Ivan the Terrible

"What’s interesting about it is that a whole shelf of books has been written about that film, but Tsivian’s approach is very different from anyone else’s: because what he does is to relate it intimately to Eisenstein’s inner life. He posits the film as very much a solution to Eisenstein’s unresolved psychological problems. He doesn’t ignore the historical fresco that Ivan IV was, or his relation to the course of Russian history, but there’s a lot of emphasis on the way that Eisenstein refigures the available material on Ivan, and turns it into a kind of psycho-autobiography. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a completely Freudian film. How he managed to get away with it at the height of Stalinism is pretty remarkable, although he did pay the price, and the film wasn’t shown until 57, after his death. But, for example, the flashback in Part II to the terrorised boy with his mother being dragged away is Eisenstein reworking the traumatic experiences of his own childhood where in fact he – the opposite – was forced to live with his father when his parents divorced. It’s terribly personal: that image of the terrorised little boy is one of the most naked pieces of picturing and transforming your own trauma that any filmmaker has put on screen. Tsivian’s good on that, and very very good at reading the minutiae of the film in a truly art historical way – he really takes you into the heart of the points at which Eisenstein turns what could have been a very hollow monumental film into a deeply personal one. It goes very much into the technique, and how Eisenstein personally masterminded the detailed construction of the film: being his own scriptwriter, art director and editor. It really is an astonishingly autographic film, and Tsivian is very good at giving you that sense."