March 26, 2011 by kennelco
(1925) director Sergei Eisenstein
viewed: 03/20/11 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
Most every film student is familiar with Battleship Potemkin, while people who have never set foot in a cinema studies classroom may never have heard of it. Oddly enough, most of those same film students who are familiar with it probably haven’t actually seen the entire film. Because, though the film itself has a running time of less than 90 minutes, the most typically excerpted sequence from the film, known as “the Odessa Step” sequence or “the Odessa Staircase” sequence, is the segment of the film that everybody knows and most everyone has seen. And with good reason.
It’s amazing. And it’s easy enough to view out of the context of the film and still understand the complexity of the montage sequence. It really is a primer in film-making in itself.
Battleship Potemkin is essentially a propaganda film, made by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925, one of several features that he made that focused on aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Strike (1924) and October (1927). This film is based loosely on events of 1905, when the sailors on a battleship revolt against their cruel leaders who are trying to feed them rotten, maggot-infested meat. They rally together as brothers and toss their oppressors into the drink. The people of Odessa, where the ship is docked, support the sailors and their cause, offering them food and cheering for them. Until the tsarist Cossacks are brought in to slaughter them, which is what takes place on the Odessa steps.
Frankly, as a former film student, I’ve seen the “Odessa Steps” sequence many times, but never then entire film. So, this opportunity was prime.
Eisenstein, who was not only an innovator in cinema through his work but was also one of the earliest and foremost film theorists uses film as a tool. For Eisenstein, the language of cinema was a set of constructs, and he believed in an almost scientific system of montage, cutting images and movements together to evoke specific effects. And thusly, the entire film, is an amazing array of images, juxtapositions, movement, shapes, machines, and men.
On the ship, building the story before the mutiny, each shot is posed in the machinery or might of the battleship, contrasted with the human forms, moving about through its passageways, working alongside the pumping mechanisms, in rhythm and measure. Shots are composed like Constructivist art, patterns of shadows fall across faces, angles of light all fit into each mise-en-scene, each composition. Every shot is striking.
And the use of montage is dramatic and amazingly formalized. The “Odessa Steps” sequence is truly the film’s highlight, it really is one of the most remarkable scenes ever created in film, often imitated (or homaged) but never equaled, the movement of the soldiers down the steps, firing on the innocent, young, elderly, the fleeing horde, the mother killed, the baby carriage pushed to fall, the elderly woman with her eye shot out…it’s cinema in one of its purist forms. And whereas Eisenstein’s theories proved brilliant as ideas, though perhaps not a rigorous science of language, it’s easy to see what one would hope a film student could learn from such an amazing, innovative and novel piece of film-making.
It was cool to finally see the film as a whole, though the ending does have a sense of anti-climax given the massive build-up of drama around the famous massacre scene (which was a fictionalized narrative point — the Odessa steps were not the scene of a brutal quelling of uprising). The red-tinted flag, the symbol of the revolution and the brotherhood, however, looked badly hand-painted, more like a magic-marker and someone without enough time to stay in the lines.
The other aspect of the film was the sense of revolution, not so specific to the mistreated sailors or the oppressive tsarist regime, but simply that of a people rising together to protest and to overthrow their oppressors. It seemed poignant in many ways to the events that have been going on throughout the Middle East over the past several months, a metaphor of solidarity against oppression. A hopeful note, not one tied purely to the specific history that was the film’s primary goal in its propaganda.
