I have to agree with Pauline Kael, who wrote that Ivan the Terrible was "so lacking in human dimensions that you may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great - it's a brilliant collection of stills - but as a movie, it's static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous."
The story is certainly busier in this one than the first, in which very little happens, though I'd say the first has better images, which in this case is what you are here for. The story itself is clearly just vacuous propaganda, with most people's interest in it to do with spotting what criticisms of Stalin were smuggled in that got it banned.
Eisenstein was a visual master, as great as any other who lived, but he was cursed to live in the Soviet Union, who stifled and suppressed all original and individual artistic thought, and ruined the lives and careers of any artists dissenting from the party line - a lot like how Hollywood is today, now that I think about it. This led the best Soviet filmmakers to give themselves over to expanding the abstract, visual - non-political - aspect of their art to heights of beauty and innovation the rest of the world never reached, while at the same time abandoning the story, which they knew they had no control over, altogether. It's hard to think of a better example of this than Ivan The Terrible.
The story is certainly busier in this one than the first, in which very little happens, though I'd say the first has better images, which in this case is what you are here for. The story itself is clearly just vacuous propaganda, with most people's interest in it to do with spotting what criticisms of Stalin were smuggled in that got it banned.
Eisenstein was a visual master, as great as any other who lived, but he was cursed to live in the Soviet Union, who stifled and suppressed all original and individual artistic thought, and ruined the lives and careers of any artists dissenting from the party line - a lot like how Hollywood is today, now that I think about it. This led the best Soviet filmmakers to give themselves over to expanding the abstract, visual - non-political - aspect of their art to heights of beauty and innovation the rest of the world never reached, while at the same time abandoning the story, which they knew they had no control over, altogether. It's hard to think of a better example of this than Ivan The Terrible.