Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And if we assume this experiment was begun by a set of optimistic scientists — fortunate enough to have acquired an immortal monkey — then we must also admit the possibility, however slim, that the monkey might well come out with Hamlet on its first try. There is even a possibility that the monkey produces a slightly improved Hamlet, in which the relationship between Gertrude and the Prince is more developed, and Horatio’s farewell is yet more touching. We would have to concede, as a people, that the random keystrokes of a monkey have surmounted the world of human art. Much in the way that a single monkey requires infinite time to guarantee the production of Hamlet+, so too would we require infinite monkey-experiments to guarantee the production of Hamlet+ on the first attempt. It is in one of these alternate dimensions that other strange things came to pass. Stroheim’s Greed was such a hit that Thalberg demanded he shoot another reel; Jodorowsky’s Dune inspired a popular brand of lunchbox; and Ivan the Terrible, Part III was welcomed with a twinkle in the eye of Joseph Stalin.
This is not the dimension in which we live. Ivan the Terrible is equaled only by Gance’s Napoléon in the pantheon of unfinished cinema. In a career determined by straight lines and cine-fists, it’s only in the final phase of Sergei Eisenstein’s career that he centers on an ambiguous, even malevolent, figure, in whom lies both the seed of the Russian state and the origin of its tyrannical tsardom. Ivan IV — who Stalin sought to rehabilitate in his commissioning of the film project — becomes a fractured lens through which Russian past and present interblend. Perhaps they blend too closely: Eisenstein’s attack on Ivan — with whom Stalin identified — was deemed inappropriate, and led to the banning of Part II and the scrapping of Part III — unless Eisenstein was willing to “correct” his account. He died before he was able to fulfil this butchery. The negative association between Stalin and Ivan is the one most likely to be noticed by the western viewer of the Ivan the Terrible films, perhaps keen to find in Eisenstein’s often doggishly loyal heart the spirit of a rebel agent. Some have interpreted the depiction as a justification of Stalinist rule: an imperfect revolutionary whose heavy hand protected Russia from within and without. But in whichever case, there is a conflict in the midst of Ivan the Terrible that quite overwhelms the direct statements of Eisenstein’s previous cinema. It’s essential to detect the third strand: this is a film about Ivan IV, and about Stalin, but also couched in this narrative is a history of the Russian Revolution, which bridged the ideological gap between.
Eisenstein is at once evoking Marxist teleology (by which Tsarism is superior to Boyarism, if only for its pointing toward, ultimately, communism); and the nature of a revolution; and the means by which a revolution crumbles into cultic authoritarianism. These simultaneous lines contradict and reinforce one another, by which we are at once sympathetic to and deeply suspicious of the protagonist figure. This ambiguity is built into the frame of the text: in a pre-Stalinist Soviet context, the image and nature of a tsar — any tsar — must imply oppression. The reign implies its overthrow. The religious iconography, the emphasis on court and ceremony, the imperial regalia — these symbols have all been used, especially by Eisenstein himself, to symbolize the ideological enemy. Even Ivan’s epithet, Grozny (which renders into modern English closer to “formidable,” or “dread-inspiring”), is an implicit challenge, a statement of the tsardom’s most total claim to power. If Stalin’s new artistic dicta encouraged the reclaiming and celebration of ancient dictators, Eisenstein’s visual language often pends toward the grotesque or the opulent. Eisenstein’s earlier, saber-rattling Alexander Nevsky hollows out the historical figure to deliver a generically Russian sword to destroy the invader; it is not a film about Nevsky as a historical figure, nor does it comment upon his historical reality save that he existed, and that he repulsed the Teutons. Ivan the Terrible does not eradicate the tsar’s historical context, nor does it extirpate the tsar from his history to convey an entirely contemporary idea. Eisenstein traces the means by which the tsardom was erected, the facilitation of its power, and the structures that centuries later would be torn down by the Russian revolutions.
And yet, he poses Ivan as the protagonist, versus a hive of feudal lords who intend to divide the Russian patrimony amongst themselves and their foreign collaborators. The boyars represent, most directly, the old feudal hierarchy, against which Ivan is a centralizing force. He determines that a Russian nation exists outside the whims and possessions of Russian lords; his principle of unification is (at least nominally) founded on the “will of the people” rather than the tribal mores of tradition. If Ivan’s specific motivations are to be doubted, his actions are nonetheless a representation of teleological development, by which the state must first galvanize a central authority and government before it can be unilaterally overthrown by a now-unified people. One might, through musty spectacles, celebrate this grand tyrant for tempting forward the wheels of destiny. But this is not the essential effect of Eisenstein’s work, because he is also a figure of revolution. He is an overthrower of a crooked old regime; he vanquishes tradition; he does not fear the church, nor the many foreign agents who seek to weaken the Russian arm. Eisenstein therefore co-opts the spirit of revolution from a time in which the material reality of the revolution stands contrary to his values; here is the transported feeling, much in the way that a modern Englishman can feel the base of his native identity in Henry’s Agincourt speech without necessarily believing in God, King, or the Law that dictates the English crown in France. Eisenstein himself writes: “It is advisable to approach different historical stages each in a different manner; what is progressive in the epoch of the Russian Renaissance of the 16th century may be profoundly reactionary for the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries!” This is a mode distinguished from his early cinema, but perhaps comparable to Eisenstein’s other incomplete masterwork, ¡Que viva México! (as much as Nevsky), in which the national or revolutionary spirit of a people is not wholly distinguished from its past, but rather extracted from and mingled with a host of historical facts. In the wide frame, the tsaring of Ivan is part of a long, revolutionary line; in the close frame, Ivan’s tsaring contains a comparable spirit to that of the revolutionaries centuries later.
But the tension in this comparative — between the modern revolution and the origin of its mortal foe — is not left slack. It is in this suspense that Eisenstein builds his third line: the corruption of revolution. In Ivan the Terrible, the nationalist mission is entrusted to a mighty, fearsome man; a man for whom justice is a closed fist; a man for whom the feudal ideology has not been destroyed so much as remade in his image. For as much as we sympathize with his intention — for he is more noble than the boyars — we fear the sharp angles of his personality, and the extremes of which he is capable. The popular narrative, so easily strung around the vacant eyes of a Nevsky, is here mangled by the specific psychology of an Ivan: we come to understand that the revolution is not wholly determined by the abstract nature of material conditions, but also by the specific person upon whom the mantle falls; or, if the material analysis must prevail, that the specific person upon whom the mantle falls is malformed by material conditions and therefore forces a regime into contradiction and decline. For as much as Part I (opposed to its sequel) seems to embody a heroic narrative, the performance of Nikolai Cherkasov constantly implies downfall, his shadow massive against palace walls, grasping at a silhouetted universe: he who is destined to break the ancient chain embodies another link of its grand arc. This becomes the extreme point in Eisenstein’s revolutionary depictions: in his earliest phase, he would not depict characters so much as collectives with symbolic fronts; he then distinguishes general characters through whom to represent a collective; and then, at the last, he seems to acknowledge and manipulate the conflict between individuals and the collective, by which a person can at once represent and contradict a wider idea. The beautiful concept — the line on the graph — is bought through the intricately complex dramas of those in the world; the film is not, therefore, simply an aesthetic reconfiguration of Stalin’s consolidation of power, but an attempt to psychologize and understand the collision between the ideal and the actual — to trace the means by which a revolution self-destructs.
Part I ends with a spectacular image: the face and pointed beard of Ivan composed against the snaking multitudes of Moscow — they have bidden his revolutionary call. But Part II will abandon entirely these open spaces. We retreat into the caverns of Ivan’s mind; here, the psychologizing impulse of Part I reaches a peculiar extreme, before its presumed explosion in Part III’s foreign incursions. “The people,” who first invade Ivan’s court, later fight his wars, then rally to his name, are not to be seen. The only mass is that of the Oprichnina, whose representatives signify the sub-boyar or lower classes, cowled in black. They are Ivan’s enforcers, and at once they are his worshippers. Their identities have been subordinated under Ivan’s new regime; they are equalized, but in submission to the monarch and his ideology. Deception reigns: Ivan’s personality seems to shape his policy more than the strict requirements of state; his memories of national injustice are completely intermeshed with memories of personal injustice; much in the way his alliances and betrayals are frequently poised on notions of loyalty and family; the “objectivity” of state is lost in a paranoia that distends increasingly from Ivan’s temperament. The snarling grins of boyars that collar the crowning of Ivan in Part I are here replaced by the Oprichniks, who dance and gavotte in Ivan’s inner chamber; Ivan has removed a diversity of corrupt malcontents and instated a sycophantic cult, among whom there is no credible opposition, and from whom is expected total devotion. In the scenario for Part III, even this inner circle will crumble in a crisscross of betrayals: Ivan commands Fyodor Basmanov to execute his own father on a count of treason; he then orders the arrest of Fyodor for fulfilling the order so mercilessly: “You showed no pity to your father, Fyodor. Why should you pity or defend me?” Fyodor lunges at Ivan, but is cut down by a German mercenary — Fyodor uses his dying breath to accuse this mercenary of espionage. So the accusatory circle will begin, actualizing the rampant paranoia of the tyrant Ivan. But this is not yet the state of affairs in Part II. Here, he has seized complete control, but in doing so has walled himself from the world. He is Ivan Alone. Ivan Absolute. Ivan Tsar. As Eisenstein writes: “Presently, on the human plane of Ivan the Terrible, I am endeavouring to convey the leitmotif of autocracy as the tragic fatality that results from an absolute ruler’s solitude. One – unique – and one – solitary, abandoned by all.” Indeed, the Soviet censors who banned Part II noted, with particular distaste, that Eisenstein had rendered Ivan into a character “something like Hamlet.” Coincidentally, Stalin made this same observation.
By the end of Part II, the revolution is, in a sense, complete. The feudal estate is laid low, with pseudo-tsar Vladimir slain at the mistaken command of his own mother. But whatever justifications were laid out in Part I for this outright consolidation have largely faded from sight in Part II, with Ivan’s decision-making often frayed or fanciful. He appeals to the priest Kolychev despite their political opposition, for the sake of friendship; he then immediately undercuts Kolychev’s authority by executing his relatives. He seems to defend chief-boyarina Efrosinia for her politicking because she is family; he nonetheless plots the death of her son, who is himself an inconveniently placed innocent. Ivan is the contradiction inherent in the body politic, insofar as he must at once embody the state and the person: he stands for a Russia lone, independent, and powerful; yet is himself lonely, agitated, and bereaved of friend, mother, lover — all. In being at once the sovereign and the man, those impulses of the latter must pour into the former. Whether Eisenstein is personalizing the abstract or abstracting the personal — or both — is a point of interpretation. The early Marxist vision of history which supplants Great Men for a study of social and economic conditions is repudiated, but so is the Stalinist vision of a Russian patrimony marked by heroic paternal figures.
Stalin — the name itself a chosen pseudonym that resembles Grozny, meaning “man of steel” — criticized Ivan for his apparent lack of resolve: “When Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God hindered him in this matter. Tsar Ivan should have been more resolute.” Eisenstein instead combines these two notions, so as to indicate a revolutionary history in which the perverse psychology of an autocrat serves as a direct metaphor, even a direct cause, of political degradation. It cannot be that the personality of an autocrat can be entirely divorced from the conditions of their time — as the Marxist position implies; nor can we imagine these autocrats as heroes in a benighted age — as the Stalinist line holds. Eisenstein lands on an unstable balance, by which each influences the other, Ivan himself a simultaneous cause and effect of his historical period. Part II introduces material from Ivan’s childhood — the poisoning of his mother by boyars in a power grab. Ivan’s centralizing ethos is therefore complicated: not merely the will to power, nor the conception of a Russian nation, but a psychological imprint made as a boy. The turns of history — the murder of a reigning regent — are through the eyes of Ivan a personal infraction. Indeed, eyes figure centrally in the imagery of these films: Nikolai Cherkasov’s wide-eyed stare; the many glances of scheming boyars or Oprichniks; the all-seeing eyes that peer out from the religious murals that decorate the tsar’s palace. In whichever case, we are witness of the tsardom coagulating into the new status quo, against which a new revolution must be mustered. Revolution is not, therefore, a condition that is fulfilled, and then defended — as Ivan defends his — but an iterative process toward the liberating ideal. The optimism and buoyancy of the revolutionary moment (as depicted vividly in Part I) is considerably harder to replicate in the apparently victorious aftermath; in such a time, the worms begin to burrow. The collective will is entrusted to one man and his personal apparatus — but it is his personality, more than that collective will, which truly determines the course of state.
The question inherent to these Ivan films, then, is the scope of possibility: in such conditions as prevailed, is there an alternative? To relent the crown to Kurbsky, a stooge to foreign interests; to permit the boyar-tsar Vladimir, under whom the independent polities would reassert their ancient rights; or instead to endure Ivan, in whom lies a singular Russia, and a Russia independent of the lurking West, but a Russia broken under a tyrannical cosh. Therein lies a somewhat temporizing, questioning approach to the terrors of Stalin, who had led the Soviet Union through the Second World War into a stirring, destructive victory. Eisenstein intended Part III to end with Ivan, stood on the Baltic shore, staring out to sea. He has conquered all — he has secured the Russian destiny. A song is heard, sung to him by a nurse in his childhood. He is there, at the foot of infinity, a pillar of solitude. Everything — nothing — the beating waves. Perhaps this would have been Eisenstein’s most sensitive statement: a final, ahistorical image composed entirely of psychological significance, a stark and matching contrast to Ivan’s crowning in the opening of Part I. But even forgoing the unmade final act, there is a unique sensitivity in Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein’s final, thwarted work is an indictment and a lament. A career defined by leaping optimism must finally encounter an impassable obstacle, and in discovering it swirl into gloomy style, into long shadows. The beaming clarity of his early work is vanquished, as is the romance of ¡Que viva México!, and the heroic vacancy of Nevsky. Perhaps it is appropriate that his final film should be an incomplete history: its conclusion had yet to be written.
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