Production
The first film, Ivan The Terrible, Part I, was filmed between 1942 and 1944, and released at the end of that year. The film presented Ivan as a national hero, and won Joseph Stalin's approval (and even a Stalin Prize).
The second film, Ivan The Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot, finished filming at Mosfilm in 1946. However, it was not approved by the regime's censors, because it depicted state terrorism in an ambivalent way. The unshown film received heavy criticism from various state authorities. In the Khrushchev thaw that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, state censorship of artistic works was gradually relaxed, and the film was finally released in 1958, 10 years after Eisenstein's death.
A third film, which began production in 1946, was halted when the decision was made not to release the second film. After Eisenstein's death in 1948, all footage from the film was confiscated, and it was rumored to have been destroyed (though several filmed scenes still exist today).
The score for the films was composed by Sergei Prokofiev.
The entire production was shot in Kazakhstan at Mosfilm's substantial production facility in Almaty. Although most of the film was shot in black and white, one color sequence appears in the second part, making this one of the earliest color films made in the Soviet Union.
Read more about this topic: Ivan The Terrible (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)