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There are a few things I've noticed about Alexander Nevsky.
It's awe-inspiring to realize that yes, those crowd scenes are real human beings, and therefore whenever you see anyone on a horse, it's an actual human being who's a competent rider. There's a scene where a horse and rider go sprawling on the ice and after a few moments they get up and move on - which seems like a pretty impressive stunt for the '30s, when the American film industry frequently pulled horses' legs out from under them, resulting in lots of broken bones and dead horses. Something about some of the actors' facial expressions and gestures really suggests people who were doing silent movies not that long before this thing came out.
The flip side is that the technology to truck in, truck out, and pan just isn't there. There are some crane shots, but these aren't very fast. These are pretty basic things I feel we take for granted about how cameras work and what we can do with 3D. What Eisenstein does in place of trucking or panning is he has a lot of fast cuts, but he also relies on this tension between a lot of static shots with a lot of movement. Combining the two gives you this interesting build-up for scene setting, which reminds me a lot of Scott McCloud's comments about manga building scenes with individual panels rather than with an establishing long shot. Eisenstein establishes scenes with these fast cuts which include people standing still, a lot; medium shot of knights under an archway, long shot of knights under archway as part of a larger devastated landscape, close shot of knights glowering under their helmets, close shot of infantrymen glowering under their helmets, long shot of a row of knights. Very few films manage to make people standing around doing nothing look quite that menacing.
Something else Eisenstein does consistently that I can't quite figure out is that he has a lot of establishing shots where figures and landscape are really low in the frame - there's a lot of sky. What I think that is, is that he's trying to establish the scene as taking place out in the open.
It's awe-inspiring to realize that yes, those crowd scenes are real human beings, and therefore whenever you see anyone on a horse, it's an actual human being who's a competent rider. There's a scene where a horse and rider go sprawling on the ice and after a few moments they get up and move on - which seems like a pretty impressive stunt for the '30s, when the American film industry frequently pulled horses' legs out from under them, resulting in lots of broken bones and dead horses. Something about some of the actors' facial expressions and gestures really suggests people who were doing silent movies not that long before this thing came out.
The flip side is that the technology to truck in, truck out, and pan just isn't there. There are some crane shots, but these aren't very fast. These are pretty basic things I feel we take for granted about how cameras work and what we can do with 3D. What Eisenstein does in place of trucking or panning is he has a lot of fast cuts, but he also relies on this tension between a lot of static shots with a lot of movement. Combining the two gives you this interesting build-up for scene setting, which reminds me a lot of Scott McCloud's comments about manga building scenes with individual panels rather than with an establishing long shot. Eisenstein establishes scenes with these fast cuts which include people standing still, a lot; medium shot of knights under an archway, long shot of knights under archway as part of a larger devastated landscape, close shot of knights glowering under their helmets, close shot of infantrymen glowering under their helmets, long shot of a row of knights. Very few films manage to make people standing around doing nothing look quite that menacing.
Something else Eisenstein does consistently that I can't quite figure out is that he has a lot of establishing shots where figures and landscape are really low in the frame - there's a lot of sky. What I think that is, is that he's trying to establish the scene as taking place out in the open.