27. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Directed By Sergei Eisenstein

Synopsis

There is a mutiny on a Battleship, called the Potemkin. The sailors are tired of eating maggoty meat everyday and when the captain gets ready to make a mass execution in order to stop a possible mutiny the sailors rise up and take control of the boat. This is happening near Odessa, and the corpse of the leader of the mutineers who was killed by one of the officers is left in the Odessa pier with a note attached to him saying that he was killed because of a bowl of soup (the sailors had refused to eat the soup with the maggoty meat in it). The people of Odessa sympathise with the sailors and with their desire for a broader revolution and help supply the Potemkin. The guard is brought in to stop the revolutionary crowding in the streets of Odessa and they do it in the most brutal way in the famous staircase scene. In retaliation the Potemkin destroys the Odessa Opera House with their cannons. A boat is sent to destroy the Potemkin at sea, but they join it in the revolution instead of destroying it.

Review

As per usual the plots of agitprop films are quite simplistic, and this is no exception. The objective of the film is to be understood by the greatest number of people possible and to easily make them empathise with the revolutionary side of the thing. Therefore the evil tsarists are obviously evil, there is no third dimension to it. That is however one of the constraints of film making in a particular political regime.

That said, it is a stupendous (great word) film. Eisentein is only 27 when he did this, remember, and he has completely mastered the technique of montage. The way he gives pace and movement to the whole film by simply being extremely smart with editing is a great, great thing.

There can be no review of Potemkin without mentioning the steps scene. Again this is where Eisenstein shows his "montagical" prowess. The sense of urgency, of cruelty and of a horrible force of tsarism coming down those stairs as a steamroller of death that can't be stopped is amazingly well achieved. Even the way in which Eisenstein makes a lion come to life when the Opera is attacked, simply be making three shots in fast sequence of statues of a sleeping lion, a lion in repose and a standing one is an amazing tribute to the imagination and skill of this man.

As I had said before in the review of Strike!, Eisenstein seems to me to be the person who understands the possibilities of cinema better at this time, Murnau is the only other director which is at the same level as him. Well, watch it, buy it at Amazon UK or US

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

It's one of those films you really need to watch.

From Wiki:

The most famous scene from the film is the massacre on the Odessa Steps (Primorsky (Potemkin) Stairs), where the Tsar's cossacks in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of stairs in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion, slaughtering a crowd of civilians as they attempt to flee down the stairs before the troops reach them.

The scene was perhaps the best example of Eisenstein's theory on montage, and ironically may have influenced many of Leni Riefenstahl's similar images in Triumph of the Will. It has been endlessly referenced in many motion pictures, with famous homages occurring in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Brian De Palma's version of The Untouchables, and Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (except the troopers marched up the stairs). It was also spoofed in Woody Allen's Bananas, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Naked Gun: 33 1/3 and the anime series Ergo Proxy.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Potemkin "a marvellous film without equal in the cinema ... anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film."