Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Eisenstein began Ivan the Terrible in evacuation in Kazakhstan during the war, on Stalin's own commission, and it is one of the strangest commissions ever fulfilled. Part I was released in 1945 and awarded the Stalin Prize. Part II was banned; the third part was never finished. The trilogy was conceived as a monument to a great centralising ruler, and turned into something considerably less flattering.

The first film covers the coronation, the campaign against Kazan and the crisis that follows, and its style is unlike anything else in Soviet cinema — closer to opera than to the montage experiments that made Eisenstein's name twenty years earlier. Nikolai Cherkasov plays Ivan in a series of held, sculptural poses; the boyars conspire in enormous shadows cast across low vaulted ceilings; Prokofiev's score does as much narrative work as the dialogue. Eduard Tisse shot the exteriors and Andrei Moskvin the interiors, and the difference between them is part of the design.

Later critics have argued about how much of the second film's dissent is already visible in the first, and the honest answer is: quite a lot, if you look at the faces. What is beyond argument is the influence. Every subsequent film that has staged power as ritual — Coppola, Greenaway, Sokurov — is drawing on the vocabulary invented here, and the Criterion edition has kept it in circulation for generations of directors who came to it long after the politics had cooled.