Metro Cinema Society: Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II

USSR 1944, 186 min, 35mm, Dir: Sergey Eisenstein

A newly struck print from Russia of what has been called “one of the greatest visual masterpieces cinema ever produced.” Eisenstein’s vast historical fresco was to be his last film, and he poured everything into it; to call it “eye-filling” doesn’t begin to describe its profusion. In the first part, Ivan is crowned, but is forced to abdicate after the boyars (nobles), who have conspired to dethrone him, poison his wife. In the second part, Ivan has been returned to power, ruthlessly determined to destroy the boyars. He faces a second conspiracy, that of his power-hungry aunt, who is intent on assassinating him so that her (perhaps mad, perhaps homosexual) son can ascend the throne. Operatic, expressionistic, designed to the hilt with gilt, brocade and jewels, featuring a lavish Prokofiev score and brilliantly edited for maximum excitement, Ivan the Terrible has been variously read as a spectacle of Oedipal trauma influenced by Freud, as a thinly disguised ! commentary on Stalinist paranoia and tyranny, and as a seminal expression of a “homosexual aesthetic” in cinema.

“One of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema. . . . A work so rich in formal and stylistic invention, so strong in emotional appeal, and so evocative in significance that cinema indeed seems the natural heir of Joyce, Shakespeare, Balzac, Zola, Scriabin, Wagner, Piranesi, and El Greco. Majestic and outlandish, Ivan the Terrible marks the triumph of film as both the synthesis and the equal of the other arts” (David Bordwell).

Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 & 2 will be screened in its entirety at each screening. There will be an intermission between parts 1 & 2.