1925 epic drama, dir. Sergei Eisenstein:
IMDb /
allmovie. The heroic sailors
of the Potemkin will not stand for this!
I think Eisenstein was always a propagandist at heart, even
during his brief career in the USA, and this project was originally to
be a film treatment of the whole 1905
Revolution to
be released for its 20th anniversary. Time, budget and Eisenstein cut
it back to just one of the eight planned subjects, and the tiny
remaining script was then rewritten and expanded by Eisenstein and
others.
But this was never meant to be a subtle film. Matyushenko and
Vakulinchuk are not woken to revolutionary fervour by their poor
treatment; they are already revolutionary organisers eager to join
their brothers in uprising, and it's only when the officers are
pointlessly and arbitrarily cruel even by their established standards
that the rest of the men join them.
More interesting to me are the small notes, because every shot here
has something to say. The Orthodox priest, clearly a tool of the
establishment, always wreathed in smoke; the anti-Jewish agitator,
also a tool of the establishment, though of course the Bolsheviks in
their turn were entirely happy to blame the Jews for everything just
as the tsars had done.
Most of the exterior filming seems to have taken place aboard
Rostislav, scuttled in 1920 but with superstructure still above
water. Odessa was a centre of film production at the time, and
Eisenstein cast largely non-professional actors because he wanted the
right regional ethnicities (as Wolfgang Petersen would later do for
Das Boot).
I assume the historical context would have been entirely familiar to
the primary audience; these days it's worth remembering that all the
experienced naval personnel had been sent east for the Russo-Japanese
war, and then for a variety of reasons what had been expected to be an
easy victory turned into a crushing defeat.
Of course things didn't go the way they're shown as going. This is a
propaganda film. Yes, the Cossacks fired into the crowd (which may or
may not have been rioting), but not at the Odessa Steps. Yes, the
officers of Potemkin put down canvas, but under the sailors with the
aim of keeping blood out of the deck planking. Yes, Potemkin fired a
pair of shells at the theatre where a high-level military meeting was
to be held, but missed, and most of the damage to the town was done by
riots and fire.
And Potemkin sailed across the Black Sea to Constanta on the
Romanian coast, failed to steal fuel and ammunition, and was returned
to the Russians after the Romanian authorities granted the crew
asylum. The ship was back in Russian service a few months later.
Matushenko spent the next two years trying to foment revolution, then
returned to Russia under a false name, and was caught and hanged.
Which is of course not the glorious triumphant revolution that
Eisenstein was trying to portray, so one can see why the film ends
where it does.
This film was entirely banned in the United Kingdom until 1954, and
was given an "X" (later "18") rating until 1987. I first saw it
between those two dates, at a private showing which I assume had
gained special permission.
I talk about this further on Ribbon of
Memes.