Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 97
Three Reviews by Andre Bazin
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but would one go so far as to condemn Racine’s tragedies because they are not
written in prose?
In the cinema, we are not accustomed to making distinctions among styles.
One could, of course, respond that cinema is different from the other arts, whose
audiences are perhaps more expert and also smaller in number. By contrast,
filmmakers address the anonymous masses. These people don’t care about aesthetics
or theories of film: they want to see “movies.” Wouldn’t it be a betrayal, then, to
introduce the aesthetic categories of the “cultural” arts into this wonderfully
“popular” foim, from which American and Russian filmmaking had gradually
managed to banish every pretension to high art? One is certainly entitled to consider
the path Eisenstein takes in Ivan the Terrible as an offensive return to a dangerous
aestheticism, which everybody believed had been eliminated from all considerations
of cinema’s destiny. But such a hypothesis doesn’t in itself give us leave to disregard
the extraordinary mystery of this titan of the cinema, the genius of his camera in
this, his latest film.^
I haven’t said very much about the plot, because it is easy to set it aside or
to see it only as a pretext for Eisenstein’s stylistic configurations. The film’s subject
does pose a problem, how ]