I. Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible
Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible is a talking silent picture, really, or if you like, an opera or ballet set to film.
The acting in Ivan is at least as overwrought as in any silent picture, and without the silent picture's excuse of being compelled to tell its story visually, and more than that, Ivan is positively operatic or balletic in its staging and contrivances and theatrics and dialogue, but it may be because it's so very far over-the-top, so unabashed in it, and so alien, that Ivan is excused all that. Eisenstein had been a theater man and a director of silents, and it shows. Anyhow, art can't be faulted for being no more or less than it claims to be, only for pretensions to something other or greater than it is.
Ivan is nothing if not anti-German, but nonetheless for that it might justifiably be counted as a later specimen of German Expressionist influence, although it has to be said that the Nazis were not the greatest admirers of the Interwar German school of Expressionism so the Expressionists may qualify as "good Germans". The picture goes so far into Expressionism as to shoot the shadows of the actors cast against a wall for the climax to the scene where Ivan expounds his geopolitical strategy of allying with Elizabeth I and England against the Germans and Livonians, with Ivan's shadow towering over his subordinate's and arching over the shadow of Ivan's armillary sphere which stands in for a globe.
To observe that Ivan drips with politics -- ideological, geopolitical, and personal -- and politics of the bluntest, most bludgeoning sort, would be facile, because it was after all a Soviet film commissioned by Stalin personally. Communism makes politics of every element of life and has done since Marx and Engels, and Stalin was the most totalitarian of Soviet totalitarians, so when Joseph Stalin orders a biopic on the Russian tyrant he most admires, that'll be a political picture. What's less excusable is the apologia in Ivan for Stalin's murderous paranoia: even in his the middle of his siege of Kazan, Ivan is warned gravely that Tartar arrows aren't to be worried about so much as the boyars back home, who are in the film one-dimensionally villainous, forever self-seeking and plotting, forever traitors and rebels against unitary, central command.
And as masterful as any element of Ivan is its score, by another Russian called Sergei, Sergei Prokofiev, who is by my lights among the toweringest composers of any nation or age. Prokofiev had scored Eisenstein's earlier Russian history talkie Alexander Nevsky, and worked that score into a cantata which is in its own right among the greater musical works of the 20th Century. The score to Ivan is very like Prokofiev: grand and dramatic, lyrical and fantastical, irreproducibly original, and at once 20th Century and ancient. For the theme Prokofiev composed a tangled, fairly Medieval-sounding, and even counterintuitive counterpoint, blared by horns with the effect of a stylized fanfare, as befits a king or in this case a czar. Well and truly a masterful score and reason enough to watch Ivan The Terrible.
II. The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16
Assuming the bitter end of this Age of Obama turns out anything like it bids fair now to do, with Republicans in Congress passing a pile of bills while Obama in his White House plays Julius Caesar and attempts the abolition of the republic in favor of his imperial say-so, I offer herewith a nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the Grand Old Party in 2016:
A nationalized and coordinated Republican platform with highly specific agenda items, possibly for enactment within the first 100 days of the new presidency, and with the Republican nominee for president as well as the assorted Republican candidates for Congress singing from that same hymnbook.
Items like, say: "Within the first ten days, a new Republican president and Congress will welcome construction to completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline to secure a cheap and steady supply of crude oil to American refineries from our cousin-nation to the north, and to generate jobs and business direct and indirect without cost to the taxpayer." And useful subpoints like, say: "Abolition of Obamacare's 30-hours rule which has untold masses of Americans working part-time when there's work enough for full-time hours and full-time pay."
Etc., etc. I appreciate that this is more the way of campaigns in parliamentary systems and not historically in the American one, but I don't propose that it become a fixed feature of American national elections, and of course something very like it was managed in the Contract With America midterm elections of '94, only absent the coordination of presidential and congressional campaigns. Plus which, it may be that by 2016 Congressional Republicans have a modest mountain of bills already fleshed out and written up and awaiting only a president who'll put his signature to them.
III. On decking the "halls"
I refer of course to the Christmas carol which per Wikipedia is a Welsh tune, with verses by a Scotsman, in English. Another of those ancient carols collected and published in the 19th Century, this one from the 16th Century.
The carol takes its title from those opening words of "Deck the halls". "Deck" there is applied in the sense of "decorate", which is remote to contemporary usage but not unknown. And surely "halls" isn't meant in that sense most familiar to us today, of "corridors"; surely no Christmas carol exhorts its listeners to adorn their functional little passageways and vestibules. Which by process of elimination leaves "halls" as in "great, grand gathering places": "Adorn and brighten your grand meeting places."
And while I'm about it, I fail to see how substituting "Christmas" with "holiday" or "holidays" should appease the tiny, tyrannical minority of joyless atheists and secularists, except through semiliteracy: "holiday" means literally "holy day".
Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible is a talking silent picture, really, or if you like, an opera or ballet set to film.
The acting in Ivan is at least as overwrought as in any silent picture, and without the silent picture's excuse of being compelled to tell its story visually, and more than that, Ivan is positively operatic or balletic in its staging and contrivances and theatrics and dialogue, but it may be because it's so very far over-the-top, so unabashed in it, and so alien, that Ivan is excused all that. Eisenstein had been a theater man and a director of silents, and it shows. Anyhow, art can't be faulted for being no more or less than it claims to be, only for pretensions to something other or greater than it is.
Ivan is nothing if not anti-German, but nonetheless for that it might justifiably be counted as a later specimen of German Expressionist influence, although it has to be said that the Nazis were not the greatest admirers of the Interwar German school of Expressionism so the Expressionists may qualify as "good Germans". The picture goes so far into Expressionism as to shoot the shadows of the actors cast against a wall for the climax to the scene where Ivan expounds his geopolitical strategy of allying with Elizabeth I and England against the Germans and Livonians, with Ivan's shadow towering over his subordinate's and arching over the shadow of Ivan's armillary sphere which stands in for a globe.
To observe that Ivan drips with politics -- ideological, geopolitical, and personal -- and politics of the bluntest, most bludgeoning sort, would be facile, because it was after all a Soviet film commissioned by Stalin personally. Communism makes politics of every element of life and has done since Marx and Engels, and Stalin was the most totalitarian of Soviet totalitarians, so when Joseph Stalin orders a biopic on the Russian tyrant he most admires, that'll be a political picture. What's less excusable is the apologia in Ivan for Stalin's murderous paranoia: even in his the middle of his siege of Kazan, Ivan is warned gravely that Tartar arrows aren't to be worried about so much as the boyars back home, who are in the film one-dimensionally villainous, forever self-seeking and plotting, forever traitors and rebels against unitary, central command.
And as masterful as any element of Ivan is its score, by another Russian called Sergei, Sergei Prokofiev, who is by my lights among the toweringest composers of any nation or age. Prokofiev had scored Eisenstein's earlier Russian history talkie Alexander Nevsky, and worked that score into a cantata which is in its own right among the greater musical works of the 20th Century. The score to Ivan is very like Prokofiev: grand and dramatic, lyrical and fantastical, irreproducibly original, and at once 20th Century and ancient. For the theme Prokofiev composed a tangled, fairly Medieval-sounding, and even counterintuitive counterpoint, blared by horns with the effect of a stylized fanfare, as befits a king or in this case a czar. Well and truly a masterful score and reason enough to watch Ivan The Terrible.
II. The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16
Assuming the bitter end of this Age of Obama turns out anything like it bids fair now to do, with Republicans in Congress passing a pile of bills while Obama in his White House plays Julius Caesar and attempts the abolition of the republic in favor of his imperial say-so, I offer herewith a nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the Grand Old Party in 2016:
A nationalized and coordinated Republican platform with highly specific agenda items, possibly for enactment within the first 100 days of the new presidency, and with the Republican nominee for president as well as the assorted Republican candidates for Congress singing from that same hymnbook.
Items like, say: "Within the first ten days, a new Republican president and Congress will welcome construction to completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline to secure a cheap and steady supply of crude oil to American refineries from our cousin-nation to the north, and to generate jobs and business direct and indirect without cost to the taxpayer." And useful subpoints like, say: "Abolition of Obamacare's 30-hours rule which has untold masses of Americans working part-time when there's work enough for full-time hours and full-time pay."
Etc., etc. I appreciate that this is more the way of campaigns in parliamentary systems and not historically in the American one, but I don't propose that it become a fixed feature of American national elections, and of course something very like it was managed in the Contract With America midterm elections of '94, only absent the coordination of presidential and congressional campaigns. Plus which, it may be that by 2016 Congressional Republicans have a modest mountain of bills already fleshed out and written up and awaiting only a president who'll put his signature to them.
III. On decking the "halls"
I refer of course to the Christmas carol which per Wikipedia is a Welsh tune, with verses by a Scotsman, in English. Another of those ancient carols collected and published in the 19th Century, this one from the 16th Century.
The carol takes its title from those opening words of "Deck the halls". "Deck" there is applied in the sense of "decorate", which is remote to contemporary usage but not unknown. And surely "halls" isn't meant in that sense most familiar to us today, of "corridors"; surely no Christmas carol exhorts its listeners to adorn their functional little passageways and vestibules. Which by process of elimination leaves "halls" as in "great, grand gathering places": "Adorn and brighten your grand meeting places."
And while I'm about it, I fail to see how substituting "Christmas" with "holiday" or "holidays" should appease the tiny, tyrannical minority of joyless atheists and secularists, except through semiliteracy: "holiday" means literally "holy day".
No comments:
Post a Comment