Chapter 8
Eisenstein and Shakespeare
N.M.Lary
Eisenstein’s English-speaking audience views his last film project from a perspective dominated by the histories and tragedies of Shakespeare. Echoes of the plays abound in the two parts of Ivan the Terrible the Soviet film-maker was allowed to complete. Of course Eisenstein worked with a multiplicity of models; examples from many different artists were constantly finding application in his work. He noted with surprise the way something out of the great fund of works he had read and seen would come to mind at the very moment it could be useful to him. Other artists helped him—also challenged him: Naum Kleiman has spoken about the sense of contest or competition in Eisenstein’s relations with other artists.1 While acknowledging the role of the many other artistic examples that continually interact in Eisenstein’s work, we may focus on what Eisenstein learned from Shakespeare. And we are free to pass to the questions of how he measured himself against the playwright and how we ourselves measure Eisenstein against Shakespeare.
My undertaking here is a preliminary one, a clearing of the ground. I will review the history of Eisenstein’s engagement with Shakespeare, consider some of the evidence that Eisenstein conceived his last film project as a tragedy and look at his late writings on Shakespeare to see how they bear on his use of Shakespeare in his creative work.
One difficulty may be mentioned at the outset. We are well advised to look for a typology of Elizabethan and Jacobean moments in the Ivan films but we cannot consider Eisenstein’s relation to Shakespeare alone. We also need to remember the relevance of Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Webster (possibly his favourite ‘Elizabethans’).2 He soon learned to see Shakespeare in relation to these other playwrights. He was helped in this by his friend, the scholar, critic and translator of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, I.A.Aksyonov (who also wrote two studies of Eisenstein and one of Picasso), and by T.S.Eliot’s Sacred Wood, which he read with close attention.3
Take Yevfrosinia’s descent into madness at the end of Part II of the film as she clutches her dead son, mistakenly killed in place of Ivan as a conse-quence of her wild scheming. Here Eisenstein gives us another great Jacobean mad scene. Or consider that critical juncture in Part I when Ivan is on his death bed: the last rites are being performed; the open Bible is held over him. The boyars stand around, waiting till their strong monarch is dead and they are free to resume divisive plotting against the state. Maybe Ivan is feigning illness; maybe he is really ill—we don’t know. Compare this with a scene in Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Pt II: the King is brought into a place called the Jerusalem Chamber to die. His son, Prince Hal, is off hunting. It is a critical moment—without a responsible ruler the country will fall apart. The King sinks into a deep sleep, and Hal comes in, sees the crown lying on the bed, tries it on and goes out. Waking up and seeing that the crown is gone, the King imagines in a moment of panic that the crown has been stolen and already the country is being pulled apart. Crude striving for power, he thinks (with some reason), is all that governs men.
The analogies with the scene in Ivan are suggestive. But Ben Jonson’s Volpone also bears on Eisenstein’s work—the situation dominating the play is Volpone in bed, pretending to be on the point of death, in order to prey on the delusions of relatives and friends. Clearly, the analogies we see must be put in context. Rather than particular parallels we need a typology of moments.
EISENSTEIN ON SHAKESPEARE: THE RECORD
Eisenstein’s most detailed notes relating to Shakespeare come from the year 1943 (right in the middle of his work on Ivan—and also the year of his very interesting comments on Dostoyevsky, which I have examined elsewhere). The history of his involvement with Shakespeare is, however, a long one. There were a number of stage designs for army theatres, which Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow list, noting that they may not have all been realized.4 In 1917, there was Hamlet; in May and June 1920, King John (possibly not Shakespeare’s). In the same year, there was Henry IV (Pt I? Pt II?), Richard III, and Twelfth Night. (And note too: in 1919, the set designs for Bartholomew Fair and Volpone.) From November 1921 to April 1922 he worked on Tikhonovich’s production Lady Macbeth, finally put on as Macbeth. The sides of the stage were in grey, and tonal changes were produced through lighting and a background sky of black, gold and purple (a foreshadowing of Eisenstein’s use of colour in Ivan?). A number of suggestive costume designs are connected with this production: the helmet of a Scottish warrior (‘the faceless one’); Lady Macbeth’s costume; and especially Macbeth’s costume (his whole body disintegrating into black and red cones, barely holding together, with a helmet over his face giving him the appearance of an ominous bird). This production led to major conflicts with the director. It was impossible for Eisenstein to be restricted to the role of set- and costume-designer for another man’s production: he had to be a total director.
Some drawings for An American Tragedy dated 26 September 1930, with the title Exhumation, refer to Hamlet (presumably the graveyard scene). On a sketch, dated 29 March 1931, of the murder of Polonius (for a stage production), he wrote: ‘He pulls the curtain as in a sea of black silk.’ In June 1931, in Tetlapayac, when the shooting of Que Viva Mexico! was interrupted by rain, Eisenstein produced 140 drawings connected (at some remove) with Macbeth—‘The Death of King Duncan’ series. According to his biographer, Yon Barna, these were done ‘very quickly, so as not to disturb the subconscious elements’.5
In his writings there are many scattered references to Shakespeare but the most important evidence relates to the time of his work on Ivan the Terrible. In 1943—following his work on the script and the sets of the film — he devoted some writing specifically to Shakespeare, which was meant to enter into his big, proposed study, Method. In 1944 he made the two Richard III drawings, which are studies of evil (with a rather remote connection to the play). For present purposes I will ignore these drawings and also the many incidental references to Shakespeare. The 1943 writings are the ones that most repay examination. First, however, I want to take up a rather more general question—the evidence that the Ivan film project was a properly tragic one.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE AS A FILM TRAGEDY
Eisenstein situated his film in a world of Elizabethan drama. In ‘Ivan the Terrible: A Film About the Russian Renaissance’ (1942) he characterised his hero as ‘frightening and attractive, fascinating and terrifying, and—in the full sense of the word—tragic, owing to the inner struggle he unceasingly waged with himself, while struggling with the enemies of his country’.6 Eisenstein’s conception of the first all-Russian tsar was suited to shock audiences at home and abroad, first because of the ‘decisive action, necessary cruelty, and occasional mercilessness of the man to whom history had entrusted the mission of creating one of the strongest and largest states of the world’ and, secondly, because of the ‘people of that Russian Renaissance of the 16th century never before seen on the screen in the whole sweep of passion for and interest in power’. Eisenstein stressed that Ivan’s ‘dark, unexpected, grim and frightful characteristics’ were necessary for any statesman in
a passionate and bloody epoch such as the sixteenth-century Renaissance—equally, without difference, in sun-drenched Italy or in England, which in the figure of Elizabeth was become Queen of the Seas, or in France or Spain or the Holy Roman Empire.
A common Machiavellian identity had to be brought out:
Images of Russian feudal princes and boyars who are not inferior to a Cesare Borgia or a Malatesta will pass before the viewer; princes of the church whose imperiousness is worthy of the Roman Popes and who for political intrigues are the equals of Machiavelli or Loyola; and Russian women who are the match of Catherine de Medici and Bloody Mary.
Elsewhere Eisenstein expressed his general admiration for Elizabethan structure as ‘exaggerated, passionate, overcharged, and in places farfetched’.7
Initially, at any rate, Eisenstein also situated his film within, broadly speaking, a historical, Marxist project:
The theme of autocracy is resolved in two aspects: One as Autocrat and One as alone. The former gives the theme of government power (progressive at that historical stage)—the political theme of the film. The other gives the personal, psychological theme of the film. Here lies the compositional unity of the personal and the social, the psychological and the political.8
The form of words allows one to see the story as the personal tragedy of a man who sought to develop Russia. This was the price to be paid for the making of Russia. In this view of the film, the historical—apologetic—categories are dominant.
In the course of work on the film Eisenstein changed to a more deeply tragic conception of the story—one that sees the limitations of the Marxist explanation of history (and of tragedy). In an unposted letter to Tynyanov in January 1944 Eisenstein writes of ‘the tragic inevitability of autocracy and aloneness…. You yourself understand that this is just what in the very first instance they are trying to “replace” in the script and in the film.’9 Now in the banquet scene in the colour sequence in Part II of the film—with its multiple deceptions, disguises, and even transvestism—the bounds of the merely personal tragedy are breached. We see the impossibility of the autocratic enterprise, the disintegration and corruption at the heart of autocracy. In Part III the theme of treachery was to be further explored—and in particular the impossibility of the adequate domination of another. Fyodor Basmanov, who in the dance scene, dressed up as a woman, offers himself to Ivan as a substitute wife, is a man who has abandoned his own father in order to become part of Ivan’s ‘iron ring’ of oprichniks. Why then should Ivan believe in the loyalty of this shifty substitute son or wife? Already in the banquet scene in Part II there is a hint of Fyodor’s future treachery (in Part III) as he jealously observes the apparent flirtation between Ivan and Vladimir.
The tragic dimensions of Ivan the Terrible became more apparent in the course of Eisenstein’s work on it. Indeed there was a tragic dimension waiting to explode in all Eisenstein’s film practice. His whole notion of the ‘art of pathos’ was closely allied to tragedy. The unfinished book Direction suggested that tragedy was the most pathetic art. In his introduction to the book he quoted Hegel:
True originality in an artist and in a work of art consists of being penetrated and inspired by the underlying idea of a subject which is true in itself…true originality in art absorbs any accidental particularity.10
In art an idea became ‘sensuous thought’, so that it might be grasped through the feelings and emotions. Nature in art was not simply presented; it too was felt, everything being transformed into an expression of man’s feelings. In a world of change, the most powerful art dealt with the experience of change. The most ‘pathetic’ art was an expression of a world of dialectical transformation.
For Eisenstein, tragedy—particularly Greek and Elizabethan—had come close to expressing the dialectical nature of the world. On occasion he used the two terms ‘pathos’ and ‘tragedy’ almost interchangeably. In pathetic art ‘each manifestation of the structure had to reproduce the basic law according to which the imaged phenomenon, thing, or man was constructed’.11 On a scale of ascending intensity, ‘Gesture passed over into sound. Sound—into words. Speech—into measured prose. Prose —into poetry. The music of poetry—into song. Song—into music.’ Light passed into colour.12 In tragedy, as in the best, pathetic art, there were moments of ‘ecstasy’ or transition to an ‘unforeseen’ new quality. Tragedy relied on heightening—and ever intensifying—means of expression.
The ancient Greeks had been aware of these changes, but being unable to account for them in their cognitive schemes, assigned them to a ‘deus ex machina’.13 Since, in Eisenstein’s aesthetics, the effect on the audience was central, he was not afraid to draw on Aristotle’s notion of a cathartic experience. The effect of the moments of special intensity or ecstasy was ‘passion raising the spectator above the level of ordinary experience’. It was an emotion beyond fear and pity, which could be produced by melodrama, where, however, they took the form of a feeling of nullity and futility.14 Tragedy as a properly pathetic, ecstatic art left one with a ‘feeling of relief and liberation at the highest point of tension of the drama, at a point moving to a new and unforeseen quality’.15
Tragedy was—or at any rate had been—the central pathetic art for another reason: it dealt with suffering, which was what ‘pathos’ originally meant. In tragedy suffering, too, underwent ecstatic transformation. And for Eisenstein, who remembered the cruelty he had sought to inflict in his early art of the cine-fist, his new film, conceived in the shadow of the Terror and made during the War, could offer vicarious suffering, leading to a cathartic experience of fear and pity, raw emotions which could not otherwise be admitted.
In Eisenstein’s view of tragedy we recognise not only logical thought but also the kind of pre- or proto-logical thought explored by Mikhail Yampolsky and Arun Khopkar.16 Tragedy embodied the conflicts of dialectical change: ‘I think that historically each new shift seems to repeat the primary shift in an ever new qualitative aspect.’17 Eisenstein stressed that Shakespeare was living in an age of major political and social change. That was the situation out of which Shakespeare was writing. It was also the kind of situation out of which Eisenstein was making his films. Now, in speaking about historical shifts which reflect earlier shifts, Eisenstein slides very quickly back to the stage of undifferentiated sensuous thought or exalted bliss underlying these shifts. The power of art is to release this undifferentiated sensuous thought—but at the same time this dreamlike state is also something that threatens art.
The intensification of pathetic means had other dangers. As Eisenstein noted, the living face might correspond to a duality or multiplicity of masks.18 In later tragedy fixity of character gave way to inner conflict and change. Unity of character was threatened by dualism and fragmentation. Chaos threatened Eisenstein’s tragic universe.
There was a tension in Eisenstein’s work as he attempted to resolve certain conflicting ideas: firstly, the hope that the undifferentiated being of primal society would again be attained in a future socialist society, in which everyone—man and woman—would be equally recognized; secondly, the fear that art could not show the way to this future socialist society and would prove a regressive force leading to an enclosed dreamworld; and thirdly, the fear, too, that there was no escape from evil in the world of the all-powerful tyrant (note that at the end of Ivan there is no good character waiting in the wings). On occasion Eisenstein resolves the tension through simple statements of faith in the great and glorious future. At other times he resorts to playful exploration of the concepts, an enjoyment of the contradictions that amounts to a refusal to be dominated by them.
EISENSTEIN’S LATE WRITINGS ON SHAKESPEARE
Playfulness appears in Eisenstein’s late writings on Shakespeare. On the question of Ivan’s possible relationship to Shakespeare’s major tragic heroes, Eisenstein is tantalisingly reticent. There are some brief notes on Macbeth and Lear, to which I will return. There is a discussion of Hamlet, which for these purposes is not particularly useful: it is an intelligent examination of the limitations of T.S.Eliot’s view of the motivation supplied for him.
He is at his most suggestive—and playful—in a discussion in 1943 of Romeo and Juliet. Provocatively he suggests that the germ of the story is this: ‘Romeo—it is said—had much more definite intentions—and performed so brilliantly that Juliet was ready to commit any folly.’ He stresses a different situation as the germ of the play—the social and political conflicts in the reign of Elizabeth and the question of succession. But for a work to attain greatness—a ‘generalised general’ has to appear through the ‘particularised particular’ of the situation. Eisenstein does not discuss the particular situations further but considers the general import of the tragedy—its magic attraction. Both the notion of repetition at a higher level of the spiral of history and the notion of penetration to the deepest level of protological, sensuous thought come into play. In Romeo and Juliet he sees a recurrence of the challenge to the institution of taboos and prescriptions governing marriages between groups or clans. In the historical shift from the feudal period to the Renaissance there is a repetition of a primal situation, which takes the form or image of a law or principle. ‘The inevitable recurrence of the most general formula of relations is continually determined in its particular historical form by the fundamental principle which underlies the succession of historical forms and which governs the succession of epochs and structures.’ But he does not develop this anthropology or psycho-anthropology, devoting instead considerable space to sensuous thought as a source of powerful artistic effect.
In a strange, very assertive move, as part of the argument that sensuous thought does underlie Shakespeare’s play, Eisenstein takes Jacques Deval’s play, L’Age de Juliette (1935) and examines the treatment of the myth in this work. In this version two petit-bourgeois families will not allow their children to marry because each of them needs to marry a richer person. And so the two young people go off to the Ritz, where they occupy a suite. And they take a bath—you see them splashing on stage. They disappear off stage, and when they return they have switched bathrobes (which are grey and white). According to Eisenstein, this exchange functions as more than just a sign that the two have made love; in the bath the two have returned to the state of undifferentiated primal being in which fish live, and which is connected with an early stage of our evolution (which is supposedly repeated in our development in the womb). They have supposedly rediscovered the bisexuality of our ontogenetic being. Deval, it appears, makes explicit something that is implicit in Shakespeare’s play.
This is certainly entertaining (Eisenstein’s account of Hamlet, based on a modified version of the Oedipus complex, which he relates to the origins of differentiated social existence, is interesting in relation to his struggle with Freud’s ideas, but scarcely entertaining). There is a definite wilfulness of interpretation—certainly in relation to Romeo and Juliet. The interpretation seems to exist above all to allow Eisenstein to assert the presence of basic structures of thought and experience. In a wonderful development of this idea he switches to Leonardo’s The Last Supper and sees the fingers of Judas and Christ mingling in the same cup as another symbol of sexual love. Judas’ betrayal of Christ is an act of sexual jealousy. Here again is confirmation of man’s basic bisexuality. And for this Eisenstein finds yet more confirmation in some writings of Stendhal and Christopher Marlowe.19 The connections in Eisenstein’s mind are richly fertile.
DIRECTIONS
From the point of view of Eisenstein’s use of Shakespeare, it is disappointing that he did not write more on Macbeth, apart from some references to the image of borrowed clothes in this play (in the notes for Method). From all Shakespeare’s tragedies, this study of power is surely the one that bears most directly on our understanding of Ivan the Terrible, rather than Hamlet or Lear, with their focus on the problem of self-knowledge. But in pursuing connections between the character Macbeth and the character Ivan, one would have to remember that Eisenstein specifically said that Ben Jonson’s ‘bichromality’ of characterisation was of direct use to him in the conception of Ivan (although by the time we come to Ivan’s inner disintegration in Part II we have surely gone beyond ‘bichromality’).20
His tantalising comments on the youthful Romeo and Juliet point in a direction that is certainly useful—towards the total image or metaphor of the work. One of the books he read with fascination was Caroline Spurgeon’s large study, Shakespeare’s Imagery, filling his copy with underlinings.21 What drew him was Shakespeare’s total metaphoric vision; and while Ben Jonson’s visual metaphors appealed to him as filmmaker, Eisenstein was finally a dramatic poet of film whose apprehension of the world transcended the visual. It is along the lines of connected metaphoric vision that Eisenstein’s relationship to Shakespeare needs to be explored. One could take as a starting point Eisenstein’s own reference to the image of borrowed clothes in the play, examine the images of disguise, deception and self-deception in Macbeth, and point to the total state of undifferentiated consciousness that is excited by these images of disguise and deception. One would also have to look at the understanding of evil shown in ‘The Death of King Duncan’ drawings. And one would have to consider the shaping influence of Eisenstein’s distinctive images of the All-Seeing Eye of God and of confession and regeneration.
But again Eisenstein’s dialogues with other artists were never exclusive. François Albera has indicated how Eisenstein could suddenly pass from a dialogue with, say, Shklovsky to one with Malevich.22 In at least two of Eisenstein’s late notes about Shakespeare, that playwright’s characteristic imagery is contrasted with the novelist, Dostoyevsky’s. I will quote one of these notes:
In Lear everything is woven together: the kingdom
is chopped up
a body is cut up
lacerating comparisons.
In Dostoyevsky the psychological and the material or physical series do not penetrate one another but unfold alongside one another.[. . .]
The reader cries out within himself with excitement (just as the cherubim cry aloud in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’) for his task of inner collaboration as co-author amounts to ‘unifying’ the disconnected series of the author.23
In this note we see why Eisenstein was finally—or for a while—ready to move beyond Shakespeare. In Dostoyevsky he saw a way of returning to his old ambition of truly effective action on the spectator—by getting the spectator to act as co-creator and to connect parallel but separate series of physical and psychological images. In Dostoyevsky, I think, too, he saw a possible way of escaping from those powerful structures of undifferentiated being that threatened to plunge the artist into a dreamlike state of sensuous excitement and inaction—but that is a whole other question.