Silent struggles

The Battleship Potemkin  (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

I used to always rent this book from the library on world cinema and that's how I got interested in foreign films. Though I didn't have the means to view them, the readings quite sustained that interest. Two directors and their films intrigued me the most. One is Luis Bunuel, who debuted as a filmmaker through his groundbreaking experimental short called Un Chien Andalou, which I saw earlier this year as well as the social realist Mexican film called Los Olvidados. The other one is Russian Sergei Eisenstein whose The Battleship Potemkin has been hailed as one of the most, if not, the most important film in earlier cinematic history. As one of the articles I've read says, Eisenstein's Potemkin "wrote the grammar of cinema".

The most popular reference to the movie is the sequence which has been touted as the most copied - the Odessa steps sequence. The closest reference I had of the film then was Brian de Palma's The Untouchables. De Palma's version of the sequence very much resembles the original where you have an infant in a cradle rolling down in a lengthy staircase. While the character of Costner saves the baby and kills the bad guy, the original Odessa steps however, leads up to a brutal ending of the Odessa Massacre episode in the five-part Potemkin.

Potemkin was banned in several countries even at one point in its Russian roots. The film achieved a landmark status that Eisenstein was commissioned to an American film outfit but failed as did his other attempts in the commercial arena. Reportedly, there was much contention also as to the accuracy of the retelling of the story which is based on the 1905 Potemkin mutiny. Eisenstein has structured the film into five parts or episodes which depicts in memory the events of that failed uprising. The first part, Men and the Maggots, introduces us to the miserable conditions of the sailors aboard the ship. Indeed, the unrest brewed from the meat with maggots (and the soup that was made of it) being force-fed to the hapless proletariat.

The Drama on the Quarterdeck shows us the memorable character of Vakulinchuk who can be seen as the symbol of what cruelty and injustice has brought upon them. Vakulinchuk courageously shouted to the officers ordered by the captain to kill the disobedient sailors, "Brothers, who are you shooting at?" Mutiny ensued and Vakulinchuk was shot. His body fished out of the sea where he was thrown was laid in the shore of Odessa. The people, also long-oppressed under the czarist regime, trooped to see the dead body and soon a massive unrest (The Odessa Steps episode) filled the city but was violently ended by the Russian militia. Meeting the Squadron, the last episode, a celebratory ode to the victory claimed by the sailors upon successfully passing a Russian fleet without being fired.

Having seen it now, The Battleship Potemkin is indeed a powerful film, notwithstanding the time and social conditions when it was made. After all, as Eisenstein intended, it is a revolutionary call and works as a cautionary tale on one hand. It is important though as a material not just for political discourse but the dialectic of film editing. Each episode is masterfully shot with the basics of juxtaposing images to create force and tension, particularly the montages of episodes 4 and 5 leaves a big room for discourse for anyone interested in the film language. It's the first silent film I saw (or I think I can remember seeing). Despite the short dialogue - a definitive call to action - read in title cards, and the score to help supply the tension and drama, Potemkin doesn't leave you quite unstirred.