“The Battleship Potemkin” Sails Through Cinematic History
1925’s silent movie classic, The Battleship Potemkin, which was director Sergei Eisenstein’s second film-making effort, stands the test of time as a cinematic tour de force, though its original intent at its release was to be more of a Soviet Communist Party propaganda film designed to win sympathy and understanding for the first so-called “Russian Revolution.” Kicked off in 1904 by liberal thinkers and supporters of the working class, who felt anger at Tsar Nicholas II’s heavy-handed rule, the revolution encompassed a number of events. The 1905 mutiny by oppressed sailors on the Battleship Potemkin against their officers was one of the more notable occurrences in a string of battles, strikes, purges and massacres — some by the Tsar’s white-jacketed Cossack troops — that took place between 1904 and 1907. The Battleship Potemkin was Eisenstein’s contribution to this propaganda effort by the ruling Communists of his time, who used the twentieth anniversary of the mutiny as a vehicle to explain how the seeds of the second, and ultimate, 1917 Russian Revolution vaulted institutional Communism to what they believed was its logical place; that of the leading light of Russia for all time. We all know how that eventually turned out, but in 1925, Communism was still viewed by many Western thinkers and intellectuals as a viable solution to what they thought were intractable problems created by the then-current social structure and the plight of the oppressed masses by the “ruling class.”
Sergei Eisenstein’s movie though, is celebrated for far more than just a really good example of how cinema could be used for indoctrination or propaganda. In fact, The Battleship Potemkin is justifiably famous for Eisenstein’s then-revolutionary experiment with cinematic “montage.” For the Soviet filmmakers of Eisenstein’s time, “montage” involved juxtaposing (weaving) shots which may not have had any actual relation to each other to create new meaning in each of the individual shots, which didn’t previously exist in each scene alone. With it, an audience member could understand why characters in one scene were doing what they were doing by watching a totally unrelated sequence in another scene, and vice-versa. In this way, the whole of the movie tended to be greater than its unique parts. 1972’s The Godfather also makes great use of montage in many parts of the movie.
Filmed in high-quality black-and-white, The Battleship Potemkin wasn’t the rousing success Josef Stalin and other Communist leaders had hoped for (Eisenstein was Stalin’s favorite filmmaker). Yet, over time, it became one of the most classic of classic movies. It also shocked movie audiences of its time with its depiction of violence in a frank and brutally honest manner. In that era, the matter of real-life physical violence could be more of an implied thing. Eisenstein, in an effort to gain more sympathy for the sailors of the Potemkin and also for villagers and others shown in later scenes in the movie, employed it brutally in some instances, and starkly and memorably in others, but always with the aim of creating sympathy for the working masses against their ruling overlords. In recent years, The Battleship Potemkin has been digitally remastered and many lost or previously-censored scenes restored. With that, it stands in a select group of silent films that have truly earned the title “classic movie.” Watch it if you get the chance to.
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