sublimation (dedication, selflessness, fortitude, fidelity, heroic/tragic self-isolation) are juxtaposed in turn with the negative ones of Kurbsky's (obsequiousness, treachery, self-interest, effeminacy)—a variation, in fact, on the opposition between Kerensky and the Bolsheviks. Kurbsky is as jealous of Anastasia as of Ivan, the jealousy of the former implying the frustration of the power drive ("Marriage is the end of friendship"), and he continuously exploits Ivan's asexual devotion in order to gain power over him (consider the embrace of the deathbed sequence).

This narrative/thematic thread of Part I, within which Ivan's sublimation can be read as being affirmed, is counterbalanced by the prevailing eye imagery and its derivatives. From the coronation scene onward, Ivan's power is concentrated in his eyes. Eisenstein withholds the appearance of Ivan's face until after he hasand from the audience whose long-suffering heroism he believes himself to be valorizing. Perhaps the point can best be made by saying that while Alfred Hitchcock did not suppose that the audience of _Psycho_ (1960) would be familiar with psychoanalytic theory, nor Douglas Sirk that the spectator of _Imitation of Life_ (1959) would have an expert's knowledge of the theory and practice of epic theater, we do not feel in watching these films that they have been written in an arcane metalanguage which is accessible to their authors but not to the people in the seats. On the contrary, Sirk's and Hitchcock's intellectual interests, which derive from bourgeois "high culture," manifest themselves in their work as the profound exploration, and reinvention, of the expressive possibilities of the popular