Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Indeterminacy, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Abstract

This essay praises Joan Neuberger’s book This Thing of Darkness (Cornell University Press, 2019) as a great accomplishment in cinematic interpretation and a detailed and subtle historical account. It contests Neuberger’s argument that Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible films present an unequivocal critique of Stalin and Stalinism by means of a historical analogy with Ivan. Platt argues that the films are intentionally, stubbornly ambivalent in their representation of Ivan, and by extension Stalin. He contends that although this was indeed a subversive movie in the Stalinist USSR, Eisenstein’s films did not offer any finalized conception of the historical role of these figures, and instead should be viewed as works that thematize the impossibility of achieving certainty in historical interpretation. In reading Neuberger’s This Thing of Darkness, one feels the urgency of the author’s efforts to prove that Eisenstein offered an unequivocal, “radical” and “subversive” denunciation of Stalin and the social violence of his era — one that accords with our own rejection of the Stalinist legacy. Author sympathizes with this effort, but it is misguided. Considered in his own social context, one cannot but appreciate Eisenstein’s bravery in articulating a different, but no less subversive position: as seen through the lens of Ivan the Terrible, Stalinist Russia was revealed to be incomplete, charged with contradictions that made it impossible to come to conclusions concerning the meaning of events.