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THE FILM SINCE THEN
Days that Shook the World as is conceivable. Crammed with tremendous images, focussed on physical action, couched in black-and-white morality, Nevsky was nearly indistinguishable from a spectacle by De Mille or Curtiz, except for Eisenstein's discriminating taste and his supreme mastery of crowd scenes, and the absence of Errol Flynn. The arrival of the Mongol dignitary; the death agonies of Pskov; the Battle on the Ice — these gave opportunity for filigree imagery of a kind which had never appeared to interest him in the days of his revolutionary films. He seemed absorbed in recreating the face of the legendary past at the expense of any but the most elementary political theme.
After another abortive effort, Ferghana Canal (the scenario of which is of the greatest interest as an example of film writing), Eisenstein began preparations for Ivan the Terrible. These were interrupted by Hitler's invasion of Russia, the removal of the studios to Alma-Ata in Central Asia, and by other duties. Throughout the war period Eisenstein was working under tremendous strain, supervising many films, both fiction and documentary, while continuing intermittently with the shooting of Parts I and II of Ivan, which was projected as a trilogy.
Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released on the last day of 1944. This extraordinary and baffling film may never be completely understood, since the third part cannot now be finished. Like Nevsky, Ivan purported to be a reconstruction of a crucial period of Russian history for the instruction and edification of the masses. Far more than its predecessor, it elided theme, plot, character development, or exhortation, for the sake of concentrating upon what I can only call * periodicity \ With terrifying vividness Eisenstein evoked from halls, costumes, processions, and from enormous close-ups of the faces of human beings, the atmosphere of medieval Russia — -the immanence of chaos and blood and death. Through the holocaust moved its embodiment, the figure of Ivan, bearing within him the seeds of growth and death. The character was so much
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