27: Battleship Potemkin

Bronenosets Potyomkin

USSR  75m  Dir: Sergei Eisenstein

Original Screenplay (Based on real events)

I've already watched Sergei Eisenstein's Strike and this is a really similar film in many ways. It's unashamedly Bolshevik propaganda. Sailors aboard the Potemkin are furious, rightly so, at being served meat crawling with maggots and being abused by officers and stage a mutiny- the officers fight back brutally, killing the instigator Vakulinchuk. This then leads to the people of Odessa rising up in protest and then being brutally massacred by the Cossacks. 

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly the massacre on the Odessa Steps. There's just one horrific image after enough from a pram with a baby falling down the steps, a small boy being killed and that iconic image of the woman with glasses. It's hugely powerful and looks incredible. The film was banned for many years due to it's propaganda and I think this sequence is the main reason because everyone around the world can think of a similar scenario, if not quite so brutal, that happened close to home when innocent protesters were attacked by the police or army. 

I had mixed feelings about much of the rest of the film. I think Eisenstein was a superb director but his films seems to lack a strong script. It's essentially a series of set pieces, each one looking spectacular but there's very little in terms of plot.

Like Strike, this has the very alien idea to a Western audience of not really having any characters. The working class banded together are one character and the upper classes that are brutally attacking them are another. It's very much that Soviet thing of 'we're all in this together' but I would have liked to have seen a few individual stories within the film. I've seen some people argue that it doesn't need protagonists but I strongly disagree. 

I think this film is over-rated. It's undeniably well made but it's less a narrative film and more a sequence of scenes which come together to form a piece of leftist propaganda. It certainly makes convincing arguments and I quite like the politics of it but that still doesn't mean it's a fantastic film. It feels like an essay rather than a story and sure, it's an excellent essay, but there's a reason that stories dominate culture.