Ivan the Terrible, part two
Pierre Jutras worked at the Cinémathèque québécoise for 33 years, first as curator of Quebec and Canadian cinema, then as director of programming. He recently passed away, and to honor his memory, we were fortunate enough to prepare a carte blanche with him, reflecting on his highlights as a programmer and film-lover (the rediscovery of Jean Epstein and Ivan the Terrible, the revelation of Wang Bing and the extraordinary retrospective devoted to Manoel de Oliveira...).
« Ivan le Terrible demeure aujourd’hui l’une des plus fortes tentatives de confronter l'opéra, digne des plus grands tel Wagner. La méconnaissance étonnante envers ce film est incompréhensible. » – Pierre Jutras
Eisenstein wanted to present the saga of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in its entirety. The first part is epic, while the second is tragic. The massive and monumental crumble, like the tsar devoured by years, power and blood.
Sergueï Mikhaïlovitch Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th greatest film of all time.
Pierre Jutras
Born in 1945 in Saint-Marcel-de-Richelieu, Pierre Jutras studied filmmaking at the Institut des arts de diffusion in Brussels in the 1970s, where he was introduced to documentary, fiction and experimental cinema. In 1978, he was hired by the Cinémathèque québécoise as Head of Quebec and Canadian Cinema and co-director of the Copie Zéro from 1979 to 1988. He was also behind the first restoration of the film Kamouraska, by Claude Jutra. In 1997, he became Director of Conversation and Programming at the Cinémathèque, a position he held until his retirement in 2011. Parallel to his professional activities, he directed Lamento pour un homme de lettres in 1988 and Petites chroniques cannibales 1 in 1997, the first segment of a trilogy that was never completed. He died in Montreal on June 22, 2023.
