Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Year: 1925
Run-time: 75 min
Source: Kanopy
This film's reputation puts at on a higher level than the prior films on this list, and there's certainly not much I can add to that reputation. I'm just going to say what strikes me about it at the moment, in the context of the other films I've been watching.
Battleship Potemkin is a Soviet propaganda film conceived as such: it documents and celebrates a very specific event in Russian history on its twentieth anniversary, the mutiny of the ship Potemkin and its participation in the riots in the city of Odessa. (Wisely, Eisenstein scrapped the original plan of covering the entire first Russian revolution.) Certainly, the story fits the needs of the state, although the basic facts are accurate. The famous Odessa Steps sequence really took place at night and not on the steps themselves, but Tsarist soldiers really did fire on the protesting crowds, and the resulting panic would not need much dramatization.
As I've mentioned before, the silent era gave directors more control over their films than they could ever have with sound. Battleship Potemkin came along at the perfect time to make a propaganda film, when a message could be so precisely controlled. But although Eisenstein doesn't shy away from intertitles, he uses them much more effectively, and the images themselves convey much more. Unlike with Intolerance, Eisenstein's presence is not foregrounded, and the themes feel much more organic and less heavy-handed.
So far, I think all of this sounds quite dry, but Battleship Potemkin is absolutely worth watching, and you may find yourself surprised at how moving it is (especially when presented well, as with Kino's restoration). One can make the claim that Potemkin, rather than Nosferatu, should be considered the first great horror thriller. It's certainly much more capable of evoking the right tension - certainly, I can't watch the Odessa Steps sequence without feeling the panic. In its sense of melodrama, and pretty much nothing else, it is something of an inheritor of the prior Russian cinema seen in Yevgeni Bauer's films.
Year: 1925
Run-time: 75 min
Source: Kanopy
This film's reputation puts at on a higher level than the prior films on this list, and there's certainly not much I can add to that reputation. I'm just going to say what strikes me about it at the moment, in the context of the other films I've been watching.
Battleship Potemkin is a Soviet propaganda film conceived as such: it documents and celebrates a very specific event in Russian history on its twentieth anniversary, the mutiny of the ship Potemkin and its participation in the riots in the city of Odessa. (Wisely, Eisenstein scrapped the original plan of covering the entire first Russian revolution.) Certainly, the story fits the needs of the state, although the basic facts are accurate. The famous Odessa Steps sequence really took place at night and not on the steps themselves, but Tsarist soldiers really did fire on the protesting crowds, and the resulting panic would not need much dramatization.
As I've mentioned before, the silent era gave directors more control over their films than they could ever have with sound. Battleship Potemkin came along at the perfect time to make a propaganda film, when a message could be so precisely controlled. But although Eisenstein doesn't shy away from intertitles, he uses them much more effectively, and the images themselves convey much more. Unlike with Intolerance, Eisenstein's presence is not foregrounded, and the themes feel much more organic and less heavy-handed.
So far, I think all of this sounds quite dry, but Battleship Potemkin is absolutely worth watching, and you may find yourself surprised at how moving it is (especially when presented well, as with Kino's restoration). One can make the claim that Potemkin, rather than Nosferatu, should be considered the first great horror thriller. It's certainly much more capable of evoking the right tension - certainly, I can't watch the Odessa Steps sequence without feeling the panic. In its sense of melodrama, and pretty much nothing else, it is something of an inheritor of the prior Russian cinema seen in Yevgeni Bauer's films.
Comments
Post a Comment