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List Price: $79.95Amazon.com's Price: $71.99 You Save: $7.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780780023246
Format: Box set, Black & White, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
ISBN: 0780023242
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 3
Picture Format: Academy Ratio
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: April 24, 2001
Running Time: 292 minutes
Sales Rank: 20138
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: March 08, 1947
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Editorial Review:
Description:
Sergei Eisenstein, long regarded as a pioneer of film art, changed cinematic strategies halfway through his career. Upon returning from Hollywood and Mexico in the late 1930s, he left behind the densely edited style of celebrated silents like Battleship Potemkin and October, turning instead to historical sources, contradictory audiovisuals, and theatrical sets for his grandiose yet subversive sound-era work. This trio of rousing action epics reveals a deeply unsettling portrait of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and provided battle-scene blueprints for filmmaking giants from Laurence Olivier in Henry V to Akira Kurosawa in Seven Samurai.
Amazon.com essential video:
A biography of the first czar of Russia was the final movie project of the great Sergei Eisenstein's life. It would be his undoing, as Stalin was not pleased with part II of this epic. But Ivan the Terrible, Part I still stands as a magnificent, rich, and strange achievement. This is a "composed" film to make Hitchcock look slapdash; every frame is arranged with the eye of a painter or choreographer, the mise-en-scène so deliberately artificial that even the actors' bodies become elements of style. (They complained about contorting themselves to fit Eisenstein's designs.) If you don't believe movies can be art, this could be (and has been) dismissed as ludicrous. But Eisenstein's command of light and shadow becomes its own justification, as the fascinating court intrigue plays out in a series of dynamic, eye-filling scenes. This is not a political theorist, but a director drunk on pure cinema.
Part II continues with the struggle for power and the use of secret police, a controversial segment that caused the film to be banned by Stalin in 1946 (the film was not released until 1958). The predominantly black-and-white film features a banquet dance sequence in color. Obviously the two parts must be viewed as a whole to be fully appreciated. Many film historians consider this period in Eisenstein's career less interesting than his silent period because of a sentimental return to archaic forms (characteristic of Soviet society in the '30s and '40s). Perhaps it was just part of his maturity.
Alexander Nevsky (1939), Eisenstein's landmark tale of Russia thwarting the German invasion of the 13th century, was wildly popular and quite intentional, given the prevailing Nazi geopolitical advancement and destruction at the time. It can still be viewed as a masterful use of imagery and music, with the Battle on the Ice sequence as the obvious highlight. Unfortunately, the rest of the film pales in comparison. A great score by Prokofiev was effectively integrated by the Russian filmmaker, but stands on its own merit as well.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I realize that most people regard Eisenstein as a god of Soviet cinema, but let me just say that these three films are terribly crude and simplistic. The worst of the three is Ivan Part 2. The "acting" (a generous term for this film) consists of rolling eyes and glacial stares. The plot and dialogue are every bit as bad as those in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. Alexander Nevsky isn't much better. This is clearly a propoganda film and it's just as simplistic as Ivan 2. The German characters in particular ... Read More
Rating:  -
Eisenstein's last film is his most visually dense, with every shot and costume and motion and set immaculately composed and every cut creating deeper resonance for the image that came before it. This is the cinematic equivalent of opera, weird and stylized and extravagant and completely un-real... it creates its own set of rules that have very little to do with the conventional rules of film. That's why it's my favorite film, but that's also why a lot of people are bored/disoriented by it.
Rating: -
Three of the great films of Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and the Boyar's Plot are both remarkable evocations of their historical eras and of the times in which they were written. It is especially in the increasingly suspicious atmosphere of Ivan that one can begin to appreciate why Stalin eventually stopped further work - it was definitely too close to home!
Three great classic films well reproduced in this edition.
Rating: -
This is a classic from which any student or teacher of film can learn. Eisenstein takes "historial license" to extremes, but it makes a great landmark.
Cost-wise - a bargain
Rating: -
From the cinematography to the set design, costumes to character detail, Eisenstein's operatic sound epics are world-class examples of film as high art, with vigorous storytelling adding to the dazzling, still unparalleled craftsmanship of his historic handiwork. "Nevsky," made in 1938, revived the director's flagging career, and earned him a spot as head of Mosfilm Studios. Stalin was less pleased with Part II of "Ivan," especially with its allusions to his use of secret police and unflattering portrayal ... Read More
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