Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Bronenosets Potyomkin, USSR, 75 minutes, silent
Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Writers: Nina Agadzhanova, Nikolai Aseyev, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Sergei Tretyakov
Photography: Eduard Tisse, Vladimir Popov
Editors: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein
Cast: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ivan Bobrov, Mikhail Gomorov, Aleksandr Levshin, N. Poltavseva, Konstantin Feldman, Prokopenko, A. Glauberman, Beatrice Vitoldi

Critical consensus over the long decades has secured the position of Battleship Potemkin even still as not only the greatest Russian (or Soviet Union) film ever made, but the greatest silent picture as well. Thus, it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which this could well turn out to be the most disappointing movie you have ever seen.

Even as recently as last month, Andrew O'Hehir at Salon could be found raving about a painstaking new restoration that includes a re-recording of the original score by Edmund Meisel (full disclosure: I am writing based on an older print obtained via Netflix with an incidental Shostakovich score). "For better or worse," he writes, taking a calculated position that flies in the face of the movie's daunting academic credentials, "this film's true revolutionary legacy is not art cinema but Hollywood; it's got a lot more in common with Tony Scott's Unstoppable than it does with Andrei Tarkovsky."

Whoa up, Bucky. The point might be arguable in terms of film history, but its suggestion is fairly misleading. Let's not forget that perhaps no other film, until Citizen Kane came into its own, has been so over-praised, over-celebrated, and, ultimately, overrated. I'm here to tell you that it's still fans of Tarkovsky who have the better chance of extracting pleasure from Battleship Potemkin than fans of Unstoppable. And I'd be willing to bet the house on that.


The story Battleship Potemkin tells is of a 1905 mutiny by Marxist revolutionaries aboard a Russian battleship with deplorable conditions, an action whose consequences spread to the seaside city where the ship comes to dock, Odessa, eventually earning brutal reprisals from the czarist army. Though the story is big, practically epic, and told novelistically across the breadth of five separately named and introduced chapters, it's a surprisingly compact production, clocking in at only 75 minutes. You could fit two viewings of it into The Godfather and still have time for lunch.

A critically important and even outright astonishing fact about Battleship Potemkin is cited in most reviews, and I'm not about to be the exception, because I think it amounts to the critical key that unlocks the whole thing: the picture is composed of some 1,300 shots (well over half of them unique setups, by the look of it), which is even more remarkable given the film's relative brevity.

To me, that makes it a technical achievement more than anything else, a film editor's film (though not credited, director Sergei Eisenstein was heavily involved in the editing according to many sources), affording an invaluable opportunity to study and better understand that unique craft almost purely on its own terms, with very few other distractions, such as a story that particularly matters to anyone anymore. It's a craft so thoughtfully, even single-mindedly, carried out here that the film may fairly be argued as the most significant source, certainly one of the most important, for the very bones of montage itself.

For example, the rightly celebrated Odessa steps sequence, probably the single most famous part of this movie already to anyone even slightly familiar with it, offers a fascinating mix of the violent and the meditative as it asserts itself with a pounding rhythm that matches the marching boots of the army advancing down the staircase. Certain elements are established and returned to again and again—a woman confronting the advancing army with her dying or dead child, a baby carriage out of control, the crowd turning to flee in panic, an old woman caught up in the excitement of the moment evidently unaware of the danger of it, the marching boots, the firing guns—as time itself explodes open, slowing on itself even as events proceed in real time. What would take a minute or two to occur takes many more minutes in the film, which looks briefly yet closely at a good many telling details of the action, mimicking and elaborately playing out the perceptions related by people in such fraught situations who say that everything seems to occur in slow motion.

With the technical aspect of it understood, I found it much easier to enjoy a good many of the small-bore attractions the film has to offer as well: with canted camera angles and a powerful sense for shadows and black, as well as for visually framing a shot, it's often quite lovely. The shots of silhouetted figures on the ship at dusk in the final section, for example, are startlingly beautiful, as are the shots of the initial approach to Odessa in the third section.

The dynamics of class conflict, even within the simplistic broad strokes of the story here, still have some resonance too, certainly in light of recent events in Egypt, Libya, and Madison, Wisconsin—alas, probably always will, I think now. While I have yet to see this with the Meisel score (and look forward to catching up with it one day) I found the Shostakovitch perfectly adequate and often more than that. And in the end it offers up a satisfying enough happy ending; in essence, ain't gonna study war no mo'.

But the greatest Russian, Soviet Union, and silent film of all? I can't go that far—I like more, respectively, Andrei Rublev, The Man With the Movie Camera, and a couple of silent films I've scheduled myself to write about shortly, and that's just off the top of my head. I think the lingering high regard for Battleship Potemkin is no more or less than an artifact of the earlier evaluations, so often hard to let go of entirely, in combination with its undeniable achievements of editing and montage. Then again, I still haven't seen the new restoration, so, of course, I must reserve the right to eventually find myself singing O'Hehir's song on this as well.