Another collaboration with "that magician Sergei Prokofiev," as Eisenstein called him, Ivan the Terrible has a strange magic bordering on sorcery. Filmed in the remote Alma-Ata studios under difficult wartime conditions, it is set in sixteenth-century Moscow where the newly crowned Czar Ivan attempts to thwart both the boyars (the feudal nobility) and the hold of the Church and create a unified Russia. Set mostly in cave-like cathedral interiors with frescoed walls, the film itself is like a fresco come to life in painterly long-shot and tortured close-up. Eisenstein appears to take the costume pageantry and palace scuttlebutt as Hollywood might-that is, to the point of absurdity-but with a different objective in mind; as Sadoul notes, "He forced his actors into the shapes demanded by his visual compositions and...the rhythm, design, and emotional structure of the sequence." Part I follows Ivan from his coronation to the victory against the Mongols at Kazan, the murder of his wife Anastasia, and his voluntary exile to Alexandrov to await his people's summons.