gold, with flecks of silver in his black beard … The red carpets of the cathedral. The red candlelight. And, illuminated by it, seemingly splashed with blood, the icon frames. The Tsar rushes about his apartments. Dark blue. Cherry red. Orange. Green … the multicoloured brightness of the apartments and towers of the Kremlin palace burst upon the Tsar, a nightmare of colour, as the camera lunges this way and that.’15 This was another colour dream that disappeared on waking to the monochrome reality of Soviet life.
On March 15, 1941, Eisenstein was awarded the Stalin Prize. But, as a previous biographer, Yon Barna put it, ‘his personal satisfaction was tempered with sadness as he noted that eight out of ten of the recipients of top awards were former students of Meyerhold – of that great personality who had so senselessly and tragically been wiped out of existence.’16 Perhaps to delay having to join Meyerhold, a month later Eisenstein published a short sycophantic piece in Pravda entitled ‘The Heirs and Builders of World Culture’ which eulogised the system that liquidated Meyerhold.
‘The land around is aglow. Thanks to the wisdom and foresight of the Soviet government and Comrade Stalin, our Union is the only place in the world where the artist can create in peace, where the builder can build in peace, and the inventor can solve his problems in peace. The rest of the world is in the furnace of war … A great task lies before us, the artists of the land of the Soviets; to continue and advance the cause of world culture. For, we apart, there is no one in the world working at this; everything beyond our Soviet soil is aimed at the annihilation and destruction of culture. Let our ranks stand all the more firmly together! We shall carry out our task with a new strength and energy! I shall wholly devote my personal creativity in the coming year to the creation of a film about the great builder of the Russian state in the sixteenth century: Ivan the Terrible.’ The article was signed, ‘S. Eisenstein, Film Director and Stalin Prize Winner.17
*
During the summer of 1941, Eisenstein was at his dacha at Kratov when news came through of the German attack on Russia. The Nazis, with the aid of Finnish and Romanian troops, invaded the Soviet Union. On the day before the invasion, Stalin was still acting as if he considered Hitler his partner. Prokofiev, who was also at Kratov working on his ballet Cinderella, described the day.
‘On the warm, sunny morning of June 22, I was sitting at my desk when suddenly the watchman’s wife appeared, looking greatly upset. “The Germans have invaded us,” she gasped. “They say they’re bombing our cities.” The news staggered me … I hurried over at once to see Sergei Eisenstein who lived not far from us. Yes, it was true.’18
From June 22 to July 3, 1941, Stalin did not utter a word in public. He then commandeered the people to conduct guerrilla warfare in Nazi-occupied areas, and said he would wage a ‘national patriotic war.’ He warned that ‘there must be no room for whimperers and cowards, for panic-mongers and deserters …’ Thousands of prominent political prisoners were hastily executed, and other potential dissidents were selected for frontline service.
To prevent the population at large from hearing German propaganda, radio receivers were gathered in wholesale. Soviet citizens of German descent were rounded up. The entire population – almost half a million – of Volga Germans was uprooted and ‘deported’ by methods which few survived. Conceding that it might be wondered how the Soviet government could have ‘consented’ to sign a pact with ‘such perfidious people, such fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop,’ Stalin gave the answer, ‘We secured to our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces.’
With unwitting prescience, there was an unrealised part of the Alexander Nevsky screenplay that stands as a metaphor for Stalin’s wooing of Hitler, and even Eisenstein’s grovelling behaviour. It was summarised thus: ‘After the Germans had been routed on Lake Peipus, the Tartar horde advanced on Russia once more, to exact vengeance. The victor, Nevsky, hastened to meet them. He walked submissively between the purifying fires in front of the Khan’s pavilion and humbled himself on one knee before the Khan. His meekness gained the time needed to build up strength so that later this enslaver of our land could be overthrown, too …’19
In a speech delivered on November 7 in Red Square to troops marching directly to the front, Stalin invoked the shades of medieval saints and tsarist generals in an unequivocal appeal to Russian nationalism. ‘Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoi, Kuzma Minin, Dmitri Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Michael Kutusov – inspire you in the war!’ In effect, he begged his soldiers to fight for Mother Russia not for Communism. Pravda replaced the phrase ‘Workers of the World unite!’ on its masthead with ‘Death to the German invader!’
Suddenly the bad guys who had become the good guys were the bad guys again. Alexander Nevsky was back on the cinema screens, and anti-Nazi films became the order of the day. The emphasis turned to documentary films, a field that had lain relatively dormant for a number of years. Cameramen were despatched to the fronts and the material they sent back was edited into morale-boosting compilation films. In 1942, the first full-length war documentaries appeared: Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin’s The Defeat of the German Armies Near Moscow, Roman Karmen’s Leningrad in Combat, and Mikhail Slutsky’s Days of War. Dziga Vertov, once the leading documentary film-maker in the Soviet Union, now out of favour, found himself editing conventional News of the Day newsreels under Esther Shub. Eisenstein was appointed consultant for a documentary on the war effort.
During the Nazi-Soviet Pact, dismissals of Jews and restrictions on them had been increased. Now Moscow’s public policy of anti-Nazism was a time of consolidation for many Soviet Jews. In July 1941, together with four other prominent Jewish intellectuals and artists – the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the playwright Perets Markish, the actor Solomon Michoels and the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa – Eisenstein took part in an anti-Fascist meeting broadcast over the American radio network. In a newsreel he called for United States intervention in the war. Speaking in his high voice in English, his hair standing up like a peacock’s fan, he declared, ‘As a representative of the Russian intelligentsia, and working as I do in the field of Russian cinematography and Russian art, the very principle of racial hatred is foreign and loathsome to me … The triumph of humanism over brutality, barbarism, infamy and violence, is a matter of a bright future for all humanity irrespective of nationality … but the time of indignation and condemnation has passed, the time has come to fight.’
The coming of the ‘Great War for the Fatherland’ inaugurated a period of relative freedom in the arts. In literature, the regime, with scant regard to ideological criteria, encouraged the use of nationalism, religion, love – anything which might sway the emotions of the reading public into identifying themselves with the struggle against Hitler. There was also a great upsurge in patriotic feeling which found an outlet in musical expression. Opera composers drew inspiration from national heroes of the past. Prokofiev began work on his War and Peace. Shostakovich produced his seventh symphony, the so-called Leningrad, in 1941, the first movement of which suggested the inexorable advance of the invading armies.
It was against this background that Eisenstein embarked on a monumental film entitled Ivan the Terrible (‘terrible’ in the sense of ‘Awe-inspiring’ or ‘Redoubtable’), a three-part epic – Ivan Grozny, The Boyars’ Plot and The Battles of Ivan – about Ivan IV, the 16th-century Tsar who first unified all the lands of Russia. By April 1941, the main lines of the scenario were sketched out, though Eisenstein devoted two further years to historical research, the analysis of Ivan’s character and related drawings, of which he made over two thousand.
‘The basic idea of the film is to show Ivan in the full context of his tremendous efforts on behalf of the Russian state in and around the city of Moscow, and I must say quite bluntly that a great deal of what he did, and the ways in which he did it, were as bloody as they were grandiose,’ explained Eisenstein. ‘Nor shall we ignore a single drop of all the blood that was shed during the life of Ivan IV. Our aim is not to whitewash but to explain. In this way, without hiding anything or modifying anything in the story of Ivan the Terrible, and also without denying his extraordinary and romantic popular image, we hope to present him, complete and as he truly was, to cinema audiences throughout the world.’20
In the autumn of 1941, Moscow came under heavy bombardment, and one midnight in mid-October Eisenstein and other film makers received instructions to evacuate the city. The very next morning the exodus began by the train which was to take them twelve days and nights into the heart of Central Asia, to Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan. This was not far from the Chinese border where other evacuated members of Mosfilm and Lenfilm Studios were hard at work on morale-boosting projects.
Using the former Palace of Culture as a studio were Pudovkin, Ermler, and the Vasilievs. The size of the rooms allowed for only the most cramped of stage sets – sets totally unsuited to the massive filming of Ivan the Terrible that Eisenstein had in mind. The three parts would have to be filmed simultaneously, because the studio could accommodate only one large set at a time and the same set was required throughout.
Eisenstein was not given separate living accommodation, but had to make do with ‘eleven square metres’ as he wrote to Elisabeta Teleshova in a letter dated March 3, 1942. He suggested that if she were to come they could have a room to themselves of twice the size. Another problem, he added, was his ‘completely catastrophic’ financial situation.
In the same month, Eisenstein wrote to Prokofiev, who was in Tblisi, the capital of Georgia, asking him to compose the music for Ivan the Terrible. In a letter of March 29, 1942, Prokofiev replied: ‘Am finishing up the last bars of War and Peace, thus very shortly I’ll be ready to submit to your bondage.’21
Although the bulk of the music was composed after the film had been shot, Prokofiev travelled to Alma Ata in May, bringing with him the score of his opera War and Peace to continue its orchestration. As the latter work progressed, Prokofiev acquainted Eisenstein with the opera, scene by scene – until Eisenstein was making suggestions for the production. Semyon Samosud, conductor and artistic director of the Bolshoi, recalled, ‘Eisenstein was the man to stage the opera … Knowing how the completion of Ivan was the most urgent task, our theatre offered him the position of consulting director.’22
Prokofiev telegraphed Samosud: ‘Eisenstein consents to work as director, not consultant. Requests urgent arrival of [Peter] Williams to work out plans for the sets. Prokofiev.’23 Eventually, however, the Bolshoi decided that a new production of such a large-scale work was unwise in wartime, and War and Peace was first heard in a concert version in Moscow in the summer of 1945. Eisenstein and Samosud met at that performance and agreed that only a full staging would do justice to the opera. Eisenstein was too ill to take it on when it was finally staged in Leningrad in June 1946, though many of the designs were based on the sketches he made in Alma Ata. Eisenstein’s experience on Die Walküre and his work on War and Peace, helps explain much of the ‘operatic’ aspect of Ivan.
Luckily, Nikolai Cherkassov had been evacuated with the Pushkin Theatre to Novo Sibirsk, not too far from Alma Ata, so was available to play the title role. (Curiously, Eisenstein confided to a friend that he would have preferred the less heroic-looking Mikhail [Michael] Chekhov to play Ivan had he not emigrated to the USA some years earlier.) Pudovkin was cast as the beggar simpleton Nicholas, and Serafima Birman, from Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theatre, took the role of Euphrosinia, the Tsar’s aunt. Eisenstein wanted prima ballerina Galina Ulanova to play the Tsarina Anastasia. Though she herself was enthusiastic and made successful screen and make-up tests, travelling difficulties forced her to decline. Ludmilla Tselikovskaya, a theatre actress from Moscow, took the part.
Eisenstein had been reinstated at The Institute of Cinematography, which had also been evacuated to Alma Ata, and he continued to teach there while working on the film. In August 1942 his first book, The Film Sense, was published in the USA, translated and edited by Jay Leyda. (A year later it was published in England.) A copy reached Eisenstein in Alma Ata, on January 22, 1943, his forty-fifth birthday.
‘This must be the first time in my life that I’m absolutely satisfied – with my first book and how it came out,’ he wrote to Leyda. ‘I can’t imagine how it could be better … Even the dust jacket … is the one I would have chosen; absolutely boulevard in appearance – yellow with black, like the cover of a detective novel. On it my face with an absolutely obscene glance and a Gioconda smile. This was cut from a photo by Jiménez in Mexico in 1930. In my right hand near my shoulder I held a sugar skull from the objects associated with “death day”. With the skull removed what is left is a semi-ironic expression on my face and a lustful eye looking out from under a slightly raised left eyebrow …’24
Eisenstein’s writings in general, from his return to the USSR in 1934 onwards, though as erudite, wide-ranging, and full of unexpected insights, were more cautious and conservative than his earlier innovative and enthusiastic essays. One noticeable aesthetic change was his attitude to montage. In a complete reversal of many of his theories (and practices), he now claimed that the ‘basic aim and function’ of montage is ‘connected and sequential exposition of the theme, the material, the plot, the action … the simple matter of telling a connected story’; he who had once characterised montage as ‘collision’ and ‘conflict’. ‘From the collision of two given factors arises a concept. Linkage is, in my interpretation, only a possible special case … Thus montage is conflict. The basis of every art is always conflict.’
But, as Dwight Macdonald suggested in 1942, ‘Eisenstein’s change of mind about montage has nothing to do with aesthetic theory; it is simply an adaptation to the political pressures which have crushed all Soviet art in the last decade … The cinema is a dramatic art form, and dramatic structure depends largely on the tension created by conflict; but there cannot be conflict in a totalitarian state, since there is only one principle, one set of values authorised to be publicly expressed.’25 There was a revolutionary quality to the conflict-montage in Eisenstein’s October, whereas Socialist Realist films i.e. Stalinist films, were, in a sense, counter-revolutionary.
While working on the script of Ivan in Alma Ata, Eisenstein also found time to write a number of essays, a perceptive comparison between Charles Dickens and D.W. Griffith, and another on Charlie Chaplin. Neither did the work on Ivan stop him from contemplating future film possibilities. He exchanged letters with Leopold Stokowski, whom he had met in Mexico, and who he invited to Russia after the war to discuss ‘an idea for a musical film.’ Eisenstein had seen and admired Disney’s Fantasia three years previously in which the conductor played straight-man to Mickey Mouse.
Eisenstein and Pudovkin were, in turn, jointly approached by the newly-knighted Alexander Korda about co-directing a film of War and Peace for which Orson Welles was suggested as Pierre Bezukhov. (Welles boasted that he had corresponded with Eisenstein, but no letters to or from him have ever turned up.) Both directors were enthusiastic and sent a detailed summary of their ideas for the film. As the USA and Great Britain were now allies of the Soviet Union, contacts with the West were allowed. (A few years previously, Korda had made Knight Without Armour, a sort of Thirty-Nine Steppes, in which Robert Donat rescues Countess Marlene Dietrich from execution by the Bolsheviks.)
In 1937, Eisenstein had written: ‘The aspiring film director could derive enormous benefit from studying the change of levels, the interplay of details in close-up, the glimpses of the behaviour of heroes and episodic characters, the type-casting and crowd scenes in long shot that unfold on the grandiose canvas of the Battle of Borodino in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.’26 (There had been two silent film versions in 1915, one of which was directed by Vladimir Gardin and starred Olga Preobrazhenskaya as Natasha. But modern audiences had to wait until King Vidor’s 1956 version, and then Sergei Bondarchuk’s mammoth eight-hour film of 1966.) During 1943, Eisenstein reread The Brothers Karamazov, noting in his diary ideas for a possible screen version. It was the first time he had read it since the time, aged seventeen, when he had prepared himself for his meeting with Dostoevky’s widow.
The filming of the three parts of Ivan the Terrible began in April 1943, in the evenings only when electricity could be spared from the more urgent needs of wartime industry. Tisse photographed the exteriors for Part I, but the cameraman for the interiors – the bulk of the film – was Andrei Moskvin. Moskvin had been a member of the FEKS group, and photographed most of the films directed by Kozintsev and Trauberg.
The twenty-eight-year-old Pavel Kadochnikov, who played Vladimir Staritsky, was asked by Eisenstein to play two different roles in Part III because Staritsky had been murdered in the previous part. ‘And that was not all,’ recalled Kadochnikov. ‘One day during the preparation for the ‘Fiery Furnace Play’ (staged in the cathedral to intimidate Ivan) he [Eisenstein] suddenly asked me, “Can you do a cartwheel?” “I certainly can,” and thus I was cast … as one of the evil clowns in the play …’27
Serafima Birman, who played the formidable Euphrosinia, recalled: ‘The filming of Ivan the Terrible was for me a time of shadow as well as light, and I still think the shadow was more powerful than the light. Yet, in retrospect, I doubt whether those shadows were real ones, for Eisenstein worked with such passion, such spontaneous inspiration, and ultimately with such true comradeship that to distress him unnecessarily, as some of us did, was to slap his superb talents in his face. For the truth is that, despite all, we loved this man, but with a love that we never expressed in words, either to him or to ourselves, but by working long and hard, by day, by night, and often on our so-called holidays as well.
‘So we agreed to do the most extraordinary things for him; for instance Cherkassov, in the Kazan sequence, had to wear a very heavy metal costume, and he willingly stood in it on the edge of a precipice, for take after take, in a temperature of sixty degrees centigrade. Poor Ludmilla Tselikovskaya once spent a whole night in a coffin because Eisenstein refused to let her get out of it. Why did we do these things without protest? I have already suggested one reason in our deep professional respect for Eisenstein as an artist. But another cause, and of equal importance, was a reflection of the war. Elsewhere in a country, people were fighting and being maimed for something they believed in, and perhaps the only way we could compensate for the privilege of our own safety was to fight a battle for what we regarded as serious and lasting art. For these reasons, and despite our quarrels with him, we eventually did whatever Eisenstein asked us to …
‘One aspect of his extremely complex personality never failed to surprise me, if only because I’ve known so many lesser men without it, and that was his completely natural way of treating, say, a young lighting assistant as though he were as important to the production as Prokofiev. Consequently, such people were transformed in his presence, and if he ever shouted at them in a fit of temper they immediately forgave him and were never angry or offended. I was often very angry myself, but they never were.’28
When Michael Chekhov saw Ivan The Terrible Part II in America, he couldn’t believe that his former colleague at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theatre, Serafima Birman, could have accepted such a ‘betrayal’ of all their lessons without protest.
With the Germans on the retreat and facing defeat, and Moscow no longer threatened, Mosfilm returned to the capital in the autumn of 1944. Eisenstein took with him a huge metal-lined wooden crate filled with his sketches and carefully bound folders. At the end of the year, he completed editing Part I, and it had its first showing in January 1945 to general acclaim. Chaplin sent a telegram extolling it a year later as ‘the greatest historic film that has ever been made.’
Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote that it was ‘a film of awesome and monumental impressiveness in which the senses are saturated in medieval majesty.’
Following the success of Part I, Eisenstein resumed work on Part II and the projected Part III throughout 1945. There was one sequence – the banquet – in Part II to be filmed. ‘Why couldn’t this explosion be … in colour? Colour would participate in the explosion of the dance. And then at the end of the feast, imperceptibly flow back into black and white photography …’29
Having managed to lay his hands on a small quantity of colour negative film captured from the Germans, Eisenstein would at last be able to put his theories on the use of colour into practice. (The Stone Flower was the first Soviet film to be made with the captured AGFA colour system taken when Russian troops occupied the plant at Wolfen, and which was adapted as Sovcolor.)
It was inevitable that Eisenstein, who had dreamt of working in colour long before it was in general use, should have grabbed the opportunity to apply it to Ivan. ‘Colour. Pure. Bright. Vibrant. Ringing … the penetrating choir of pink flamingos, standing out against the pale blue background of the Gulf of Mexico, picked up the refrain where Van Gogh’s canvases in the Hague Museum left off with their whirlwind of colour produced in Arles … the green square of the tablecloth in the lemon room flooded with light, the dark blue teacup among red cups, the golden buddha against the azure walls or the books in their orange and black binding on the green and gold brocade of the round table. I always surround myself with such spots of colour … I find it dull when there is no yellow pencil next to the blue one to set it off; no red and green striped pillow lying on the blue couch …’30
Eisenstein, in his copious writings on the subject, was conscious of the symbolic connotations of colours. Of the banquet scene from Ivan the Terrible: Part II, he wrote: ‘At first all the colour themes are tied up in a knot. Then the red theme is gradually teased out, then the black, then the blue. What counts is that they are torn away from their original association with an object. Suppose that the red theme begins with a red sleeve; it is repeated with the red background of candles; when Vladimir Andreyevich goes to his death, the theme is picked up by the red carpet … I wanted there to be red drops of blood in the black-and-white part, after the murder of Vladimir Andreyevich; but Fira [Esther] Tobak would not have it; saying that would be Formalism …’31
In January 1946, Eisenstein, while also working on another book on film theory (Film Form), wrote to Jay Leyda: ‘I was (and still am for about three weeks) busy like hell; just finishing to shoot and cut the second part of Ivan. This part includes two reels made in colour. Colour used in quite different a way than it is usually done – so that it gives a big additional chapter to what is nearly ready in book form. If everything is all right here with the picture I expect to take a vacation and finish the book – three quarters of which is ready for print. Most of the stuff is unpublished (part of it even unwritten yet!) and is mostly concerned with the development of the principles started by Potemkin during these twenty years in different media (is that the way to say it?) – treatments of sound, music, colour …’32
Apart from his work on Part II, Eisenstein had completed the script, many sketches, and shot four reels of Part III. Among the production stills is one in which Mikhail Romm, in full regalia, makes an extremely convincing Elizabeth I of England. Part III would have opened up the trilogy with more exteriors, more crowd movements and more battle scenes than the claustrophobic Part II.
One sequence which survived shows an ageing Ivan interrogating a haughty one-eyed German knight about his false papers, while Dickensian clerks ponder the papers in a dark cellar-like hall. Another that was filmed, but lost, was the confrontation between Ivan, the Earthly Tsar, and the Heavenly Tsar, in a fresco of the Last Judgement, while the names of Ivan’s victims are intoned. ‘He accounts as his a fearful responsibility. Sweat pours in streams from his forehead. Scorching tears stream from his closed eyes. The Tsar has grown thin, emaciated. And seems yet older by a dozen years …’33
In order to get the Tsar’s appearance as he imagined it, Eisenstein presented the chief make-up artist Vassili Goryunov with a pile of sketches. On looking through the sketches Goryunov remarked, ‘These sketches can never be realised … they are pure formalism.’ ‘I’ll supply you with an idea for an image, and it will be up to you to realise it,’ replied Eisenstein. ‘But you must always work with the face of the player … You must lengthen Cherkassov’s head. You’ll have to make a stiff wig, and think about his chin while you do it … Have you noticed that Cherkassov’s torso and arms do not harmonise with the shape of his head? It actually should have a shape like this.’34 Eisenstein then drew Ivan’s head in what Goryunov described as the shape of a cucumber, not recognising the wig as the continuing influence of the Chinese opera on the work as a whole.
Ivan the Terrible is the peak of Eisenstein’s achievement, fulfilling his ambitions of a synthesis of all the arts – a gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense – a film opera combining music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and dance. All the individual components complement each other, arresting the eye, the ear, the mind and the emotions; ‘the montage of attractions’ has matured from the often too schematic, frenetic and didactic ‘intellectual montage’ of the earlier films. If the sets, costumes, lighting or colour are stylised then so are the performances, a blend of classical Russian acting and that of the Chinese opera, while the text is written in blank verse. Yet, in no way can Ivan be ‘accused’ of ‘formalism’ because everything is used in the service of the historical narrative, with its contemporary undertones, the psychology of the characters, and the atmosphere which informs their actions.
Ivan the Terrible, which should be seen as a single work, with its unifying and continually developing plot, characters, themes, and pictorial style, assembles all of Eisenstein’s preoccupations, obsessions, and motifs of his films, drawings and writings, so that his final film is his most personal. The simultaneous attraction and aversion to religious rites and the aura of the church; the themes of regicide and Oedipal patricide, the exercising power, whether for good or evil; martyrdom and sado-masochism; fraternalism bordering on the homo-erotic, and the existential isolation of the individual – all are in evidence.
Each of these strands is woven into a tapestry of haunting images: the tenebrous church and chambers through which people move in conspiratorial groups; the vast shadow of the Tsar projected on the wall, a symbol of his overweening power; the Tartar prisoners tied to the walls of Kazan, pierced by the arrows of their own people and dying like so many Saint Sebastians; boyars’ necks in close-up waiting for the sword, and the Tsar clinging to his handsome, young devotee Fyodor. The final scene of Part I, one of the most memorable in all cinema, has Ivan appearing at the portal of his retreat, having calculated on the masses coming to seek his return to power. In profile, his pointed beard lowers into the frame, while in the background thousands of people, literally behind and below him, weave their way towards him across the snowy countryside, stopping to kneel and pray.
The colour sequence, with its dominating reds and golds punctuated with black, explodes onto the screen, as Fyodor in a female Oriental mask dances and sings surrounded by a chorus of young men (many of them chosen by Eisenstein from the Red Army) as a pagan prelude to midnight mass. As the dancing gains in tempo, Ivan discovers from Vladimir, the drunken simpleton, that his mother has arranged for him to become Tsar. There is then a mock coronation, as Ivan dresses Vladimir in his regalia with orb and sceptre, resulting in the assassin mistaking his prey. The dazzling choreographic sequence, leading to the denouement, demonstrates the Tsar’s dependence on the oprichniki (the chosen few around him), the precariousness of his power, his political shrewdness and his personal vulnerability.
The magnificent Nikolai Cherkassov, who has the lean angularity of an El Greco portrait come to life, dominates every scene, his body taking on positions one thought only possible in an animated film. The other characters, too, move in a similar manner, every gesture a meaningful one. Ivan’s faithful follower Malyuta sits at his master’s feet, becoming his ‘ginger dog’ waiting to be stroked; Vladimir, a brother to Harry Langdon and Stan Laurel, is an overgrown baby, being sung a lullaby as he is cradled in his mother’s arms. But more than a film of posture and gesture, Ivan is a film of glances; eyes move up and down, from left to right, penetrating, suspicious, adoring, watchful. There are eyes, too, staring from the icons on the walls, and one gigantic eye watching everyone like Big Brother.
As Eisenstein celebrated the success of Ivan the Terrible: Part I, and the coming of 1946, he had no inkling of the bitter struggle which loomed against two enemies – Stalin and Death.