Here’s another movie I’ve always wanted to watch. Hope you can join us for today’s movie.
In common with the beginning of Touch of Evil, the end of Some Like It Hot and the middle of Psycho, there is a sequence some way into Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin that has overshadowed the work as a whole and infiltrated the consciousness even of those who have not seen the entire film. Eisenstein set out to tell the story of a 1905 naval mutiny, a key moment in the Russian revolution, which was sparked by the serving of rotten meat to the crew of the Potemkin. But it was the episode which follows the crew’s arrival in Odessa, and the solidarity shown to them by the oppressed civilians, that has earned the picture its legendary standing. Before it was paid homage to in The Untouchables and spoofed in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, the “Odessa Steps” sequence had for many decades served as the definitive masterclass in movie editing, admired by luminaries such as John Grierson and Alfred Hitchcock. It still merits that status, crammed as it is with fundamental lessons in the manipulation of rhythm and suspense through cutting, changes in shot length and position, camera movement and close-up.
It’s a six-minute lesson in Eisenstein’s montage technique, where our responses are steered and dictated by the unstoppable momentum of the editing. As the Tsar’s soldiers march on civilians (an incident which never actually happened), the eye widens just to keep up with the action; the speed of the cuts and the frenzy of each frame makes it seem as though the action will spill from the screen. When the sequence ends with a close-up of a woman bleeding from behind her shattered glasses, it feels like a sick joke on what the images have done to us; we can well sympathise with the sensation of optical assault.
Of course, there is more to the film than simply that sequence. If there were not, it could hardly have survived its endless revivals and regenerations—including a screening in Trafalgar Square in 2004 to the accompaniment of a new Pet Shop Boys score. You could blame the techniques Eisenstein used here and in Strike for much of the stroboscopic editing that has dominated Hollywood for the past 30 years, but that would be to miss the beauty, clarity and rage of his methods. The film still stands as a distillation of all that was revolutionary about this filmmaker, and all that can still be revolutionary in cinema.
