Hacker CinemaIvan the Terrible
TV series · 30 min episodes
Created by Herbert Sargent
Ivan the Terrible is an American sitcom that aired on CBS for five episodes during 1976. The short-lived series parodied American attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. Set in Moscow, the sitcom starred Lou Jacobi as a Russian hotel waiter named Ivan Petrovsky, and the day-to-day misadventures of Ivan's family and their Cuban exchange student boarder, all of whom live in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment. Also appearing in this series were Christopher Hewett, Phil Leeds, Alan Cauldwell and, in her TV series debut, Nana Visitor. Harvey Korman appeared as a Soviet bureaucrat in an uncredited cameo at the close of each episode. The executive producer of this series was noted comic Alan King.
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The Bolsheviks and (to a lesser extent) the Nazis had plenty of good art that also saved as propaganda for the most despicable causes. You can appreciate Eisenstein or Harlan as great directors without thinking them to be fine human beings. Of course beyond art that is purely formally fascinating, there is a tension between artistic quality and serving a narrow propagandist agenda, and personally I find Battleship Potemkin utterly dull and overrated. But the best films these directors created in the service of totalitarianism transcend this narrowness: try Ivan the Terrible, for the example.
Soy Cuba contains lush and gorgeous B&W cinematography. The film opens up with the camera flying over the waters of Cuba; the reflection of the water is glistening in a way unlike other films. I believe they used an X-ray film strip to achieve this shot.
Mikhail Kalatozov has included another impressive shot at the end of his previous work, "The Cranes Are Flying." (Palme d'Or at Cannes 1958) The camera follows the protagonist, then gets seamlessly lifted up by a crane to depict the entire street parading.
While Soviet-era films does not have much exposure in the English-speaking world, there are so many gems, critically and technically. The filmmakers were acutely aware of great filming techniques.
Also check out:
Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964) - B-roll scenery contains another lush reflection of the Moscow waters
Ivan the Terrible (1944/1958) - Eisenstein is an ardent practitioner of the montage, and prefers to static camera shots. However, his compositions are very imaginative, and there is no shot you want to miss. His film also briefly experiments with color, and he exploits colored lighting to emphasize the characters' psyche.
Anything by Andrei Tarkovsky - Tarkovsky is indisputably a master of Russian cinema after Eisenstein. He often shoots in nature, but no director shoots with such rich texture of the mud. His long shots emphasizes the bleakness inherent in the Russian psyche.
The Ascent (1977) - Set in WWII, the film shows the resistance escaping the Nazis covered in snow and panting in the cold. Great snow photography.
Hard to Be a God (2013) - A sci-fi story on the immigration of humans to a different planet, the colonizers inhabit the inhospitable environment. Like Tarkovsky, the slow dragging in the mud conveys the dreary lives.
These are recommendations I came up off the top of my head relating to cinematography, but there are definitely many more to appreciate.
I've imported the list to Letterboxd:
https://letterboxd.com/js2/list/akira-kurosawas-100-favorite-movies/detail/
One curiosity: Aoi sanmyaku (青い山脈) is apparently "The Blue Mountains", but OC translated it as "The Green Mountains."
(Also, it's two parts, so I added both to the Letterboxd list, similar to Ivan the Terrible, which is why there's 102 entries.)
If you're into that, I can also recommend Frank Strobel's version and live recording (with full orchestra and chorus) of Prokoview's score to Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible", bringing a film-opera experience like very few other movies.
Fun fact: the first part is said to have been Stalin's favourite movie, while the second was censored
She (Caroline Kennedy-Pipe ) - and the Hamlet thing is mostly colour but it did send me down a clickhole of tracking down 'Stalin hated Hamlet'. That the "story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics" sounded a bit off to me - after all, Stalin famously commissioned Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.
It seems around 1940 or so Stalin did stop a Hamlet production (based on a Pasternak translation) at the Moscow Art Theatre. Recollections vary somewhat but the most plausible explanation is that Stalin felt Hamlet (the character) was weak. Completing the circle, the Russian wikipedia page on Ivan The Terrible has a quote from a Central Committee critique of a different movie in which, as an aside, part two of Eisenstein's film is criticized as ahistorical and as portraying Ivan as too weak "like Hamlet". The second part was not screened until some years after Stalin and Eisenstein's deaths. Hamlet itself was not staged in the last 12 years of Stalin's life.
An interesting analogy to this is Stalin and the film Ivan the Terrible. Stalin commissioned the film because he admired Tsar Ivan, and thought of himself in his mold. His version of Ivan was a great man who was surrounded by corrupt boyars intending to sell out Russia, and only he has the strength to unite the country against them. Ivan is loved by the common people, but hated by the sophisticated, "europeanized" nobility, who are traitors.
Stalin loved Part I, but was unhappy with Part II, since it didn't fit his myth of Ivan. He banned the film and nearly had the director, Sergei Eisenstein executed.