Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible today

2024 marks 80 years since the release of one of the strangest and most consequential films of all time: Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part One. The great avant-garde filmmaker behind Battleship Potemkin had fallen on hard times at the start of the 1940s, before receiving a commission from none other than Stalin himself: to make an epic biopic of Ivan the Terrible, the bloodthirsty 16th-century tsar who united the Russian state, and who Stalin saw as a historical model. Eisenstein threw himself into the task, blending all his eclectic influences and eccentric theories to produce a masterpiece. Of three planned instalments, part one was a hit with Stalin, but part two – in which Ivan succumbs to violent paranoia and the persecution of his subjects – was banned. Eisenstein died while working on the unfinished third film in 1948.

Today, his incomplete masterpiece remains a fascinating artefact. Eisenstein’s radical ideas about sexuality and political power seemingly grow ever more vindicated with time – and his treatment of the violence of the Russian state speaks to the present day with grim relevance. To get to the heart of Eisenstein and Ivan today, host Sam Goff speaks with Joan Neuberger, Professor Emerita at the University of Texas and the author of This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia.

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Intro music by Juliet Merchant.