Bronyenosyets Potyomkin

Sergei Eisenstein (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was in his mid-twenties when he made Potemkin (which neither Sally nor I had seen before).  It is amazing because it’s genuinely exciting and because the excitement is thanks entirely – unless you can engage with it as Communist propaganda – to Eisenstein’s art.  I’ve just seen three films at BFI in the Terence Rattigan season and each got a round of applause.  There was silence at the end of Potemkin in NFT1 and it felt more like disengaged than stunned silence – the silence of people miles away from the political landscape of the 1920s.  As propaganda less than a decade after the 1917 revolution, however, the film must have been almost unimaginably powerful to sympathetic audiences.  For example, the images of the sea, and of different kinds of light on the sea and the horizon, would surely have fused with the political message to give the triumphant mutiny of the sailors a cosmic dimension, and colossal emotional potency. The historical event on which the film is based happened in 1905 – the year the Russian Revolution didn’t quite happen.  The choice of this instead of events from 1917 remains impressive, as an expression of confidence in the historical inevitability of the revolution coming to fruition.

The Odessa steps sequence (an invention according to David Thomson’s note used in the BFI programme) is astonishing.  First, because the editing – the choreography (some of the Cossack guards’ goose-stepping, as Sally said, is rhythmically seductive), the intercutting of different ‘stories’ – seems so far ahead of its time.  Second, because it’s nevertheless much rougher technically than it would be in a complex action sequence today, and as a result more real and upsetting.   The legends (rather a surfeit of these in the early stages) immediately remind us that the individual is to be subsumed in the mass yet, like Bertolucci making 1900 half a century later, Eisenstein is so naturally an artist that the component parts of the mass are a collection of vividly individual faces and bodies (especially in the steps sequence).  The political point-scoring is often very deftly incisive.  When the corpse of the seaman Vakulinchik is laid out on the Odessa pier, a placard ‘For a spoonful of  borscht’ placed on his chest, the working-class onlookers are respectful, even reverent; two better-dressed women peer a bit too closely, heartless voyeurs.   Throughout there are breathtaking compositions – and thrilling marriages of image and sound:  the original, stirring score has been newly recorded for this re-release.  And there’s the red flag flying brilliant in the monochrome (an effect imitated in the child’s coat in Schindler’s List).    Eisenstein wrote the screenplay with Nina Agadzhanova, Nikolai Aseyev and Sergei Tretvakov.  The cinematographer was Eduard Tisse.

30 April 2011