Ivan the Terrible, Part One [Region 2]
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![Ivan the Terrible, Part One [Region 2]](/pictures/Ivan-Terrible-Part-d.jpg) |
Features
• PAL
In Theaters : 08 March, 1947 |
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Ivan the Terrible, Part One [Region 2] description
A biography of the first czar of Russia was the final movie project of the great Sergei Eisenstein's life. It would be his undoing, as Stalin was not pleased with part II of this epic. But Ivan the Terrible, Part I still stands as a magnificent, rich, and strange achievement. This is a "composed" film to make Hitchcock look slapdash; every frame is arranged with the eye of a painter or choreographer, the mise-en-scène so deliberately artificial that even the actors' bodies become elements of style. (They complained about contorting themselves to fit Eisenstein's designs.) If you don't believe movies can be art, this could be (and has been) dismissed as ludicrous. But Eisenstein's command of light and shadow becomes its own justification, as the fascinating court intrigue plays out in a series of dynamic, eye-filling scenes. This is not a political theorist, but a director drunk on pure cinema. --Robert Horton |
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Ivan the Terrible, Part One [Region 2] Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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IVAN THE WONDERFUL I
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Despite having been produced over 60 years ago, IVAN THE TERRIBLE remains one of the most bizarre and compelling movies ever made. It is filmed in an ultra-expressionist style, despite the fact that expressionism had long passed its heyday in the 1920's and early 30's. Nonetheless, the style fits this almost gothic film perfectly. Religious and other symbols of power and authority are exaggerated, transformed into grotesques. The powerless peasantry, mired in the darkest ignorance, is presented as a frightening presence of menace, ever lurking in the background, waiting to be harnessed by the next tyrant. Ivan himself is depicted as an elongated, Nosferatu-type character with a moral compass so convoluted as to be nonexistent. The mixing of "song & dance numbers" under the most monstrous circumstances toward the end of Part II only enhances the mesmerizing quality of the film. It is said that Stalin attempted to pressure the director to make this masterpiece more "Stalinist friendly," but that the filmmaker courageously refused. Unfortunately almost all other films made during the Stalinist Era reflect the justifiably maligned, dreary style called "socialist realism."
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Ivan the Terrible, Part One [Region 2] dvd movie.