STAGE REVIEW: 1969

A scene from 1969.

 

Back in black

By Ed Rampell

 

One of the great things about the theater is that it can dramatize history, and the people who make it and shake it. Actual events can be given shape and form when expressed in the theatrical medium. Playwright Barbara White Morgan attempts to do this by taking on the heady late sixties, when revolution was in the year, with the Towne Street Theatre world premiere production of 1969.

 

In it, Ajamu (Jaimyon Parker) wears the era’s obligatory uniform of black leather jacket, shades (even indoors and at night) and Afro, which were de rigeur for the period’s black militants. His comrade, Lewis (Lamar Usher) also even dons a beret. Ajamu is the leader of the Afro-centric Blacks United group, which occupies a building that the city government, led by City Councilman Ernest Butler (Kenny Cooper), wants to redevelop and turn into a youth center. This sets the two -- both African American but from different sides of the ideological tracks -- on a collision course.

 

In doing so, this two-acter directed by Kim Harrington poses and dramatizes questions that were very much in the air circa 1969. How will the oppressed advance and attain liberation? By staying within the system or by straying outside of the prevailing established ways of doing things? In Morgan’s play, integration collides with black nationalism, nonviolence with militancy, civil rights with black power, the ballot with the bullet.

 

While Blacks United is a fictional group, it seems like a synthesis of, or suggested by, actual organizations, such as the Philadelphia-based MOVE and the Black Panthers (although they were actually Marxist Leninists, not what Huey Newton and Bobby Seale mocked as “pork chop nationalists”). Indeed, the staged standoff at the Blacks United headquarters calls to mind the similar impasse at MOVE’s HQ, which resulted in the U.S. government’s only domestic aerial firebombing of the 20^th century. In any case, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) is also alluded to, while Ajamu seems like a composite character composed of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey, etc.

 

The earnest Ernest believes in more incremental change through the electoral process, and seems emblematic of the wave of African-American politicians who attained office in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act, which saw the late sixties elections of Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher as the black mayors of Cleveland and Gary. 1969 ponders whether these changes at the top will engender true black empowerment -- or the creation of a new African-American establishment. The fact that the drama’s city councilman’s last name is “Butler” -- long a stereotypical and subservient role for blacks -- may indicate where Morgan stands on that issue.

 

Megan Weaver is fetching as Ernest’s wife, Grace Butler; has the city councilman’s wife, with her Afro wigs and fur coat, gone bourgie? Grace’s (presumably) younger, less together sister Edna (Lina Green) is trying to pull herself together. As 1969 was rather famously also when Woodstock took place, no play about that year would be complete without a flower child, and Samantha Clay has some scene stealing fun as the stoned out hippie chick, Joyce, which displays her background with the Groundlings improve troupe. In a double role she also plays Mayor Evans’ (Jonathan Harrison) bourgeois wife Sylvia, who may well be the flip side of her countercultural alter ego. Another Caucasian thesp, Andy Ottenweller, portrays Dave Epstein, radical host of a talk show in, perhaps, the David Susskind mode (although Epstein’s Dave is hipper, younger and to the liberal Susskind’s left), who sympathizes with Ajamu and his cause.

 

All of the elements are here for a combustible concoction set against the background of the sizzling sixties. Alas, this Molotov cocktail never explodes. Although your reviewer was intellectually absorbed by 1969 it rarely became emotionally engaging, even when high stakes were being played. Perhaps this was due to the acting, directing or maybe the writing -- or perhaps all three? For one thing, the staging is a bit repetitious. The play’s credits do not list a set designer per se, and it shows, considering the very standard artwork that decorates the Butlers’ apartment (although it may be meant to cleverly reveal the couple’s being divided between their black sides and the bland middle class values they seem to aspire to). In any case, this is supposed to be live theatre, not a pamphlet or leaflet.

 

Having said that, Morgan’s plot does have some twists and turns which your reviewer did not see coming down the road, which is to the dramatist’s credit. As is the effort to render a play with characters who embody the social struggles of 1969, and a story that dramatizes that era’s almost revolution. (Alas, our side lost and we must soldier on.) Especially as the civil unrest unfolds in Missouri, showing that, beneath the surface, America remains a powder keg ready to blow. 1969 is presented by the Towne Street Theatre, which was created after the 1992 L.A. riots “to create, develop and produce original work that is reflective of the African-American experience and perspective…”

 

Perhaps next stop for TST’s 1969 is Ferguson? The fire next time!

 

 

1969 runs through Nov. 2 at the Stella Adler Theatre, Main Stage, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2^nd Floor, Hollywood, California, 90028. For info: (213)712-6944; www.townestreetla.org. For online tickets go to: 1969.

 

LAFF 2013: AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY

Grace Lee Boggs in American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.

Lee winding road

By Ed Rampell

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggsis engagingly, wittily directed by Grace Lee. No relation to her documentary’s subject, Lee first stumbled upon Boggs a decade ago while making another nonfiction film, 2005’s The Grace Lee Project.

The director appears onscreen in American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee, but the focus remains fixed on Boggs. Lee has a good film sense and her techniques run the gamut, from naturalistic talking heads footage -- including of Bill Moyers, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis and Danny Glover -- to the imaginatively cinematic. For example, in sharp contrast to most longwinded leftwing intellectuals, Lee humorously sums up Hegel and Marx in 30 second montages, and creatively uses reverse motion historical news clips to represent going back in time for this biopic about Boggs.

Boggs attended the LAFF screenings in her wheelchair, took part in Q&As with Lee and appeared on Tavis Smiley’s PBS talk show on June 21. An inspiration on- and offscreen, this radical icon remains full of grace -- bogged down she’s not, as she remains ready for the revolution -- whatever form it may take.

 

 

FILM INTERVIEW: OLIVIER ASSAYAS

A scene from Something in the Air.

Enough for Ahead

 

By Ed Rampell

 

Following the Boston Marathon bombing the new rightwing mantra is “radicalization.” French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ new feature Something in the Airis about the process of radicalization -- but by revolution, not religion. Set shortly after France’s historic worker-student mass strike of May 1968 Something in the Air’s politicized protagonists encounter anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and the counterculture as the young militants come of age when, as Assayas says, “everything was political” and many of his generation felt that world revolution was imminent. With this film and his 2010 epic Carlos --about the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlo the Jackal” -- Assayas shows he is one of the planet’s top political directors. We interviewed Assayas at, of all places, Beverly Hills after an advance screening of Something in the Air.

 

JEsther Entertainment: Recently we’ve seen huge revolutionary upsurges in the Middle East, North Africa; here in America we had the Occupied movement and the indignant in Spain and Greek general strikes. Does part of you still dream and hope there could be a revolution?

Olivier Assayas: Yes. But as much as I believe in those political movements, as much as they give one hope, because it gives a notion that youth again believes that it can have a collective effect on society, the way they envision politics is very different from whatever the 1970s’ were. Because for good or bad the 1970s were utopian. The 1970s believed in the possibility of turning society upside down, of taking over. It was utopian, but then it had some sort of reality because at least in France we had a model, which was May ’68, which was like three years old, and it comes as close as it gets to being an actual revolution. So, yes, this dream of a revolution, it was utopian, but then it was also grounded into something that had actually happened, that had a solid reality. Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things -- the modern world has become so brutal that of course, you have to recognize and endorse. But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,”which was an insult.

JE: What role can cinema play in today’s politics?
OA: Cinema in general plays a very modest role in politics. Politics are connected to real life, to real struggle, to the actual pain of real life people, and movies are very, very minor compared to that in terms of the effect they can have. The only thing movies can do is, eventually, a movie like this is have some sort of dialogue with youths who would be attracted to some kind of involvement into politics. Because often, they idealize the 1970s and movies don’t really represent the 1970s. It’s a way of giving some kind of portrait to that period that can be understandable, can be some sort of reference point and which also could remind that they could be in a generation not so, so, so far from us. The conscience that a specific generation could change the world.

JE: Can you discuss some of the other specific rock songs used in your film and how they express the politics and other inner meaning you were getting cross, as a “layer of illustration,” as you put it?

OA: I wanted to use specifically, protest songs to be present. So I used this Phil Ochs' song ("Ballad of William Worthy") that Johnny Flynn sings, because it’s from another era. But it was still around. Wherever you were, some guy would pop up and he’d be playing a song that came from that history of protest songs. It was very present. The actual song is more a song of the early ’60s, mid-’60s at the latest. And we are six or seven years but still it was just part of, those songs carried in terms of politics, in terms of involvement in politics, and was something that was extremely important in those years, yes, that I needed. In terms of the way I use songs, they all have a specific meaning, so it would be long and tedious to go through every single one of them. Maybe one way of dealing with this would be saying it’s the difference between the party in this film and the party we created in my movie called Cold Water, which I made in the mid-’90s, where I use a completely different soundtrack. Which was also pretty much a soundtrack of the 1970s, but used big names, it used the songs, my whole generation could relate to, like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Credence Clearwater Revival, so on and so forth. Here, it’s a completely different ambient. For instance, when I’m recreating the similar party scene in Something in the Air we are at this country house, villa, which belongs to this rich family, and they’re having this kind of hip, cool party. You would not have music like Credence Clearwater Revival, it would be just uncool, right? You could have Captain Beefheart -- Captain Beefheart was believable in that context. Or Soft Machine or Incredible String Band, because they were underground, they were this avante garde thing.

JE: What kind of music do you like to listen to today?
OA: I listen to a lot of indie rock. But the thing is now it’s everywhere. It’s in fashion shows, it’s in commercials, when you go to a washroom in a hotel, it’s what you listen to. It’s everywhere and it’s becoming problematic in many ways for me. In the sense that my love of music, was also because the music carries something that’s not exactly revolutionary but it’s about values that are not the values of society. The world I come from is a world that is defined by the relationship between art and politics in a certain way. I think that’s something that’s getting lost now and so I have difficulty adjusting to that…It has do with the innocence of youth which I think the modern means of communication, the obsession with consumption is erasing, is destroying in a certain way. One essential aspect is that there was a belief in the future. People trusted the future. There was this hate, dislike, suspicion of the present, of anything that had to do with the material value of the present in the name of something that would be coming in the history. That’s also why people were so obsessed with political history, because political history of the 20^thcentury told them the lessons that would make them be successful with the revolution that would obviously happen in the very near future. Again, hope means belief in the future, literally. Today it’s something that’s gone. Because this kind of despair or loss of faith because the world is not changing. When you are kids today who grow up listening to politicians on TV or on the radio or in the newspapers, saying how important they are, how they have no grasp on the big issues of the world, how are they going to believe in politics? How are they going to believe that they can do something and change the world for the better? It’s not surprising that they lose faith in that and they lose faith in the future.

JE: Does Gilles sell out at the end of the film?
OA: I don’t think he does. Gilles discovers his true path. He realizes that making movies in the industry is not for him, and eventually there’s an answer in something that has to do with experimental or independent cinema. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but the reason why I ended up making movies is because somehow movies are about some kind of collective utopia, something you do together. It’s collective; it’s art you can share with people from all parts of society. In the context of independent filmmaking, when you are on a film set you’re working with people who are there not because they’re doing a job, it’s because people love what they do, and they want to be part of something bigger than them. I found a way through cinema, through independent cinema, to find a way to pursue the hopes of the utopias of the ’70s.

JE: What’s next?
OA: Next for me is a movie I will be doing with Juliette Binoche. It’s not the ’70s again; it’s today, it’s contemporary. [Laughs.] …It’s about acting, it’s about the relationship between reality and acting. Juliette plays a stage actress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

 

  

                  

 

                       

 

 

 

LAFF 2012: THE FIRST MAN

Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) The First Man.

The rebel

By Ed Rampell

I have many lead sentence ideas competing in my feverish noggin to launch this review with, so I’ll begin by declaring: writer-director Gianni Amelio’s adaptation of philosopher-writer Albert Camus’ The First Man is the best picture I’ve seen so far at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2012. It is sort of Francois Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows meets Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, with a little bit of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 You Can’t Go Home Again tossed in for good measure.

Like Wolfe’s posthumously published book, Camus’ novel was autobiographical and unfinished when he died an untimely death at age 46 in a 1960 car accident. Shortly after The First Man opens Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin), a Camus-like prominent writer in France, returns to his hometown of Algiers. Just as Wolfe received a hostile reception at his hometown of Asheville after his tell all about these secretive North Carolinians’ sins, scandals, etc., Cormery is plunged into Algeria’s bitter division, as Arabs struggle for independence against the French settlers and state. Although Cormery is one of the “pied noir” (the so-called “dark foot” settlers of French origin) he speaks out in favor of a “just” and “equal” Algeria during his return visit -- much to the chagrin of some settlers. (This was a very brave if dangerous thing to do, even back in France, where French supporters of Algerian liberation, such as Camus’ fellow Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, faced death threats.)

Despite being warned for security reasons to lodge in a hotel, Cormery stays in the family apartment with his loving if illiterate mother, played as an old woman by Catherine Sola. As a solo mom whose husband -- like Camus’ actual father -- was killed during World War I when her son (Nino Jouglet) was an infant, Catherine (poignantly played as a young woman by Maya Sansa) raises little Jean with the help of her simpleminded laborer brother (Nicolas Giraud) and the strict family matriarch (Ulla Baugue). In real life, Camus’ mom was a deaf mute, but although Jean’s screen mother isn’t, the difficulties of his Algiers childhood are movingly evoked. And like all the troubled children depicted in French cinema, he grows up to become a great artiste (Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and, in that motion picture Parisian tradition, is shown going to the movies.

The First Man alternates between 1950s Algeria and Cormery’s 1920s childhood. There is a seaside scene reminiscent of the ending of The 400 Blows and checkpoint and café scenes suggestive of The Battle of Algiers. (By the way, it bears noting that Algeria has played a distinguished if little commented upon role in film history, from Pontecorvo’s revolutionary masterpiece to the 1969 Oscar-winner, Z, to 2006’s Days of Glory,2011’s Free Men, and now this stellar feature, etc.)

The film’s denouement may seem abrupt or even disorienting, but this may be the filmmaker’s way of indicating that the source work, Camus’ novel, was cut short and incomplete. In any case, The First Man is excellently acted and co-stars Denis Podalydes as young Jacques’ mentor. In 2011 Podalydes portrayed the recently and happily deposed French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011’s also superb, The Conquest (offscreen the activist actor campaigned for the Socialist candidates, including the contender who just beat Sarkozy, Francois Hollande). Gamblin is reflective as Camus’ adult alter ego, and he appeared in another recent great film, The Names of Love, a personal favorite, wherein Gamblin romanced a part-Algerian woman played by sexy Sara Forestier. Jouglet does excellent work, too.

Of course, the greatest existential question of all time is: Would you walk a mile for a Camus? Indeed, when it comes to The First Man, not even a plague should stop you -- strap on your shoes and run, don’t walk, to go see this beautifully shot (by cinematographer Yves Cape) Camus biopic of sorts about coming of age and dealing with revolutionary upheaval in a dignified, honorable way. Don’t’ be a stranger to a movie based on the last novel by and about the author who wrote The Stranger and The Plague.


The First Man screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23, 2 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

  

 

  

  

 

LAFF 2012: WORDS OF WITNESS

Heba Afify and others in Words of Witness.

Happy is she who can give herself up

By Miranda Inganni

During 2011’s “Arab Spring,” filmmaker Mai Iskandar (Garbage Dreams) travelled to Egypt to witness firsthand what the country was experiencing. Upon meeting Heba Afify, a young journalist for Almasry Alyoum, the English version of Egypt’s leading independent publication, Iskandar found a voice to tell the story of the country’s remarkable upheaval. And so the documentary, Words of Witness, came to fruition.

Afify, as her mother frequently reminds her, is from a good family and a young woman. Having wanted to be a writer from a young age, 22-year-old Afify must endure her mother’s remarks that while she recognizes that her daughter is a journalist, she is first and foremost “still a girl.” Despite her mother’s overly-maternal concern, Afify’s intent is to tell the news and educate her fellow Egyptians of the changes as they happen. With the contemporary trappings available to most young adults, Afify texts, emails, posts and tweets the story of an uprising.

Using Afify’s cell phone footage along with the footage shot by Iskandar, Words of Witness is raw without being naïve. With a country in flux, on the edge of the unknown, Afify gives off a sense of hope and integrity. While she is indeed young, Afify takes risks to get to the point of the matter, while being mindful of her mother’s concern. (Interestingly, her father supports his daughter's actions and encourages her to break her mother’s rules.) She is not simply some dumb kid daring to face opposing government, civilian and military forces for the sake of adrenalin or fame, but rather an observer of adversity and revolution who awakens hope.


Words of Witness screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 17, 2:40 p.m., Regal Cinemas; June 20, 7:40 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

LAFF 2012: THE IRAN JOB



Kevin Sheppard in The Iran Job.

More than just a game 

By John Esther

After a formidable college career in basketball, Kevin Sheppard played the game for various teams outside of the United States, but nothing would prepare him for the ordeal after he was hired to play for A.S. Shiraz in the land of Iran.

One of two non-Iranian players on the team (the other, his roommate, is Serbian), Sheppard feels like an outcast. He does not speak Farsi and his coach does not speak English. And the team is a lot worse than anything he has played with in a long time. His girlfriend is back in the States and people do not celebrate the same holidays here. However, the coach, the players and the fans have great expectations for the expansion team to do what no Iranian basketball expansion team in the league has ever done: make it to the playoffs.

As we watch Sheppard transform his team on the court toward success, the documentary captures Sheppard transforming into a real man off the court. Sure, Sheppard is charming and gregarious, but when he first arrived in Iran he was not exactly culturally sensitive to the country. For example, he thinks it clever to repeatedly refer to a Persian man as Saddam – as in Saddam Hussein, the ex-Iraqi dictator, who was Arabic (and there was that 1980s war between Iran and Iraq after Iran was invaded by Iraq -- with US government approval). But set against some of the recent political uprisings, Sheppard sees that these are people, often young people his age, living in a country under a very harsh government, who are oppressed in a country the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the U.S. could annihilate if need be.

Bristling with charm, fun and insight, director Till Schauder's The Iran Job works as a rare breed of cinema: a documentary featuring sports with some political currency.

The Iran Job screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival tonight, 7:10, Virgin America Theatre; June 17, 6:50 p.m. Regal Cinemas; June 24, 3:30 p.m., Regal Cinemas.



LALIFF 2011: CHICO & RITA

A scene from Chico Y Rita.

True-ba-loney

By Ed Rampell 

Chico & Rita is another Cuban-music themed film, although it is actually an animated feature, not a doc, co-directed/co-written by Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (director of 1992’s Belle Epoque starring Penelope Cruz).

Chico & Rita's animation is stellar, vividly bringing to life the Havana, Manhattan, Paris and Las Vegas of the 1940s/1950s. The music, too, makes this film worth seeing. However, the script leaves much to be desired. The Havana of bygone days looks glamorous, especially in comparison to today’s Cuban capital, which looks drab and shabby. Well, half a century of embargo may or may not do that to you, but the film's Havana of yesterday is largely devoid of that grinding poverty that inspired, oh you know, that little thing we call “revolution.” It wasn’t all mambo and showgirls under Cuban dictator and U.S. puppet Fulgencio Batista, don’tchaknow?

The love story between a pianist and singer is also remarkably stupid and senseless, full of celluloid stereotypes and completely absent of the sense of the ongoing bond a romantic relationship can generate between two people. The movie’s notion of love is, well, cartoonish; there’s a big difference between true, lasting love and obsession, don’tchaknow? 

But again, having said this, if you can overlook these points Chico & Rita is a fiesta for the eyes and ears, with some of the most compelling cartoon, animated erotic imagery since R. Crumb and Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 Fritz the Cat.  

NBFF 2011: BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS

Sum Chung-yang (Donnie Yen) in Bodyguards and Assassins.

Re(a)d history

By John Esther

After a 40-minute delay, the Newport Beach Film Festival screened (somewhat incompetently: wrong ratio aspects, reel-changing snafus) the 140-minute film, Bodyguards and Assassins, to a surprisingly half-empty theater. Notwithstanding the delay, it was a Saturday afternoon, it was the festival's only screening of the epic film, it featured martial arts star Donnie Yen (Hero; Ip Man) and the 2009 film has not been set for a U.S. theatrical release. I presumed the theater would be packed to capacity. 

(The film will screen at both the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival in May.) 

Directed by Teddy Chan, Bodyguards and Assassins sets itself in British-rule Hong Kong, 1906, where a group of dedicated democrats pledge to protect Dr. Sun Wen (Zhang Hanyu) from a group of Qing assassins dedicated to the kind of law and order we see tyrannical rulers trying to preserve currently in Syria, Iran and Libya. And China.

For those seeking nonstop martial action and little else, look elsewhere. There is plenty of plot, back story and character development here. Director Chan and writers Tim Nam Chun, Junli Guo, Bing Wu and James Yuen want audiences to know the motivations behind each of the main historical characters, most of which happen to be, legally speaking in U.S. terms, kids. Seventeen-year-old Chong-huang (Wang Po-cheih) is set to attend school in the United States, but would rather stay and fight for a new China. Chow Tofu (Mengke Bateer) is a very big, seemingly invincible teenager from Shaolin moved by anti-authoritarianism. Recently-orphaned Fang Hong (Li Yuchun) learns at the age of 16 what is really important.

A fine film in some regards (impressive set design; crafty fight scenes; dialogue about East versus West values), Bodyguards and Assassins, is suspicious in light of China's current regime. Young characters ready to shed blood for the revolution, the reported $23-million dollar film is not only about learning Chinese history, but also about perpetuating sentiments of China's current revolution for today's youth. Keep up your Red Guard.

Starting from its simplistic title cuing the youth to the queues to see those martial arts queues (both historical and cinematic symbols -- depending on one's age and knowledge of Sino history), once we learn to love, at least like, the characters in Bodyguards and Assassins, the film revs up for some hyperbolic action. The targeted demographic: young viewers. History gets traded for histrionics as the film's protagonists fight with superhuman skills -- fighting multiple-armed people simultaneously and prevailing, withstanding increasing brutality and enduring hardship, all for the future of country. No sacrifice is too great for the children of the revolution. After the main protagonists die we get a bio clip underneath with name, city of origin, year of birth, year of death. Immortalized. 

It is not just the youth here, either. Yen's character, Sum Chung-yang, is an undetermined-aged (how convenient) policeman with a checkered past. A gambler opened to the highest bidder, he, too, learns that he must sacrifice himself for a better tomorrow. When heroes, historical or cinematic, die on the screen, the message of sacrifice to an audience is similar -- if not repetitive to an illiterate viewer.

For Occidental eyes, Bodyguards and Assassins is more of a playful recreation of history than anything else. There is story and action. The good guys and gal prevail before his and her magnanimous deaths and the British Empire takes a chop to the sternum (although it can still get its people to fork over $30 million for a royal wedding). But for those under the rule of China's thumb -- beyond being financially indebted to it -- Bodyguard and Assassins illustrates something else, quite insidious. 

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.