The Battleship Potemkin

I've been in the grip of one of my inexplicable bits of learning explosions--a topic grabs my fancy and I explore it from several different angles. This summer it's the Ukraine, a country I heretofore had little opportunity or cause for contemplation. But I've been reading a lot about it and have stacked my Netflix queue with films that pertain to it. The Twelve Chairs, discussed below, was based on a novel by Ukrainians. The Battleship Potemkin, one of the most important films of all time, takes place largely in Odessa, which is one of the great cities of the Ukraine.

It may sound strange, but as I was watching the film, made in 1925 by Sergei Eisenstein, I wasn't sure if I had seen it before. If I did it would have been in the one film class I took in college, but I don't think we saw the whole thing. I think I saw the few seconds of film that were revolutionary, in that they amplified the use of montage--stitching together individual moments that alone have no impact, but put together elicit an emotional response from the viewer. The scene in question was a Russian sailor, reading an inscription on a plate. Angered, he throws the dish to the floor. Eisenstein, instead of simply shooting the scene all in one shot, cuts it into several shots, from different angles, which makes the sailor's act seem all the more momentous and sweeping.

Eisenstein didn't invent montage, but he perfected it. He also was quite the propagandist, and The Battleship Potemkin is a good example of that. It is the true story of a mutiny on board a ship in the Russian navy in 1905. Sailors, disgusted by the rotten meat they are fed, revolt. They take the ship into port in Odessa, where they find sympathetic citizens. The leader of the revolt is killed, and they send him to shore wearing a sign that reads "Killed for a plate of soup." A riot takes place on the Odessa steps, but the Czar's cossacks, marching forward like automatons, fire down on the crowd, killing indiscriminately (that part is pure fiction). The ship is surrounded by a flotilla of naval vessels, but in the spirit of brotherhood they are not fired upon, and allowed to pass.

Of course this is all agitprop. But it also undeniably brilliant filmmaking. Despite the technological advances made in the 85 years since then, no modern director could improve on the Odessa steps sequence. Much of it has been borrowed and parodied since then, especially the sight of the baby carriage careening down the steps, but for the close to ten-minute running time it is masterfully done, with cuts from the panicked citizens to the robotic soldiers. Even more moving than the baby carriage is the scene in which a woman holds up her trampled son in the face of the onslaught.

There are some pieces of that don't work today. The middle section, which involves the dead sailor, is overly lugubrious. Much is made of the one mutineer who is killed, but not a tear is shed for the officers who are pitched overboard. But of course this was a film made in the Soviet Union, where equivocation could get you sent to Siberia.

The Battleship Potemkin is a must-see for anyone interested in cinematic history, as it contains the bare bones of film grammar that are still used today. But for people who don't care a damn about montage or the Kuleshov Effect, it's still a great action film.