 Starring: Alexandr Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov, Vladimir Barsky
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Year Of Release: 1925
Plot: Towards the end of the Tsarist era in Russia, the workers of the country are on the edge of revolt, and the soldiers on the battleship Potemkin reach their tipping point when they’re told they’re expected to eat meat riddled with maggots. After they manage to overthrow the officers, the Tsarist forces fight back and a massacre occurs of the ship’s proletariat supporters in Odessa. |
I’m starting to sense a theme coming through in the articles where I write about a relatively little-watched film. Basically I say how good they are and that you should watch them, while being well aware that most of these films are obscure because they sound about as much fun to watch as open heart surgery.
I feel The Battleship Potemkin may be a tougher sell than most. I like the film, but even I’d have to think twice if someone asked me whether I fancied watching a piece of Bolshevik propaganda about the birth of Russian communism, that was made in 1925 and is basically about how an argument over soup turns deadly (and I swear to God, it really is about that). Hell, originally it even had an introduction written by Trotsky.
No, I think despite being one of the best and most important films ever made, Battleship Potemkin is never going to be on many people’s must-see lists. However it is worth noting how vital the film was to birth of modern cinema. It was the first movie to really bring Soviet montage theory to the wider world, and show filmmakers the true power of editing.
Before your eyes glaze over as you wonder why you should care a flying frig about Soviet montage theory, its acceptance was arguably the birth of modern cinema, and the ideas it put forward are now ubiquitous in movies. In the 1920s, cinema was still so young that filmmakers across the world were constantly experimenting with what did and didn’t work in film storytelling. It was during this period that most of the techniques that are now the basic components of a director’s bag of tricks were born.
In the earliest days of cinema, directors tended to treat films as they would a stage play. They framed the shots almost like the camera was an audience member in the theatre, with very little editing and with the characters rushing about the scene with little thought about the actual composition of the shot. This quickly developed into more complex editing techniques, but it was still just about presenting a sequence of events. Each shot purely showed the next thing that happened to build a story.
Sounds fairly simple so far, but Soviet montage theory, of which Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisentstein was a leading proponent, took things a step further. In Russia they realised that editing wasn’t just about creating a series of events, but that you could use montage to create emotion, pace and build your film to something new and different. On a basic level (although the Soviets took it to immensely complex ends), montage theory suggests that rather than editing being about showing a series of events, it’s about creating meaning, and that what shots you put next to each other are as important for their context as their continuity.
Like I said, Eisenstein got immensely complicated with it, but a simple example during Battlehip Potemkin is that during the revolt on the ship where the working men overthrow their Tsarist officers, there’s a random shot of a piece of meat that’s riddled with maggots. When we first see the shot earlier in the film, it is purely part of the continuity, showing what the soldiers are angry about, however during the battle, it not just a reminder of this, but in the context of the scene becomes symbolic of diseased system the men are fighting against. After this shot, the Tsarist aren’t just trying to feed maggot-riddled meat to the men, they are equated with being that meat themselves. Purely by adding a seemingly random shot into the sequence, Eisenstein creates meaning that wouldn’t be there independently. Nowadays that sounds pretty basic, but back then it was very new.
Montage also includes things such as cutting back and forth between two different events so that they comment on one another in the audience’s mind. A famous example is in The Godfather, where the baptism scene is intercut with the murder of the rivals to the Corleone clan. Both the baptism and murders are important scenes on their own, but extra meaning and power is created by intercutting the peace and sanctity of the baptism with the violence of the deaths.
Another famed example of montage filmmaking is the end of Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, where Cary Grant moves in to kiss Eva Marie Saint, and it immediately cuts to a shot of a train going into a tunnel. By putting the two shots next to each other, Hitchcock creates a visual pun that suggests what Cary Grant does next, but which us prudes aren’t allowed to see. Independently it’s just a kiss and a train, but together it’s sex.
All this might sound very obvious because we see this sort of things all the time in movies (whether we’re aware of it or not), but in the 1920s it was revolutionary. Montage theory said that rather than just showing events, you can use film to lead how people feel about things and create complex associations in order to build up entire philosophical, ideological and emotional responses, just from which shots you layer on top of one another, and that this was more important than the story itself. For example there’s a sequence in Eisenstein’s October that, despite being silent, the director believed could end up with people rejecting religion, because it collides a series of shots which end up equating God with a block of wood.
The reason that the emergence of montage can be said to be the birth of modern cinema, is because it was one of the first techniques to emerge that was genuinely unique to cinema. Most of the tricks used beforehand had been borrowed from art, literature, photography and the theatre, but montage didn’t have a true equivalent in any other art form, and so it was here that film started to emerge as something truly unique, and where it proved that it could have a power and visual immediacy that other art forms lacked.
Almost immediately people began to see the power montage theory had to change how people thought about things. Eisenstein was using it to create Communist propaganda, and Battleship Potemkin certainly has a stunning revolutionary zeal. Even today there are very few films that can match its relentless passion, power and ideological fervour. The film got a dubious but very revealing endorsement from none other than Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who said it was “A marvellous film without equal in the cinema... anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film." Despite being a fan of the movie itself, as the Nazis didn’t like Communism and he was aware of the zeal Potemkin could incpire in people, he promptly banned the film, but it helped open his eyes to the power of cinema that the Soviet montage theories had helped reveal, and which the Nazis were keen to use in their own propaganda films.
Although helping out totalitarian dictatorships isn’t the greatest thing in the world, the power of the montage style of editing also spread through less propagandist cinema. Potemkin was one of Charlie Chaplin’s favourite films, and you can see his adoption of many of the montage techniques in his movies from the late 20s and 30s. Since then it’s spread through all of cinema to a greater or lesser degrees, and helped turned cinema into a truly unique art form in the process.
It was Potemkin that helped open filmmakers eyes to what cinema could do, and indeed it continues to do so, hence the homage paid to the famous Odessa Steps sequence (where Tsarist forces open fire, and a baby in a pram rolls down a huge set of steps) in everything from Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables and Woody Allen’s Bananas, to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and even The Naked Gun 33 1/3. Battleship Potemkin really is an astonishing piece of filmmaking, and even 84 years later you can see why it still has such an impact on moviemakers.
I know you probably won’t, but if you’re genuinely interested in film history and want to see a movie that proves even an 84-year-old silent movie can be as dynamic and pulse-pounding as anything produced today, The Battleship Potemkin is well worth seeking out. After all, it shows you where cinema as a genuine independent art form began. Just don’t blame me if it makes you want to find a Tsar and overthrow him.
TIM ISAAC
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