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Sergei Eisenstein is widely acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant and important initiators of film as an art form; The Battleship Potemkin is perhaps his greatest film. (He also directed Strike [1924], Alexander Nevsky [1938] and Ivan the Terrible, part I [1944] and part II [1946, released 1958].) Eisenstein was born in 1898; his father was an assimilated Jew and his mother from a merchant family. He traveled widely as a child, showed an interest in the theatre, and in 1915 entered civil engineering school in St. Petersburg. In 1918 he joined the Red (Bolshevik) Army; when he was demobilized in 1920 he went to Moscow and entered the world of the theatrical avant-garde in Moscow. His first film, Strike, was called by Pravda (the official paper of the Soviet Communist Party) "the first revolutionary creation of our screen." The Battleship Potemkin was made in 1925, as part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of a series of uprisings which took place in Russia in 1905, and which Soviets regarded as the "first Russian Revolution." That means that the film was made after the Bolshevik victory, after the Civil War, after the Soviet Union had established itself as a state Ð and after the death of Lenin in 1924. There were several blows to Imperial power in 1905, including a crushing defeat of the Russian Navy by the Japanese. The film is based on a historic occurrence (though see below for an indication of how ÔfreelyÕ Eisenstein dealt with historical fact), in which the sailors on a Russian Imperial Ship in the Black sea mutinied against their superior officers; the uprising took place just outside of Odessa, a major port city (now in Ukraine)[MAP]. The film is shot in Odessa, and one of its most famous scenes is shot on the Potemkin Steps, which lead down to the harbor of the city. The film assumes significant class differences between the officers and their men: note how Eisenstein has cast the officers, and how theyÕre dressed Ð versus his choices for the sailors and their supporters, and how theyÕre dressed (and undressed). This is related to EisensteinÕs concern with "typage" Ð casting with an emphasis on types, representative of social groups, rather than individuals. The real "protagonists" of the film are not individuals but representatives of larger groupings; the "hero" of the film is, as Eisenstein put it, "the Revolution." "Although Eisenstein was proud of his research into records and the mutineersÕ memoirs, and although he used the student agitator Konstantin Feldman as a performer and a historical consultant, the film takes great libertiesÉ Eisenstein synthesizes 1905 events: the mourning over Vakulinchuk in Odessa refers to an interlude during the Moscow uprisings, and the Steps sequence fuses the Odessa massacre with one in Baku. Through the use of typage, the sneering anti-Semite at VakulinchukÕs tent becomes a premonition of the reactionary Black Hundreds society that emerged as a response to the 1905 uprising [The Black Hundreds were state-abetted, anti-semitic mobs that led pogroms Ð attacks on Jewish communities]. Most notably, the triumphant ending cuts the historical episode short, omitting reference to the eventual exile and imprisonment of the mutineers. ÔWe stop the event at this point where it had become an ÔassetÕ to the revolution,Õ Eisenstein admittedÉ Twenty years later he explained that the ending shows 1905 to be an Ôobjectively victorious episode, the harbinger of the triumph of the October revolutionÕ." (David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Harvard U. Press, 1993, pp. 62 Ð 63.) Questions to consider before class: What are the "key" moments of the film? |
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