Ivan the Terrible (1944)

It's hard to tell whether the first part of Ivan the Terrible (dir. Eisenstein) is to be considered as a Stalinist propaganda film or whether it provides a critical account of power. And the interesting question is, of course, what this kind of judgment could be based on, what kind of judgment one is making when one says "this is a propaganda film rather than ..." Apparently, the Soviet élite enjoyed it. Regardless of what the answer is, Ivan the Terrible is a film full of cinematic pomp. It starts off with the coronation of Ivan - he is to become the all-powerful Tsar. Interestingly, it takes a good while before we even see Ivan's face. Instead, we see all the glory of the ceremony: the clothes, the attributes of power. But it becomes clear that Ivan's power is challenged by the rich boyars who, when Ivan is lying on his death bed after a battle, immediately start plotting about the follower. It seems as if this type of plotting makes Ivan the leader he is (we see this pattern twice): he rises from his death bed and makes some drastic changes in the administration; traitors are kicked out and men of the people are hired. Ivan is a dramatic and paranoid man. Eisenstein always films Ivan as if he is an entirely different creature than the rest, his pointed beard and dramatic posturing underlining the Tsar as performativity dependent on external attributes but also as some kind of strange inner power. And the ornate costumes! I have rarely seen a movie where so much focus lays on the costumes (Jarman's Wittgenstein comes to mind); in some scenes, the extreme costumes take up entire rooms, making the people within them almost disappear.What is more, don't forget to admire the eerie and artificial-looking set design - brilliant (for example - look at how the doors are often so small that the characters look like giants). The viewer is thrown into a messy world where angles and Eisenstein's play with distance create an unnerving claustrophobic space.