Cine

The problem with this film is it is in sound and anyone who knows Eisenstein will know that he and John Gilbert were the two people most afraid of the element of sound in film. Basically with Ivan Groznyj parts one and two Eisenstein has tried to make a silent film with sound. No that's not a contradiction, well not for Eisenstein. Here is a man whose art has passed him by and he has never come to terms with it. The most impressive aspects of the film is its visuality which is often sublime but just as often fails to succeed because it is overlaid by sound which Eisenstein both ignores and neglects to varying degrees. Hence we have a film made in the 1940s which looks 20 years older with acting styles that are even more antiquated. Eisenstein, along with the likes of Pudovkin, resented the audio component of film because it detracted from the poetry of the visual image and would align film too closely with drama. He concluded the cinema would merely become a series of filmed plays. Eisenstein obviously believed his criticism for it is Ivan Groznyj I & 2 which betrays a theatricality that had long been overcome in mainstream American and English cinema. So Eisenstein merely uses his actors as props and stages the drama in broad strokes of sweeping gesture and concentrated stares. Not unlike the type of production one will see on the stage. Eisenstein was truly a poet but by the time he made this film cinema had progressed markedly. There were new and more gifted filmmakers doing more than he was now capable of as they embraced the devices at their disposal and set about crafting art with a subtlety and novelty in which he was sadly lacking.