In 1925, the Soviet government commissioned a young intellectual named Sergei Eisenstein (the director of STRIKE) to create a film commemorating the unsuccessful Russian revolution of 1905. The result was BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, a vibrant, cinematically radical, and extremely accomplished
work which went on to become one of the most celebrated movies ever made.
It is 1905 and the words of Lenin are reverberating throughout Russia: "Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history, it is the only lawful, rightful, just and truly great war...In Russia this war has been declared and won."
The crew of the czarist battleship Potemkin, some of whom are sympathetic to Lenin and his cause, have had their fill of the maggoty meat being served them. When their protests become too vocal, a group of them are rounded up and confronted with a firing squad. Just as the order to shoot is being
delivered, Vakulinchuk (Alexander Antonov), a sailor standing on the sidelines, urges his comrades to rise in revolt and a fierce battle ensues. Although Vakulinchuk is killed in the struggle, the mutineers prevail and seize control of the ship from its officers. The Potemkin sails into the harbor
of Odessa, where it is greeted by thousands of men, women, and children. An atmosphere of fervid revolutionary solidarity is established as sailors, workers, and citizens all band together against their oppressors. Suddenly the militia appears and systematically fires into the crowd.
After the Odessa massacre, the Potemkin's crew, anticipating a naval attack, decides to meet it head on. Face to face with the czar's armada, the Potemkin, poised for battle, signals its opponents to "join us." The czar's ships lower their cannons, and the men on board unite with the crew of the
Potemkin in the brotherhood of revolution.
When Eisenstein was selected to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1905 revolution, he and his co-scenarist, Nina Agadjhanova, envisioned an 8-part epic to be titled THE YEAR 1905, but bad weather and a short deadline forced them to lower their sights and allow a single
revolutionary episode, the Potemkin mutiny, to stand in for the whole. Along the way, Eisenstein decided to eschew strict historical accuracy (e.g. the Odessa massacre never occurred) in favor of art and propaganda. The resulting picture was welcomed with enormous attention, both in the Soviet
Union and abroad, and to this day it remains a critics' classic. (It was selected as the greatest film ever made in a 1952 poll commissioned for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Eisenstein was voted the greatest director of all time in a 1962 survey taken by the British magazine Sight and Sound).
It was Eisenstein's editing theories and techniques that caused most of the fuss. He pioneered a dynamic, virile, and consciously expressionistic style of editing, now known as montage, that according to many reinvented cinema and defined it as an autonomous art. Eventually, the more organic films
of such masters as Ozu and Renoir were to counter the theories of Eisenstein, who himself retreated from the extremes of dynamic editing in his IVAN THE TERRIBLE and other late works.
A few years before IVAN, however, Eisenstein was still enthusiastic about the manipulative potential of montage and of filmmaking in general. In a 1939 essay on BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, he wrote, "If we wish the spectator to experience a maximum emotional upsurge, to send him into ecstasy, we must
offer him a suitable 'formula' which will eventually excite the desirable emotions in him."
Although Eisenstein never used the P-word in this 1939 piece, propaganda was an integral part of his early work. As a result, one looks in vain for "interesting" characters, ambiguous attitudes, or unexpected narrative elements in POTEMKIN. Among his most audacious innovations is the replacement
of the traditional single hero with the heroic collective, an approach that was impeccably Marxist but so alienating that even committed communist filmmakers who followed Eisenstein shied away from it.
POTEMKIN occasionally stoops to simplistic symbolism to make a propaganda point--for example, the devious priest who wields a crucifix with some of the characteristics of a hatchet. The film is marred also by an overall grounding in (and pandering to) righteous--at times almost
sadistic--vindictiveness.
Nevertheless, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN survives as a superbly made movie, and its extraordinary 6-minute "Odessa steps" sequence remains among history's most brilliant pieces of cinema. But perhaps Khrisanf Khersonkii, an early Russian critic, summed up this Eisenstein classic best when he wrote,
"POTEMKIN was made with a wonderful head, but somewhere inside it is cold." As agitprop, POTEMKIN is a masterpiece. As art, it leaves something to be desired. (Graphic violence.) leave a comment
