Eisenstein's three great films about the Russian Revolution - Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October - were all made between 1924 and 1928, before Stalin had consolidated his power and gained an iron grip on the arts. During this period the Communist Party initially favored Proletkult artists. Strike, made in 1924, Eisenstein's second film and the first of the trilogy, was originally planned as the first of a series of films documenting the pre-revolutionary working class. It turned out to be an artistic success as well as an educational aid and it won an award at the 1925 'Exposition des Arts Décoratifs' in Paris, as well as being commercially exhibited in Germany.
On its release in 1925, Strike was poorly received by the Russian public, whose imagination had already been gripped by American films and the comfy folkloric familiarity of their conventional questing heroes and tightly developed narratives.
A domestic flop in the Soviet Union, Potemkin was loved by German audiences, although the armed forces were forbidden to see it for fear of mutiny, as were Pennsylvanian audiences on the grounds that it gave American sailors 'a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny'.38 When it was eventually screened in the US in 1926, Chaplin declared it to be 'the best film in the world'. In France the authorities burnt all copies they could find - it received only a limited art house screening at Paris film clubs. Despite being banned in the UK until 1954, The Battleship Potemkin has rarely been out of the annual BFI critics' top ten list, and only then when another Eisenstein film has been voted in.
It is easy to see why. The Odessa Steps sequence has even now the power to move and excite: '...Eisenstein, in forcing the spectator to create the image by putting together all the relationships between attractions (relationships existing because of the interpenetrating theme), gives to the spectator not a completed image, but the "experience of completing an image".'39 All Eisenstein's elements come together in this perfect piece of cinema and the audience participates in the process of producing meaning.
The film documents an event that helped precipitate the 1905 Revolution which shook the Tsarist regime. The battleship Potemkin is a microcosm of Russian society. The ship's officers, doctor and priest - all representing the ruling power structure - pile abuse on top of abuse until maggot infested meat and a threatened mass execution push the sailors to mutiny. The mutineers eventually find sanctuary at the Black Sea port of Odessa, the setting for the film's penultimate sequence, showing Odessa's population supporting the Potemkin mutineers anchored in the bay. The sudden appearance of Tsarist soldiers abruptly reverses the joyous mood as the troops mercilessly advance, shooting everything that moves. Rhythm (cutting) builds with tempo (the pace of action within the frame) as the soldiers descend the steps in relentless solid formation behind the chaotically scattering crowd. This descending action travels left to right across the screen for rapidity (because we read left to right, top to bottom in English, our brains process screen information better in this direction, enabling us to read the images faster).
Tags: eisenstein potemkin russiancinema russia sergeieisenstein
