This Thing of Darkness

Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" in Stalin's Russia

Joan Neuberger

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501732782
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger's engrossing production history of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a major contribution to the study of Eisenstein and thus informs the history and theory of cinema and the study of Soviet culture and politics. Neuberger's ability to mine, interpret, and connect Eisenstein's voluminous, intriguingly digressive writings makes this book exceptional. — Karla Oeler, Stanford University

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film.

Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

CHAPTER 1

The Potholed Path

Ivan in Production

Ivan the Terrible was heavily stamped by the historical context in which it was made. Understanding Ivan first of all requires us to recognize that Eisenstein was both the exceptional, willful, privileged auteur who is familiar to us as well as an embattled Soviet citizen functioning under the everyday restrictions of life and work in Stalin’s Russia during a devastating war. His access, power, and talent were undoubtedly exceptional, but his experience of Stalinist hypertrophied power, its unpredictable judgments, its uncertain boundaries between public and private, its corrupt and corrupting forces in everyday life—these were the conditions in which everyone lived. And like filmmakers everywhere, Eisenstein would have to realize his artistic vision within the confines of social and political imperatives and local institutional practices, where many financial and artistic decisions were beyond the control of even the most powerful auteur filmmaker.

It took almost four years to complete Part I of Ivan the Terrible and another year to finish Part II. During that time, the Soviet Union was invaded and occupied by Germany. Thousands of towns and cities were destroyed by the Nazis, tens of millions of people were killed, and many millions more had their lives uprooted and transformed. During the war, while Leningrad was under siege and Moscow under attack, the Moscow and Leningrad film studios were evacuated to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, where most of Ivan the Terrible would be filmed. By the time Part I was released at the very end of 1944, the Red Army had turned the tide of the war and was pushing the Nazis out of Eastern Europe and back to Berlin. But the social and institutional turmoil of the war years did not end with military victory. Demobilization, reevacuation, and repatriation as well as physical and emotional recovery from bombing and loss all impeded the resumption of stable, everyday life and complicated the completion of Eisenstein’s film.¹

Making any film anywhere requires the coordination of multiple institutions and personalities reaching decisions about funding, equipment, location, transport, and many other smaller matters, independent of the artist’s vision. In the Soviet film industry, high-stakes ideological demands and the official cultural policy known as Socialist Realism added several more layers of complication and oversight. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet government tried to control artistic production in a variety of ways, both for ideological purposes and for profit. Artworks of all kinds were considered important media for cultivating socialist values and behavior. Soviet officials at the highest levels, including Stalin himself, took an interest in the artistic embodiment of state ideological goals.² As in other creative ventures, film-making was subject to an array of official decisions intended to produce films that carried proper political messages. Ideology was always prioritized over profit, insuring that Soviet filmmaking would never repay the state’s financial investment, much less make a profit, and studio chiefs worried about money constantly, if ineffectively. Centralized planning in the absence of adequate investment meant that technology and training in all areas of production failed to keep up with demand.³ These kinds of failures did not lessen the government’s obsession with ideological control but rather made it seem all the more imperative.

In the broadest sense, ideological control was successful. It limited production to films that neither challenged Soviet power directly nor openly praised alternative ways of life. But the process was cumbersome and often counterproductive. After proclaiming Socialist Realism as the reigning ideological model for all the arts in 1932–1934, officials in the administration of each of the arts, from the lowliest critics up to Stalin himself, discovered how difficult it was to organize artistic production by command. To make matters more complicated, the ideological requirements were never clearly articulated.⁴ At the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov and others made speeches intended to end debate about the definition of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realist art was supposed to be “accessible to the masses” and show socialist reality “as it should be,” or as it would look after the successful building of communism. Socialist Realism, it was often said at the time, quoting a popular 1920s song, was supposed to “turn fairy tale into reality.”⁵ Literature and the visual arts were to be positive and optimistic rather than critical or cynical. Soviet art was to embody loyalty to Party (partiinost′), to ideology (ideinost′) and to the people and the nation (narodnost′). These vague and open-ended concepts raised innumerable problems of implementation.

In practice, Socialist Realism was an official rejection of the formal experimentation of the modernist avant-garde in the 1920s, which people with mainstream tastes in all classes found difficult and alienating. Peasants, workers, and party functionaries all wanted art that enlightened and uplifted without being too challenging.⁶ Vague as such instructions seem, Maksim Gorky applauded the open-endedness of the policy, optimistically stating that “the method of collective work will allow us to understand socialist realism better.”⁷ That left artists and arts administrators to figure out whether any individual work of art met state ideological requirements. Since no one knew exactly what Socialist Realism was, every artistic project was a gamble. On one hand, artists never knew whether their work would be approved or not, because party watchdogs decided whether a work met the requirements of Socialist Realism on an ad hoc basis. On the other hand, the lack of clear directives gave artists room to continue to experiment and an ability to negotiate the approval process.

Socialist Realism was a two-pronged transformation of arts production in the Soviet Union and, contrary to the way it is usually studied, its institutional structure was by far more radical and damaging than its aesthetics and poetics. As a way of telling a story, Socialist Realism has much in common with other, politically neutral genres. Formulaic narrative and style may have marked Socialist Realism as inferior to literary fiction and serious art but placed it in the company of other popular formulaic genres like adventure, romance, and mystery. And to some extent, the realism of its aesthetics was a continuation of earlier trends that paralleled contemporary international movements and drew on preconstructivist aesthetics.⁸ But where formal and storytelling guidelines revived earlier realist styles, Socialist Realism was a policy carried out by a government determined to control the message of works of art. Socialist Realism is most significantly distinguished by the institutional structures that attempted to control its production.

In the film industry, the implementation of Socialist Realism produced an accretion of committees for oversight and criticism, the structure of which changed every few years.⁹ The system’s vagaries put not only artists in a vulnerable position but also the people charged with patrolling the borders of acceptability. Required to protect the Soviet people from dangerous ideological messages and the Soviet government from any hint of criticism, arts administrators had to guess how a work would be interpreted not only by audiences but also by successive layers of critics, including Stalin himself, who took a growing personal interest in the film industry.¹⁰ Since political loyalty remained the highest value, it would always be safer for officials to argue that a film failed to meet ideological standards in case someone higher up the chain of command came to that conclusion after they had approved a work.

During the 1930s, Boris Shumiatsky, as head of the Main Cinema Administration (whose form, name, and functions changed repeatedly between 1932 and 1946), instituted increasingly rigid and punitive practices to ban suspect films. Screenplays (also in short supply) went through ideological reviews. The screenplays themselves were written in two stages: first as a “literary treatment” or scenario (literaturnyi stsenarii), and then as the “director’s screenplay,” which included dialogue and specific technical instructions. Both had to be approved by studio administrators before going into production. Films were then reviewed in the form of rushes, and again when finished, often resulting in additional shooting, editing, and cutting. But even in this carefully monitored context, viewer response was no more predictable in the Soviet Union than it is in Hollywood. Each year, films made it through the gauntlet of preliminary committees, only to provoke controversy once completed.¹¹

Artists, even those more or less aligned with state ideology, generally responded to these formal and institutional restrictions with a large dose of skepticism. Film offered artists more latitude than fiction or painting because the semantic ambiguity of visual images combined with the temporal progression of narrative offered more room for interpretation and experimentation. Technological changes like the coming of sound and color and the continual improvement of cameras and lenses gave filmmakers the tools to innovate.¹² Filmmakers approached this obstacle course in various ways. No one was free to pitch a film that would be entirely outside the boundaries of Socialist Realism, so everyone practiced some degree of self-censorship. But because many of the modernist directors of the 1920s remained active and powerful in the 1930s, modernist practices remained visible even in films with conventional forms and plots. And since the parameters of Socialist Realist film were ill-defined, even the most orthodox-seeming projects could get caught in the political crossfire if someone somewhere along the line worried that it contained something suspicious. These failures of planning and complications of ideological control should make it clear that film censorship was a negotiated process rather than a unilateral imposition of restrictions from above. The word “censorship” itself is a misleading label for the multidirectional, negotiated process that led to the release of a Soviet film.

Those negotiations were part of a larger system of patronage. One of the things that makes Ivan the Terrible such an extraordinary project for its time is that Eisenstein did not stop at imagining a transgressive portrait of absolute power and its consequences; he succeeded in making the film he imagined—or at least he made two-thirds of it. In order to protect his Ivan the Terrible and get it released, Eisenstein exploited (or tried to exploit) the patron-client system that operated in the film industry. In the Stalinist film industry, as in the institutions that administered the production of music and painting, the patronage system seems to have been more or less institutionalized.¹³ Ivan Bolshakov, the film industry chief at the time, played a complicated dual role in this system as both patron to his filmmakers and as client of Stalin’s patronage. Bolshakov was responsible to Stalin for providing acceptable films, but he was also responsible to his clients for giving them the resources and feedback they needed to make their films acceptable. Almost anyone could write directly to Stalin and call on him to be a patron, and Eisenstein took full advantage of this loophole. But ultimately it was Bolshakov’s job to move films through the production and approval process. In Eisenstein’s case, he proved to be a loyal patron through to the end. Despite the extraordinary political difficulties Ivan presented, Bolshakov promoted the film that he had invested with time, state resources, and enormous effort over the five-year period of its gestation, and he intervened with Zhdanov and Stalin on Eisenstein’s behalf. Bolshakov undoubtedly had a hand in the censorship decisions that made Part I politically successful; decisions that have had an enormous effect on the way Part I has been seen, even to this day. He did not, however, succeed in persuading Stalin to approve Part II.

This system put the head of the Committee for Cinema Affairs (as it was called from 1938 to 1946) in a vise. Constant pressure from above to produce more films and constant artistic, organizational, and ideological challenges from below created recurrent crises, three of which occurred during the production of Ivan the Terrible, in 1941, 1943, and 1946. In the spring of 1941 before the Nazi invasion, when Eisenstein was writing the literary scenario for Ivan, Zhdanov called a meeting with Bolshakov and leading filmmakers to try to resolve the chronic bottlenecks in production. When Bolshakov had taken his position in 1939, he tried instituting reforms, such as bringing directors into administration with the introduction of artistic directors—Eisenstein was made artistic director of Mosfilm—but in 1940 and 1941 a large number of films were still being banned.¹⁴ Bolshakov wanted to expand his reforms, but Zhdanov had other ideas, including the counterweight of greater political oversight. The invasion temporarily distracted officials, but the slow pace of production put Bolshakov under the microscope again and again.¹⁵

The production of Ivan the Terrible offers an especially prolonged and demanding example of working within this system. In some ways, Ivan the Terrible was a typical product of its time. The literary scenario underwent several rounds of formal and informal review. Negotiations over financing, casting, and material issues were recorded in sometimes flaming telegrams and memos. Both Part I and Part II were screened several times by film industry committees, by the central Committee on Cinema Affairs, and by Stalin before decisions were made about releasing them. All of that was more or less the norm. At the same time, everyone involved knew that Ivan the Terrible was a prestige project with Stalin’s personal investment, so at various stages it underwent extra scrutiny, and at other times Stalin’s role gave Eisenstein extra latitude.

The production story i...