FILM REVIEW: THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (REMASTERED)

A scene from The Battleship Potmekin.

Stills the greatest

By Ed Rampell

At an Oscar party this year, actress Magi Avila asked me if I had a favorite film. Interestingly, I think that the best movie ever was made before the cinema had sound and color (except for that hand tinted red flag, that is!). Nor are there conventional movie stars or a sexy love story in director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, based on the real life saga of a revolt aboard a ship that spread like wildfire to the port city of Odessa.

When I was a student revolutionary I read Rosa Luxemburg’s stirring 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, and never forgot one line that made an indelible impression upon me: “But in the storm of the revolutionary period even the proletarian is transformed from a provident paterfamilias demanding support, into a ‘revolutionary romanticist,’ for whom even the highest good, life itself, to say nothing of material well-being, possesses but little in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.”

Yes, what I am referring to is the romance of revolution, when people are lifted up out of their petty mindsets and ruts and all things suddenly seem possible. Unlike general strikes, which are generally planned and called for by trade union leadership, mass strikes usually spontaneously originate and, in fertile soil, mushroom and go viral. Most recently, a Tunisian vendor who set himself on fire in order to protest the state’s abuses there set off the uprisings now rocking North Africa and the Middle East – and arguably, Wisconsin.

In the case of The Battleship Potemkin, as the title cards -- all 146 have been restored in this remastered edition -- reveal, what instigates 1905 czarist Russian sailors is being forced to eat maggoty meat. This touches off a mutiny, and then a strike by Odessa’s working class, as, literally, a cast of thousands pour across the screen decades before CGI, in support of their mutinous mates. This movie’s “stars,” of course, are the aroused workers and sailors, finally standing up for their rights and breaking the chains of oppression in order to win a new liberated world. What is extremely notable is the mass psychology of the people in the act of defiant solidarity and rebellion -- they are nearly ecstatic. For instance, more recently we saw this elation among the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as the populace threw off their tyrants.

Of course, the czarist pigs must put the workers back into their place(s) and stamp out this outpouring of mass joy and unity, so they sic their Cossack dogs on the unarmed civilians in what is arguably the silver screen’s most terrifying scene of violence en masse. The Odessa Steps sequence is a tour-de-force of montage, with rapid editing that pops your eyes and tugs your heartstrings. It is to the mass drama what Alfred Hitchcock’s pulsating Psycho shower scene is for slasher/ serial killer flicks and what the shootout at the O.K. Corral is to Western enthusiasts. The throbbing, powerful Odessa Steps’ five or so minutes will make you sit on the edge of your seat, and it has been oft spoofed and referenced in many movies, such as Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables and most recently in the aptly named The Trotsky.

This Cossack carnage, however, never really happened as portrayed onscreen. According to legend, while planning Potemkin Eisenstein stood atop the Odessa Steps chewing cherries, taking in the vista of this Ukrainian port city. When he spit the pits out of his mouth Eisenstein noticed them bounce down the stairs, and the germ of an idea was born. Thus, the stuff of legends. Be that as it may, this spectacle of cinematic slaughter brilliantly shot by Eduard Tisse only “lies” in order to tell the truth about the brutal repression of the czarist regime.

The sailors aboard the battleship boldly respond to the mass killing. Eisenstein symbolically uses stone lions to express the rising of the proletariat (this was rather hilariously spoofed in a sex scene in Woody Allen’s Love and Death). But the rebellious sailors must pay for their mutiny on the Potemkin, and the czarists deploy a squadron to defeat the revolutionaries. Undaunted, the Potemkin courageously steams toward the entire battle fleet, sort of like Gary Cooper almost single-handedly taking on all the bad guys in High Noon. What happens next, Dear Reader, is not only one of the greatest moments in the history of revolutions (yes, it actually happened!), but in film history.

Around 1922, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin declared: “For us, the cinema is the most important of the arts.” Alas, Lenin never lived long enough to see Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. This silent film speaks volumes. With its jubilant, triumphant vision of human solidarity it arguably did more to spread the gospel of the revolution more than any book or pamphlet by Karl Marx, Lenin or Leon Trotsky ever did.

I hadn’t seen The Battleship Potemkinon the big screen since my Hunter College cinema professor Joel Zucker screened it for our film history class and I’m happy to report that it remains my favorite movie of all time.