Yuri Tsivian,
Ivan the Terrible.
London: British Film Institute, 2002, (BFI Film Classics series)
ISBN: 0 85170834 X
87 pp
£8.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing).

Yuri Tsivian’s book on Ivan the Terrible is a strange and wonderful project dealing with a film that is already widely familiar. As Tsivian says, “The more we know the more we can see” (8). This is much the same thing that I assumed when I wrote my own book on Ivan over twenty years ago. The question is, though, what is desirable to know? I set out to point out as much as possible about what one sees and hears in Ivan – to help, in other words, the viewer know more about the finished film. Tsivian’s aim is quite different (though equally informed by Russian Formalism, I am happy to say). He wishes to trace the influences and aesthetic beliefs that Eisenstein brought to the making of the film. “My plan,” Tsivian says of the film, ” is to analyse it in formation.” (The Formalists frequently discussed how literary works were “made.”) Unquestionably his book will help viewers know a great deal of unfamiliar material and hence to see even more in a rich, eccentric film.

Tsivian has not produced a mere survey of Eisenstein’s intentions in making Ivan. Instead, his idea is to look at “the phantom film,” in effect, the film Eisenstein thought he was making. The author offers three valid justifications for doing so: first, the film is unfinished; second, it is a difficult and experimental film; and third, we inevitably have, and need, advance knowledge when we come to films. In this case, understanding some of Eisenstein’s peculiar beliefs about art, as brilliantly explicated by Tsivian, can send one back to the film as we have it today much better to understand its peculiar aspects. As Tsivian points out, “for better or worse, we simply do not watche movies the way Eisenstein thought – or at his low moments, wished – we did.” Learning to watch films as Eisenstein conceived them, if only for the time it takes to read this short book, is a revelation.

For example, in the section entitled “Eccentric tragedy” (47-51), Tsivian traces Eisenstein’s notions of a dismembered and reassembled body. Beginning with an obscure note by Eisenstein comparing Ivan with Potemkin (Russia 1925) and bringing in Chaplin’s movements as an instance of montage, Tsivian moves through some of Eisenstein’s interests, from Coriolanus (“There was a time when all the body’s members,/Rebelled against the belly . . .”) to Freudian psychologist Alfred Winterstein’s study of Greek tragedy to the dismemberment of the Egyptian god Osiris to the eccentric performance Eisenstein expected from his Ivan, Nikolai Cherkasov. By the end, it all makes some sort of sense.

Tsivian is the ideal guide for such a venture. He has studied the notebooks, diaries, and other unpublished material in the Eisenstein archives at great length and has taken enormous pains to track down the many literary, artistic, and intellectual references that the learned and insatiably curious filmmaker bundled together in such profusion as his ideas flooded onto the page. Apart from frame enlargements and reproductions of Eisenstein’s own drawings, the book’s illustrations range from renaissance engravings to Symbolist paintings, all of which Eisenstein could plausibly have known. The book’s section on bisexual imagery in Ivan (60-73), which could have been so tedious in the climate of current film studies, proves a model of how to trace influences as they make their way into an artist’s thinking and emerge to shape a film. The explanations and writing style are both admirably clear, especially given how abstruse some of the ideas involved are and how convoluted the path from the original inspiration to the final film often was. Tsivian is also engagingly straightforward about how he went about his detective work and what he hopes the reader to gain from the results. As he candidly says at once point, in discussing Eisenstein’s interest in androgyny and how it influenced Ivan, “I know this sounds weird” (68). So it – and many of Eisenstein’s other ideas – do, but Tsivian manages to explain the bizarre links the filmmaker’s tireless mind was able to make among a huge range of texts and cultural artifacts.

As all this may suggest, this book does not offer a simple introduction to Ivan aimed at the viewer about to see the film for the first time. Indeed, Tsivian urges the reader to see the film before reading it. Beyond this, I suspect having seen it several times and having a good basic knowledge of Eisenstein’s theoretical work would be even better. With good DVDs available, viewers can easily become familiar with the film, and they also have the luxury of going to the individual scenes discussed to test the author’s claims. It is a rare book that sends one back to a film so intrigued and so well equipped to learn a great deal more.

It is conventional even in laudatory book reviews to find at least a few quibbles with the author. Mine are minor indeed. On page 70, the caption for a frame enlargement of Fedor Basmanov specifies that the lighting that makes him look “seraphic” comes from above. In fact the key light just off right is roughly at the level of the actor’s chin, while the fill light – only slightly less bright – comes from off left at the level of the ear. The results are glowing hair and smooth skin, contrasting with the later shot of this character, also illustrated, where the light comes from below. I also do not think that Vladimir reacts in fear when the black swans are brought out in the banquet scene in Part II; he’s drunk and confused, and hence dazzled by the sudden burst of activity, but in Figure 71 (72) he reaches out to touch one of the swans, clearly delighted by it.

Despite Tsivian’s virtuoso explanations of the sources of obscure motifs in Ivan, he resolutely refuses to indulge in allegorical interpretations of the finished film. One might object that Eisenstein often flaunts symbolism in our faces, seeming to beg for interpretation. Tsivian points out, however, that Eisenstein saw irreconcilable conflict as the basis for montage and that the frequent jolting of the viewer that results is the opposite of an invitation to allegorical reading (29). I have stressed that one goes back to the film with an enhanced appreciation, but perhaps the aggregate result of Tsivian’s book is not so much a series of revelations about the film as an enhanced appreciation for the mind that could conceive it.

Kristin Thompson,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Created on: Friday, 27 June 2003 | Last Updated: Friday, 27 June 2003