“Mickey Marx”: Ėjzenštejn with Disney, and Other Funny Tales from the Socialist Realist Crypt

This paper seeks to establish a genealogy between Sergei Eizenshtein and Walt Disney, by analyzing one of the most celebrated scenes in the history of cinema, the killing of Prince Vladimir in the second part of Eizenshteinʼs Ivan the Terrible. The sleeping beauty invoked in Ivan the Terrible by this coded reference conjures up a resurrection of Lenin; it happens in the second part of Eizenshteinʼs Ivan the Terrible, which is staged as a repetition of a scene from Snow White. The intertext of Eizenshteinʼs film thus parodically animates the ghost of Lenin during the peak of Stalinism.