The Battleship Potemkin movie review (1925)
Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a student and advocate of Soviet theories of film montage, which argued that film has its greatest impact not by the smooth unrolling of images, but by their juxtaposition. Sometimes the cutting is dialectical: point, counterpoint, fusion. Cutting between the fearful faces of the unarmed citizens and the faceless troops in uniform, he created an argument for the people against the czarist state. Many other cuts are as abrupt: After Potemkin's captain threatens to hang mutineers from the yardarm, we see ghostly figures hanging there. As the people call out, “Down with the tyrants!” we see clenched fists. To emphasize that the shooting victims were powerless to flee, we see one revolutionary citizen without legs. As the troops march ahead, a military boot crushes a child's hand. In a famous set of shots, a citizen is seen with eyeglasses; when we cut back, one of the glasses has been pierced by a bullet.
Eisenstein felt that montage should proceed from rhythm, not story. Shots should be cut to lead up to a point, and should not linger because of personal interest in individual characters. Most of the soundtracks I've heard with “Potemkin” do not follow this theory, and instead score the movie as a more conventional silent drama. Concrete, the Michigan band (Boyd Nutting, Jon Yazell, Andrew Lersten), underlined and reinforced Eisenstein's approach with an insistent, rhythmic, repetitive score, using keyboards, half-heard snatches of speech, cries and choral passages, percussion, martial airs and found sounds. It was an aggressive, insistent approach, played loud, by musicians who saw themselves as Eisenstein's collaborators, not his meek accompanists.
It was the music, I think, along with the unusual setting, that was able to break through my long familiarity with “Battleship Potemkin” and make me understand, better than ever before, why this movie was long considered dangerous. (It was banned at various times in the United States and France, and for a longer time than any other film in British history; even Stalin banned it, at a time when mutiny was against the party line.)
The fact is, “Potemkin” doesn't really stand alone, but depends for its power upon the social situation in which it is shown. In prosperous peacetime, it is a curiosity. If it had been shown in China at the time of Tiananmen Square, I imagine it would have been inflammatory. It was voted the greatest film of all time at the Brussels, Belgium, World's Fair in 1958 (ironically, the very year “Citizen Kane” had its great re-release and went to the top of the list for the next 40 years). The Cold War was at its height in 1958, and many European leftists still subscribed to the Marxist prescription for society; “Potemkin” for them had a power, too.
