I had two possible openings for this article. I think I’ll go with my standard one to say something about the filmmaker: Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. There’s a name I had seen tossed around quite a while, but I can’t say I had ever seen any of his work before. He made silent movies for the Soviet Union: it’s not that surprising I hadn’t seen any. But I had long been aware that he is considered one of the greatest artistic innovators in film. But it’s not like his work popped up on late night cable when I was growing up. So yes, here is my first exposure to his work.
By the by, the second opening was that I had heard that George Lucas once commented that Soviet filmmakers had more creative freedom than American ones because the Soviets, as long as their work fit the political needs of the state, were allowed to make what they wanted while American filmmakers had to make films that had to earn a profit for the studio. I’m not sure whether I can agree with that or not since, to my mind, both seem like a form of control, just for very different reasons.
If anything, Lucas’s observation certainly was something I had in mind while watching this film. This film came out in 1925 and was about the Russian revolution of 1905. That was a mere twenty years earlier, and most people who would have gone to the local theater to see this film probably could remember back that far. Furthermore, Stalin was in power at the time, and of the various Soviet dictators, I think it is safe to say he was the harshest of the lot. As such, yes, this film does what it can to reinforce communist ideology. I wasn’t expecting anything less, and it’s not like American films don’t do what they can to reinforce the American political and economic systems. I kept that in mind as I watched, and I was mostly interested in how Eisenstein told his story, based as it is on a true event involving the Russian battleship Potemkin and the events surrounding the crew’s mutiny and overthrow of the officers onboard.
So, here is the story of the rebellion that seems to start with an ordinary sailor named Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov). Vakunlinchuk, before the ship’s officers have even really given him a reason to, is asking his fellow sailors whether they should join their comrades in taking power from the corrupt upperclass. And that’s before the story picks up and shows the cut of meat that will used to make the sailors’ borscht is riddled with worms, worms the ship’s doctor dismisses as maggots that may not even be alive (despite the fact he can see them moving) and that he insists can be washed off with brine. With Vakulinchuk asking his “brothers” on the crew when they will join the rest of the Russia and the clear disdain the officers have for the crew, it isn’t overly surprising that all it takes is a few stirring words before a firing squad is to execute some rebellious members of the crew who just weren’t able to walk out of the way fast enough when the captain was basically ordering everyone to eat the rotten food for said firing squad to join the rest of the enlisted officers and attack the officers.
I found it a little funny that, despite the fact the crew managed to get a lot of rifles, the only people I saw firing guns during this whole sequence were the officers. The rest of the men seemed to just use the guns as blunt objects as they swatted the officers into the sea. The only individual who doesn’t get tossed overboard that probably should have was a wild-haired priest, and if I wanted any more evidence this was Soviet propaganda, it was that the man of God was siding with the obvious villains, and more than a few of the officers were literally twirling their mustaches before the rebellion happened. I’ve seen plenty of American films where, unless the priest or minister is painted as blatantly corrupt, they can usually be counted on to be on the right side of a rebellion like this. But this is the Soviet Union, and they’re an atheist state what with religion being the opiate of the masses and all that.
That’s more or less the first two sections of the film. Eisenstein’s film is divided into five acts, all of which depict the crew of the Potemkin as heroic figures worthy of praise for their desire to stand by their fellow Russians. Russia is already in a revolution, and the crew opt to join, the film ending with their realization that the other naval vessels they were sailing towards were, thankfully, also rebelling and they would not be getting into what would be a one-sided battle with forces loyal to the Tsar. Vakulinchuk seems to be the only casualty among the crew during the mutiny, and the crew’s memorial for the fallen man at the port city of Odessa leads to the film’s most famous section: Act IV: The Odessa Steps.
Odessa seems, as a whole, to be wholly inspired by the actions of the crew of the Potemkin, and what had to be hundreds of extras come out to both mourn Vakulinchuk and to provide provisions to the surviving crew before they cast off again. There is a very large staircase leading to the port, and at first, it was streaming with what looked like Russian citizens from all walks of life, the only dissenter being a government official who wanted to blame the Jews for what happened, but he was swatted down almost immediately. It’s only when the Cossacks show up, marching in unison down the stairs with their rifles, dropping to fire their weapons every few steps and stepping over the bodies of fallen men, women, and even a couple children as they go. A mother trying to get past to take her injured son for medical treatment is herself shot, It’s a massacre, and Eisenstein doesn’t really hold back here. The most famous of the moments captured by his camera is of course a baby carriage, with a baby inside, bouncing down the stairs after the baby’s mother was shot. Brian DePalma would do his own take on this moment in The Untouchables, the big difference being the baby in that film was stopped before tragedy could occur. The baby here, well, Eisenstein doesn’t show an infant going splat or anything, but he likewise doesn’t show anyone stopping the carriage.
And that is the film’s most gruesome scene. The heroic crew of the Potemkin fire the ship’s guns for the only time in the entire film as they open fire on the large theater that the military’s generals were using as a headquarters, blowing it to bits and showing some very surprised-looking lion statues before they exploded. Were they supposed to look scared? I don’t know, but I somehow suspect they were. Eisenstein doesn’t seem to be the sort of director who leaves things open for interpretation. His use of title cards is proof of that. What exposure I have had to silent films tells me title cards often give bits of dialogue or maybe a bit to set the stage for a scene. Eisenstein’s are more likely be the latter, and often use short, pithy sentence fragments (or at least the English translations do) to reinforce exactly how the characters are feeling and perhaps how the audience should feel in response.
That is more or less what this film is. In a sense, it reminded me of The Birth of a Nation, another silent film claiming to represent history. Both are something of a propaganda piece, but I didn’t feel dirty watching Battleship Potemkin. I’m not a communist or anything, and certainly Stalin was a monster, but I will gladly take a film where the basic idea is people should band together to defeat the sorts of oppressors on display here than D.W. Griffith’s incredibly racist take on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Whatever might be said about communism as an ideology or how it worked out in practice in the Soviet Union, this film was maybe the equivalent of any number of American films about the Revolutionary War, a story that only presents the best of the nation’s origin story. And as far as that goes, I think I know which of these two silent films I don’t really regret watching.
NEXT: So, looks like up next is another film in a language I don’t speak about a revolution I don’t know much about. Be back soon for the Italian/Algerian co-production about the Algerian War against the French in 1966’s The Battle of Algiers.
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