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Potemkin One of the greatest films ever made, it is the first masterpiece of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. The story focuses on the battleship and the mistreatment of the sailors, who are forced to eat maggot-infested meat. Finally they revolt and are helped by the townspeople of Odessa. In one of the film's most famous sequences, in which the terror is heightened by the editing and close-ups, Cossack soldiers march down the Odessa steps firing on the helpless people. In the film's climax, the Potemkin is allowed to sail safely away. (Felix 54). The films of Russian director Sergei M.
Eisenstein had a great impact upon the world of cinema when they were first seen, and today he is regarded as one of the major artists and innovators in the history of film. In the first years of the 1920 's, after years of revolution and war, Russia's film industry was almost nonexistent, but in the theater there was a great deal of activity, with new artistic and intellectual ideas being introduced. There, Eisenstein worked as a set designer and a director, trying such experiments as staging a play in an actual gas factory and developing many ideas that he would later use in his films. Based upon his work in the theater and only a bit of experience in film, he was assigned in 1924 to direct an episode of a planned eight-part film that would explore the events that led to the 1917 revolution. (States 81 - 2). The resulting film was STRIKE (1925), which was released as an individual film because the plans for the eight-part epic were never realized. STRIKE is a quite accomplished film for a first-time director and in many ways can be seen as a rough draft for Eisenstein's first masterpiece -- Potemkin.
The latter film was also planned as part of a longer work. The Russian leaders, having recognized the power and potential of film as a persuasive and patriotic medium, wanted a film to mark the twentieth anniversary of the uprisings of 1905 that were precursors to the revolution of 1917. Eisenstein and Nina Agadzhanova Shut prepared a script in which the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin was only a small part. When filming began, however, Eisenstein decided to concentrate on the mutiny and the events connected with it as "the emotional embodiment of the whole epic of 1905. " (Goddard 138 - 41). The finished film presents the story of the Potemkin in five parts. In the first, "Men and Maggots, " viewers see the mistreatment of the sailors by the officers, focusing upon the fact that the meat for the midday meal is covered with maggots.
The ship's doctor examines the obviously infested meat and pronounces it edible, further provoking the men. In the second part, "Drama on the Quarterdeck, " the Captain (Vladimir Bars) threatens to shoot any sailor who will not eat the meal. Some relent and some continue to refuse. The mutineers are then covered with a tarpaulin and a firing squad is ordered to execute them.
Vakulinchuk (Alexander Antonov) pleads with the men not to shoot, and after a long suspenseful sequence that alternates between the condemned men and the firing squad, the squad refuses to fire. In the ensuing confusion, the doctor is thrown overboard and Vakulinchuk is killed. In the third section. "Appeal from the Dead, " the townspeople of Odessa visit the body of the dead sailor lying in state at the harbor. (Kenez 67). The fourth section, "The Odessa Steps, " is the highlight of Potemkin and one of the most famous sequences in the history of the cinema, arguably the most famous. It has been studied, dissected, and analyzed for more than half a century, and it nevertheless retains its artistry and power.
The section begins with some of the townspeople taking food to the sailors while others wave to them in support. Suddenly, some of the citizens begin scurrying down a long series of outdoor steps. The reason for this action becomes clear when viewers see a shot of a line of Cossack soldiers with their guns at the ready. The action continues as the Cossacks march down the steps, occasionally firing, as the citizens flee before them. Close-ups of injured people, hands being stepped on, and horrified faces convey the terror.
Once there is a change in the relentless movement downward, as a mother picks up her badly injured child, who is probably already dead, and walks up the steps, appealing to the soldiers not to shoot. They do not listen; they shoot her and continue the downward march. Another mother is holding onto a baby carriage with her child in it. When she is shot and slowly falls, the time elongated by the editing, the carriage begins rolling down the steps uncontrolled. Interact with the shots of the runaway carriage are shots of the horrified face of a young man wearing glasses. (Youngblood 35 - 6).
In the last section, "Meeting the Squadron, " the Potemkin has to sail out of the harbor past a squadron of other ships. There are tense moments as sailors prepare to do battle, but when they signal to the other ships "Comrades, join us, " the battleship Potemkin is allowed to sail out unmolested. (Kenez 67). The film Potemkin is based upon an actual incident in 1905, but certain liberties were taken with the facts to make the film a more powerful patriotic and visual statement. For example, many citizens of Odessa were killed by the Cossacks, but it was only when Eisenstein saw the steps that he thought of staging the massacre at that location.
Also Eisenstein deliberately avoided the use of an individual protagonist in the film because he wanted to stress the group working together rather than being led by a hero. In fact, to stress the appearance of realism he used nonprofessionals rather than actors in many of the roles. Since he did not put any significant emphasis upon character development, the look of the characters was much more important to him than acting ability. (Goddard 138 - 41). It is gratifying to see that he stresses the importance of the "montage image" in the film, noticeably in shots of the film characters in which two successive impressions are registered through a turning of the head and shift in the lighting, conveying the concepts of the dynamic image and internal contradiction that were so important to Eisenstein. Many of us have been teaching the film with this emphasis for years, convinced that Eisenstein had hardly abandoned montage but merely conceived it in new ways. Eisenstein, even in the silent period, had always spoken of "montage within the shot, " referring mostly to contrasts of strong opposites -- graphic, spatial, rhythmic, and so forth -- within the frame.
Potemkin, arguably, introduces something quite different: a serial breakdown of gestures and poses by the same figure within a single shot, resulting often in wildly exaggerated facial expressions of the actors. (Youngblood 35 - 6). The editing style of Eisenstein is one of the primary virtues of Potemkin. The editing made the film noteworthy and powerful when it was first released, and the editing techniques and theories of Eisenstein and other Russian directors, particularly Vsevolod Pudovkin, have been studied and discussed ever since. Indeed, they remain an influence, conscious or unconscious, on filmmakers today. Eisenstein stated that his theory of editing was based upon collision. Instead of trying to make a series of shots link smoothly together as most filmmakers did, he wanted to produce a "shock" when one shot changed to another.
He was particularly concerned with the rhythm established by this series of "shocks, " so that the length of individual shots was often determined by the underlying rhythm of the sequence rather than by the requirements of the narrative. One aspect of Potemkin and several of Eisenstein's other films that frequently caused him trouble both inside and outside the Soviet Union was their patriotic or propagandists content. He frequently had to revise a film because Communist Party dogma had changed between the beginning and end of a project, and in the United States and other Western countries he was greatly admired as an artist by some people and despised as a Communist by others. Today, however, Eisenstein's reputation is secure.
In a 1958 survey of film historians, Potemkin was chosen as the best film of all time; and in international surveys of film directors and of film critics through the years, it has continued to rank in the top six of the greatest films ever made. (States 81 - 2). How disappointing. No matter, Eisenstein's Potemkin is still a great film. Or is it? Let's leave that question aside except to point out that it has always been difficult to judge Soviet cinema by ordinary and universal standards. We always looked at Soviet movies through unusual filters, with complex sensations of political sympathy (as in my case) or antipathy, or out of simple curiosity about an exotic, experimental society that for much of its history remained inaccessible to outsiders.
Now that the Soviet Union has imploded, its films are more exotic still, for they are among the remaining artifacts of a vanished civilization, its themes and icons preserved in celluloid. (Calvin 14 - 21). Those films reveal and, being Soviet, made under the censor's eye, they also conceal; thus we have to watch them cautiously, alert to omission or hidden meaning. Judgments about their cinematic worth always have to factor in political context and the painful conditions in which Soviet filmmakers labored. And, inevitably, any consideration of Soviet cinema escorts us to such large twentieth-century issues as the relations among art, the artist, and the state, between cinema and the masses, about the moral and social function of films, and about the filmmaker as enchanter, entertainer, teacher, or propagandist. In one form or another, these issues surface in all societies, but is there any doubt that their collective story is more tortured and more poignant, and considerably more absurd, in the history of Soviet cinema than anywhere else? And where else was the state so determined a cineaste? (Kane 72).
A series of recent books indicates a renewed fascination with that remarkable story. In part, the great burst of film activity during the Gorbachev glasnost period inspired attention. Another reason, I'm happy to say, is that film study is now an increasingly acceptable methodology among historians and other analysts of Soviet culture and society. (After all, Kremlinologists and other social scientists did not do too well. ) Recent work focuses on the beginnings and on the ends of Soviet cinema, with less work on the post-Stalin period associated with Khrushchev's cultural thaw, and on what followed, the period known derisively by the post-Brezhnev generation as zasshi ("stagnation"). Oddly, as many have noted, some of the finest creations of modern Soviet cinema belong to the stagnation period, easily outshining the works freely crafted during the brief Gorbachev era, when the old restraints finally came down.
Unintentionally, these recent books form a collective Requiem for Soviet cinema. (Membrino 31). When socialist film societies in the 1920 s applied to municipal boroughs for permission to show Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to their members, they were stonewalled. Realizing it was impossible to distribute politically motivated foreign films in the UK, they set up their own distribution networks. Films were projected on to factory walls a screens set up in church halls.
But the members of these militant left-wing groups were also barred from airing their views in mainstream media. Frustrated by this enforced silence, the societies clubbed together to buy the equipment to make their own films. This was the beginning of the "alternative newsreel." (Kane 72). While Sergei Eisenstein's films have been fixtures in film courses since cinema studies became a separate area of academia some thirty years ago, it's unclear just how familiar they are to nonacademic audiences beyond such celebrated excerpts as 'The Odessa Steps's essence from The Battleship Potemkin.
Few graduate students I've taught over the last twenty years have seen anything beyond Potemkin and have no knowledge of Eisenstein's sound work at all. In part, this is due to the disappearance -- in New York and other cities -- of repertory houses which kept his work before the public. If the Criterion Collection's set of that work -- Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2 (1944, 1945) -- does not change the situation substantially, it won't be for lack of trying. Few DVD packages can boast such fine primary material -- "new digital transfers... from new 35 mm masters made exclusively for Criterion by Mos film" -- accompanied by first-rate, immediately accessible scholarly apparatus. Criterion has produced nothing less than an ideal mini seminar for home consumption. (Kane 72).
Eisenstein's contribution to the art was certainly more than skillful editing. He also introduced the notion of the masses as collective hero - an innovative way to inculcate the new socialist ideals. What is little-known is that Battleship Potemkin, now a gilded classic of world cinema, was actually not originally very popular in Soviet Russia. It initially ran for only two weeks in Russia before being pushed off the screens by the import, Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Then, as now, it seems, rollicking entertainment was of more interest to "the masses" than experimental art. Except in Germany perhaps.
In Berlin alone, Potemkin played on more screens than it did in the whole USSR. But then up until the late 1920 s when the Soviet government imposed restrictions on imported films not to be fully lifted for 70 years, foreign silent films dominated the Russian market. (Calvin 14 - 21). After the artistic success of Potemkin, there followed a 13 year period in Eisenstein's career where he constantly seemed to catch too late the proper political current, and was able to satisfy neither critics nor audiences. His film created for the 10 th anniversary of the October revolution, October (originally Ten Days that Shook the World), had its release delayed until the following year by the need to excise all scenes featuring Trotsky, whose fall was just beginning. Even so, critics saw the movie to be too formalistic and lacking the visual power of Potemkin. (Valarde 72 - 4). On February 2, 1946, a banquet was held at Moscow's House of Film, honoring Stalin Prize laureates.
The preeminent Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, who had just turned 48, was among the most feted artists in attendance. It was a night of regalia for the energetic director, whose film triumphs stretched back twenty years to the Golden Age of early Soviet film - his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin is still widely regarded as one of the ten best films of all time. Eisenstein asked the famous actress Vera Maretskaya to dance, then collapsed on the dance floor from a severe heart attack. (Hundley 455 - 82). Eisenstein's heart had long been known to be weak.
Two decades of Stalin's manipulation of the arts had taken their toll. Nonetheless, Eisenstein survived the heart attack and undertook a long overdue period of recuperation (he would write in his memoirs that this period of forced rest allowed him, for the first time in his 48 years, to stop and take stock of his life, realizing that he had been so busy rushing to and fro, that he had not really fully tasted any of it). (Hundley 455 - 82). Words: 2, 529. Works Cited: Youngblood, D. 'Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920 s. ' New York: Viking Press, 1978. Kenez, P.
Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917 - 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. States, R. 'Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. ' New York: Viking Press, 1980. Calvin, M. Soviet Film Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, 14 - 21.
Felix, S. Battleship Potemkin. Washington DC: U. S.
Public Printing Office, 1972. Hundley, J. Russian Sergei Eisenstein's classic war story. Historical Quarterly 9 (October 1978): 455 - 82. Membrino, J. Sergei Eisenstein's films.
Art Review 27, no. 1 (1992): 31. Valarde, T. Sergei Eisenstein and His Art. New York: Tiller Press, 1986. Kane, R. History of Movie Industry.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Goddard, D. History of Soviet Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, 138 - 41.
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