Battleship Potemkin

Introspective Peasants Revolting... Actually

Battleship Potemkin
aka Bronenosets Potyomkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
USSR 1925 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a few decades since I last revisited Sergei Eisenstein’s oft voted ‘number one film of all time’ classic Battleship Potemkin. So I thought, with the recent Blu Ray release by the BFI of the film coupled with the score that Red Ken, the then mayor of London, commissioned from the Pet Shop Boys for a free live performance accompanying the film in Leicester Square on 12th September 2004, this was a good opportunity to take another look. Although I bought the original CD album of this piece when it was released back then (which is also included in this recent BFI release, along with the Blu Ray), I’d never heard this particular score with the context of the images it was meant to accompany before. So I’m glad this version finally got a release.

Now, Eisenstein was all about the Russian propaganda of course and, this film made in 1925 was put together to commemorate the anniversary of the failed but inspiring Russian Revolution of 1905. And it was much widely acclaimed and, you can’t ask for much more than to have your movie banned in most countries on the fear that it would spark an uprising amongst the working classes in places like France and so on. Over here in the UK, the ban wasn’t lifted for a while and it was finally granted a release, with an X certificate, presumably to deter a certain section of the cinema going population, in 1954. 

The film is a ferocious beast of a movie in terms of the power of images and ideas, for sure. It’s also a case, for those detractors of the art of silent cinema, for a more naturalistic acting style in that medium... it possibly helps that many of the ‘so called actors’ were in fact common people from the streets and navy of good old mother Russia. There’s certainly not much in the way of overdramatic gesturing in this one. 

The film is split into five sections (translated as thus on this particular iteration of the film)... Men And Maggots, Drama On The Deck, The Dead Man Calls Out, The Odessa Staircase and Rendezvous With The Squadron. And it demonstrates a lot of Eisenstein’s signature directorial flourishes for sure. Obviously, Eisenstein was all about the editing and his cross cut montages... to show, for instance, the hard work of the men on the boat cross cut with the mouldering, maggot infested food they are expected to eat being prepared... are all present and correct.

As, of course, is his method of typeage... casting non-professionals to give them an authentic look as visual shorthand and then inserting them into little vignettes staged apart from the main action but made to look like they are part of it, in order to amplify the emotional context of the movie... like little static inserts whereas a film maker today would probably either zoom in or move the camera within the shot. But there’s a lot to be said for doing it this way too and it’s still an effective way of working, I think... if much abandoned in the method of execution these days. 

But there are other things which I feel are less said about the director’s work than is generally lingered on, due no doubt to the incredible impact of his other techniques. I mean, he was obviously as good as Fritz Lang when it came to directing huge crowds of people in unison but, the shot compositions are pretty good too. Like early in the movie when the diagonal ropes of the sailors hammocks as they sleep below decks are juxtaposed with similar shorts of different angles and then, later, reoccurring in the diagonal lines created by the struts, ropes and staircases on the walkways above.

Plus little details which are picked out such as the fallen crucifix of a wrathful priest embedded in the deck or the dislodged glasses hanging from a rope during the scene where the mutineering rebels take control back from their overseers. 

Then there’s the famous slaughter of the civilians by the police on the steps of the Odessa (not that this moment happened on these steps in real life)... one of the most influential sequences in the history of cinema, much used since and always cropping up in cinematic homage to this day, in a film already overflowing with influential and iconographic imagery (there’s a reason why directors like Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann cite this as their favourite film). 

A brutal and gory sequence with such imagery as the head shot child dying, his mother carrying his body against the troops and also being shot down, the other mother shot and knocking her own baby carriage down the steps (in a fate the actress more or less met in real life 20 years later, when Stalin was having a go at everyone... how many times have we seen this moment reconstructed since?), the woman with the eye shot out and, of course, the montage of the stone lions rearing up from sleep to startlingly awake at last. You can see just why the film is still influential... it’s got some powerful, visual ideas used to push its agenda.

And it’s nice to see this version of the film retains... or perhaps rather recreates... the red coloured flag which Eisenstein himself had hand tinted for the film’s original premiere back in 1925. Which is a very nice touch for modern audiences to see, I think.

As for the score by the Pet Shop Boys... well it’s not bad ‘actually’ and doesn’t, for starters, detract from the movie (I may be hoisted up and taken to task for that but I think it’s fine, sorry). It’s pretty good and well spotted in terms of, for instance, where some sung lyrics might suddenly invade the mix at certain highlights to support and possibly elevate the spirit of revolution which infuses the tale. They could certainly even be accused of Mickey Mousing* it in a few sequences... for good or worse but, again, I think it actually works here.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this recent(ish) Blu Ray presentation of the 2004 UK screening of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I’d like to think the director would have been okay with this freshly scored version and I think it doesn’t do the film any harm... as long as the kiddies who view it today in their new fangled film studies classes (wish we’d had those in my day) realise that the sonic environment of this version is unlike anything that could be heard contemporary to the film’s original release. I think it’s important that people know that before going in. And, if you are aware of that and haven’t seen this version... maybe pick up a copy. It’s still a pretty great movie.

*The once very popular but unfashionable for a while practice of a composer matching notes to catch on screen action in a film... yeah, they mostly all still do it and I don’t think it’s a particular bone of contention anymore, it’s nice to say.