There are few historians who can write about Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible with Joan Neuberger's academic authority. Indeed, Neuberger has been studying the film's historical, political, cultural, and narrative contexts and nuances for over two decades. Her excellent I.B. Tauris “film companion” to Ivan the Terrible has been on the reading lists of many undergraduate film courses since the volume's publication in 2003, while her numerous articles have offered additional important insights into the conception, production, and reception of Eisenstein's unfinished trilogy. This Thing of Darkness, the volume under review, builds on Neuberger's earlier studies, while introducing new archival research and offering a wide-ranging survey of the latest scholarship on Eisenstein's film. The resulting monograph is a systematic, comprehensive, theoretically-sophisticated, and multilayered scrutiny of a work that some scholars have described as the “most complex movie ever made” (Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible, 2002, 7).

Neuberger begins her discussion by mapping out the film's extraordinarily complex production history (Chapter 1, “The Potholed Path”). Drawing on material from a wide array of sources (including Eisenstein's film production notes, personal diaries, theoretical writings, and correspondence with Mosfilm administrators), the author traces the various ways in which the director had to “maneuver in the Stalinist political-cultural labyrinth” (37). Chapter 2, “Shifts in Time,” looks at Eisenstein's own theoretical writings (especially Method and Nonindifferent Nature), as well as literary works, documents, and secondary sources that the director studied and / or consulted while working on Ivan the Terrible. Neuberger argues that Eisenstein's vision of history as a dialectical, three-dimensional spiral not only informed the film's structure and narrative, it also profoundly challenged both “Stalinist historicism” (122) and the regime's attempt to make Russia's pre-revolutionary past useful to the Soviet state. To illustrate this point, Chapter 3, “Power Personified,” offers a thorough analysis of several scenes from Ivan the Terrible while demonstrating how the director's theories regarding historical processes shaped his depiction of Ivan's biography “as a dialectal spiral” (128). After briefly alluding to the standard interpretation of Tsar Ivan as a reflection of Stalin, Neuberger further elaborates on the theoretical intricacies of Eisenstein's notions of how a life, especially a political biography, should be narrated.

Chapter 4, “Power Projected,” begins with a discussion of Eisenstein's concept of the “fugue” as a structural model for narrating Tsar Ivan's complex and “polyphonic” relationships with his antagonists and then moves on to analyze the use and abuse of power presented in the film. Chapter 5, “How to Do It,” examines (and illustrates through an exceptional in-depth analysis of several individual sequences from the film's Part I) yet another concept central to Eisenstein's cinematic theory and experimental approach to filmmaking, namely polyphonic montage or “the weaving of audio, visual, sensory, and intellectual voices in every frame” (300). Here, Neuberger also chronicles Eisenstein's collaboration with composer Sergei Prokofiev, cinematographer Andrei Moskvin, and actor Nikolai Cherkasov. Lastly, chapter 6, “The Official Reception,” deals with the Soviet authorities’ varied reception of Eisenstein's project, from awarding it the Stalin Prize for Part I, to preventing the revision of Part II, and, finally, to proscribing the production of Part III.

In the volume's Introduction, Neuberger writes that one of her book's goals is to take Ivan the Terrible out of the “museum of film studies” and to make the film “watchable and watched again” (7). While one hopes that this meticulously-researched, empirically-rich, and theoretically-informed study will indeed inspire a greater appreciation of the complexities of Eisenstein's film, the volume will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in early Soviet cinema or Eisenstein's oeuvre. Interdisciplinary in its scope and combining “historical, political, cinematic, and cultural approaches” (2), the volume has much to offer to historians, as well as film and culture scholars. One should also add that, although this book is ultimately a history of Sergei Eisenstein's film, Neuberger's compelling insights into the director's views on recurrent cycles of violence and the nature of absolute power will also convince the reader of Ivan the Terrible’s relevance to any moment or milieu.