Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) is Sergei Eisenstein's monumental historical epic — watch it online on iFILM. Shot during the Second World War and released in 1944, the film traces the early reign of Tsar Ivan IV as he fights to weld Russia's fractious principalities into a single state. Nikolai Cherkasov commands the screen in the lead role, presenting a ruler whose iron determination curdles, frame by frame, into paranoia.

Eisenstein frames every scene like a Byzantine icon: vaulted ceilings pressing down on figures, torchlight carving faces into half-shadows, robes arranged with painterly deliberateness. The court around Ivan is a nest of competing loyalties — boyars circling for weakness, advisors switching sides, even family members who cannot be trusted. Serafima Birman's Efrosinia, the scheming noblewoman who wants the throne for her own son, is the most dangerous presence in any room she enters.

The film won the Stalin Prize and was celebrated as a portrait of strong leadership — though Eisenstein's intentions ran considerably darker. The second part of the planned trilogy was shot but suppressed, only released a decade after Eisenstein's death in 1948. What exists of this project is formally unlike almost anything else in cinema. Stream Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) online on iFILM.