Panzerkreuzer Potemkin

There is something special about watching the really old films, especially when it is a film as influential as 'Bronenosets Potyomkin' ('The Battleship Potemkin'). Besides the historical value of the film I was surprised how much I really enjoyed it. Director Sergei Eisenstein takes reel events and changes them a little for this powerful film.

The story begins on the battleship Potemkin where the men are served rotten meat. A sailor named Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) steps up and after a series of events mutiny is what follows. Out of revenge an officer is able to kill Vakulinchuk. The men on the ship want to honor him and try to bring their revolution to the shore, to the city of Odessa. They place him in the harbor in a tent with a sign that says he was killed over a boil of soup. The people of Odessa sympathize with the sailors from the Potemkin and they are welcomed in their city. A massacre, in one of the most famous sequences of the cinema, is what follows on the Odessa Staircase.

It is especially this great sequence that shows some real horrors, uncompromising I should add. There are images, like the slit eyeball from 'Un Chien Andalou', you will remember. The people on the staircase, troops firing at them, a crushed hand, a woman with her child shot dead, but most of all a carriage with a baby in it, rolling down the staircase. Every image is effective, showing things what few (or no) films did back then. I was amazed of how good this scene still works today; I was watching in disbelieve.

On a technical scale the film is also very good. Most of the time we believe we are watching what the film wants us to see, the visuals work. Eisenstein is able to make things even more effective the way he cuts between the images. Famous for its montage, 'Bronenosets Potyomkin' sometimes seems like a choreographed sequence of presented images, with a rhythm and a tempo. I could say so much more about this film, one you should have seen if you are interested in the history of the cinema. If you do not really care you might give it a chance. It is one of the most effective silent films I can think of, still very accessible for a large audience.

I don't recommend that you see this as a 'landmark' in film; don't merely pass through to say you did, or because it's a travelled destination for most people. Instead, come to this with fresh eyes if you can. Rarely since has a film - and film tradition - been so deeply centered within its worldview, rarely indeed is a film made of the very fabric of the world it gives voice to. Most films these days are built at random, or from random spare parts.

Eisenstein had already made a more successful film before this, more reflexively about the seeing eye. So, even though there is a more rip-roaring story here, you may have to struggle a bit with how faceless appears this world to us, these days so accustomed to the paradigm of the individual hero. But Eisenstein was an architect - literally, as well as in film - and so space matters, our relationship with space through motion matters.

In other words; this may have been preserved to us as a museum piece, which is an indictment of our own understanding of cinema as coming down to us by the books and lists of assorted institutions, but at the time it was part of the most deeply revolutionary film school, one that rigged trains as movie studios and sent them scurrying the countryside to film the people and show them to themselves. I mean, here was a man - Eisenstein - who studied Japanese ideograms to understand synthesized image; who discovered that editing to the beats of the human heart affected more, true or false it shows the desire to both know and reach out.

Our cinematic ideas have mostly regressed into mechanical reproduction since the time when these things were first engineered. Oh, there's plenty of Eisenstein every time you open the TV, but none of it is knowing. It's merely a matter of going-through-the-motions, without the blueprint anymore.

So, look at how crowds are orchestrally conducted through stark geometries, how Eisenstein dissects cinematic space with even a stationary camera. But this type of cinema meant to agitate the people, was never about a thought, it was about an action.

And so with this one. There is the one hero who, although dead, calls out to the people. They rush to him, like ships around their harbor. So on board the ship there is valiant effort for brotherhood and justice, inspired revolution; portside is the motherland, cheering the effort with aplomb. And in the end there is the hero ship, itself filled with heroes, now passing through a sea corridor lined with brother ships, all cheering the one. You can imagine the people cheering at the cinema, who had been there to cheer the real thing years ago.

And when I say 'the real thing' I mean the revolution 8 years before; the Potemkin event depicted here was purely fictional. Yet by the famous steps at Odessa is erected a monument to the fictional sailors, what better example of cinema shaping reality?

So yes, it is a revolutionary film. We may be inclined to make fun of the notions, or worse yet dismiss off-hand because of hindsight knowledge. But this was a film celebrating a time when the world seemed like it could be new again. Then came Stalin and, ironically, vanished all these filmmakers that sung the paeans.

This classic is filled with vivid images that stay in your mind after you have watched it, and there is a lot to appreciate in the way that the key scenes were set up and photographed. The visuals are so impressive that the movie's imperfections are usually not so noticeable, and they don't keep it from being a memorable film.

The movie certainly deserves the praise that it gets both for the influence that it has had, and for some ideas that for the time were most creative. The famed 'Odessa Steps' sequence alone demonstrates both fine technical skill and a keen awareness of how to drive home an image to an audience. It deserves to be one of cinema's best remembered sequences. Some of the other scenes also demonstrate, to a lesser degree, the same kind of skill.

It says a lot for how effective all of the visuals are that so many viewers think so highly of "Battleship Potemkin" despite a story that is sometimes heavy-handed, and despite characters and acting that are both rather thin. These features might simply stem from the collectivist philosophy that lies behind the story, and they are obscured most of the time by Eisenstein's unsurpassed ability to present pictures that viewers will not forget.

Despite the flaws, this is a movie that most fans of silent films, and anyone interested in the history of movies, will want to see. There's nothing else in its era that's quite like it.

With workers striking in Russia, the crew of the battleship Potemkin feel a certain kinship for the plight of their brothers. When they are served rotting, maggot infested meat some of the crew object, only to find themselves singled out and placed in front of a firing squad. With the marines seconds away from firing the deadly shots, ordinary seaman Grigory Vakulinchuk steps into the breach and intervenes to save the men by appealing to the firing squad to ignore their orders. When the officers take their revenge and kill Vakulinchuk, all are bonded together in the struggle; a bond that reaches to the city of Odessa where the rebellion grows, leading to a bloody and historic series of events.

It is hard to imagine that anybody who has seen quite a few films in the past few decades would be unaware of this film, but it is perhaps understandable that fewer have had the opportunity to actually sit down and watch. I had never seen this film before but had seen countless references to it in other films and therefore considering it an important film to at least see once. The story is based on real events and this only serves to make it more interesting but even without this context it is still an engaging story. The story doesn't have much in the way of characters but it still brings out the brutality and injustice of events and it is in this that it hooked me – surprisingly violent (implied more than modern gore) it demonising the actions and shows innocents falling at all sides in key scenes. The version I saw apparently had the original score (I'm not being snobby – modern rescores could be better for all I know) and I felt it worked very well to match and improve the film's mood; dramatic, gentle or exciting, it all works very well.

The feel of the film was a surprise to me because it stood up very well viewed with my modern eyes. At one or two points the model work was very clearly model work but mostly the film is technically impressive. The masses of extras, use of ships and cities and just the way it captures such well organised chaos are all very impressive and would be even done today. What is more impressive with time though is how the film has a very strong and very clean style to it – it is not as gritty and flat as many silent films of the period that I have seen; instead it is very crisp and feels very, very professional. Of course watching it in 2004 gives me the benefit of hindsight where I can look back over many films that have referenced the images or directors who have mentioned the film in interviews; but even without this 20:20 vision it is still possible to see how well done the film is and to note how memorable much of it is – the steps and the firing squad scenes are two very impressive moments that are very memorable. The only real thing that might bug modern audiences is the acting; it isn't bad but silent acting is very different from acting with sound. Here the actors all over act and rely on their bodies to do much of their delivery – word cards just don't do the emotional job so they have to make extra effort to deliver this.

Overall this is a classic film that has influenced many modern directors. The story is engaging and well worth hearing; the directing is crisp and professional, producing many scenes that linger in the memory; the music works to deliver the emotional edge that modern audiences would normally rely on acting and dialogue to deliver and the whole film is over all too quickly! An essential piece of cinema for those that claim to love the media but also a cracking good film in its own right.

If you're a film student, or were one, or are thinking of becoming one, the name Battleship Potemkin has or will have a resonance. Sergei Eistenstein, like other silent-film pioneers like Griffith (although Eisenstein's innovations are not as commonplace as Griffith's) and Murnau, has had such an impact on the history of cinema it's of course taken for granted. The reason I bring up the film student part is because at some point, whether you'd like it or not, your film professor 9 times out of 10 will show the "Odessa Stairs" sequence of this film. It's hard to say if it's even the 'best' part of the film's several sequences dealing with the (at the time current) times of the Russian revolution. But it does leave the most impact, and it can be seen in many films showcasing suspense, or just plain montage (The Untouchables' climax comes to mind).

Montage, which was not just Eistenstein's knack but also his life's blood early in his career, is often misused in the present cinema, or if not misused then in an improper context for the story. Sometimes montage is used now as just another device to get from point A to point B. Montage was something else for Eisenstein; he was trying to communicate in the most direct way that he could the urgency, the passion(s), and the ultimate tragedies that were in the Russian people at the time and place. Even if one doesn't see all of Eisenstein's narrative or traditional 'story' ideas to have much grounding (Kubrick has said this), one can't deny the power of seeing the ships arriving at the harbor, the people on the stairs, and the soldiers coming at them every which way with guns. Some may find it hard to believe this was done in the 20's; it has that power like the Passion of Joan of Arc to over-pass its time and remain in importance if only in terms of technique and emotion.

Of course, one could go on for books (which have been written hundreds of times over, not the least of which by Eisenstein himself). On the film in and of itself, Battleship Potemkin is really more like a dramatized newsreel than a specific story in a movie. The first segment is also one of the great sequences in film, as a mutiny is plotted against the Captain and other head-ups of a certain Ship. This is detailed almost in a manipulative way, but somehow extremely effective; montage is used here as well, but in spurts of energy that capture the eye. Other times Eisenstein is more content to just let the images speak for themselves, as the soldiers grow weary without food and water. He isn't one of those directors who will try to get all sides to the story; he is, of course, very much early 20th century Russian, but he is nothing else but honest with how he sees his themes and style, and that is what wins over in the end.

Some may want to check it outside of film-school, as the 'Stairs' sequence is like one of those landmarks of severe tragedy on film, displaying the ugly side of revolution. Eisenstein may not be one of the more 'accessible' silent-film directors, but if montage, detail in the frame, non-actors, and Bolshevik themes are your cup of tea, it's truly one of the must sees of a lifetime.