Kevin Bartig (Michigan State University)
Eisenstein and the Politics of Perception
The celebrated collaboration of director Sergey Eisenstein and composer Sergey Prokofiev cul-minated in the cinematic masterpiece Ivan Groznďy, an ambitious trilogy that remained unfin-ished at Eisenstein's death. Of the two completed parts, the first (1945) received a Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union's highest honor in the arts, while the second was censored and did not premiere until 1958, years after Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and Stalin were all dead. Part III was never com-pleted. On the surface, the tripartite film presents elements of a typical Socialist-Realist plot: Ivan IV, Russia's first Tsar, struggles to free his lands from occupiers at great personal cost. Yet the ubiquitous trope of self-sacrifice for the greater good unfolds in an extraordinarily complex visual and audio framework that audiences have found alternately perplexing, exhilarating, con-fusing, or thoroughly strange. Political readings of the film have been polarized, from those that see it as shameless justification of State-sponsored Russian imperialism, to those that claim the film is a shockingly daring critique of Stalin's regime (and anachronistically laud Eisenstein as a closet dissident).
The question of whether Eisenstein’s and Prokofiev’s work was perceived as subversive by its audiences is to a great extent colored by Cold-War-era biases. Partially in response to black-and-white interpretations of the Stalin era in particular, scholars have recently sought a much more nuanced view of individual perception, uncovering a surprising diversity of ways in which Soviet citizens negotiated on an internal level with State-sponsored ideological norms. The basis of this work has been limited primarily to journals, speeches, and other written documents, although a much more broadly defined notion of subjectivity and the elusiveness of quantifiable “meaning” has been a widely addressed topic in studies of Soviet music. In this paper, I examine yet another way in which subjectivity under the strictures of the Soviet system might be approached: subjectivity by predetermined creative design. Drawing primarily on examples from Ivan Groznďy, I analyze instances of audiovisual dissonance as transformative moments that are an extension of Eisenstein's dialectically-based theories of visual image and music. In combining images and music that are seemingly antithetical, or juxtaposing contrasting music so that incongruities arise, Prokofiev and Eisenstein challenge viewers of their work to synthesize conflicting stimuli, and in the process experience the film in a highly individual fashion. This fundamental subjectivity allowed Eisenstein and Prokofiev to produce a stunningly provocative yet hermeneutically open work within the outlines of a bureaucratically mandated subject. It is in this context that the seemingly incongruous success of Part I and failure of Part II must be understood. The analysis and discussion in this paper relies heavily on Prokofiev's and Eisenstein's little-explored notes and correspondence, which are housed in Moscow at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture.
The question of whether Eisenstein’s and Prokofiev’s work was perceived as subversive by its audiences is to a great extent colored by Cold-War-era biases. Partially in response to black-and-white interpretations of the Stalin era in particular, scholars have recently sought a much more nuanced view of individual perception, uncovering a surprising diversity of ways in which Soviet citizens negotiated on an internal level with State-sponsored ideological norms. The basis of this work has been limited primarily to journals, speeches, and other written documents, although a much more broadly defined notion of subjectivity and the elusiveness of quantifiable “meaning” has been a widely addressed topic in studies of Soviet music. In this paper, I examine yet another way in which subjectivity under the strictures of the Soviet system might be approached: subjectivity by predetermined creative design. Drawing primarily on examples from Ivan Groznďy, I analyze instances of audiovisual dissonance as transformative moments that are an extension of Eisenstein's dialectically-based theories of visual image and music. In combining images and music that are seemingly antithetical, or juxtaposing contrasting music so that incongruities arise, Prokofiev and Eisenstein challenge viewers of their work to synthesize conflicting stimuli, and in the process experience the film in a highly individual fashion. This fundamental subjectivity allowed Eisenstein and Prokofiev to produce a stunningly provocative yet hermeneutically open work within the outlines of a bureaucratically mandated subject. It is in this context that the seemingly incongruous success of Part I and failure of Part II must be understood. The analysis and discussion in this paper relies heavily on Prokofiev's and Eisenstein's little-explored notes and correspondence, which are housed in Moscow at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture.
