Eisenstein’s title cards don’t only provide dialogue or narrative exposition: they also serve an overt didactic purpose, and a title here suggests ‘easy to vent one’s rage on a recruit’. ‘Voted the greatest film of all time by an international panel of critics in Brussels in 1958, as it had been in 1950, POTEMKIN (Russians and purists pronounce it Po-tyom-kin) has achieved such an unholy eminence that few people any longer dispute its merits. After a suspenseful build-up, as the mother approaches closer and closer to the soldiers, appealing to them not to shoot because her child is ill, mother and child are brutally shot down, as are a group of elderly citizens who have followed the mother up the stairs to join in her appeal to the soldiers. Battleship Potemkin study guide contains a biography of Sergei M. Eisenstein, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Perhaps no other movie has ever had such graphic strength in its images, and the young director Sergei Eisenstein opened up a new technique of psychological stimulation by means of rhythmic editing–“montage.”‘ – Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Holt Paperback, 1991), ‘The film once had such power that it was banned in many nations, including its native Soviet Union. Cossacks mounted on horses wait at the bottom of the staircase and join the assault, which turns into a crazed slaughter of the innocent. Here Eisenstein plays simultaneously on two primal fears: the fear of an infant being abandoned by a mother and the fear of a mother who realizes she is helpless to protect her infant. The shots of the woman are all the more disconcerting because Eisenstein has broken another rule of standard film continuity: He has reversed the order of cause and effect. Rather than showing us shots of the soldiers firing and then the woman reacting, Eisenstein shows us the terrified reaction before he reveals the cause. We watch him desperately thrusting himself down the stairs supported only by his arms. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, lines of government soldiers appear at the top of the steps, and begin firing into the crowd. The young mother trapped on the huge flight of stairs with the baby carriage is shot in the stomach. The clashing movements and rhythms of the montage pieces keep the spectator disturbed and off balance, just like a fleeing citizen of Odessa. The Question and Answer section for Battleship Potemkin is a great Part Five: Rendezvous with the SquadronAboard ship, the citizens of Odessa call for the sailors to team up with the army in active and open rebellion against the Tsar. Part Two: Drama on the DeckOfficers and crew assemble on the deck. Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for "assembly" or "editing"). He draws out the mother's agony by devoting 10 shots to her slow and painful death, as her body takes an unnaturally extended time to fall to the ground. The Admiralty squadron has been sent after the Potemkin, however, and so the sailors decide to head out to sea to engage the battle there. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. In this way, through his editing technique, Eisenstein transfers the panic of the people on the steps to the spectator. Eisenstein held that proper film continuity should not proceed smoothly, but through a series of shocks. Part Four: The Odessa StepsThe people of Odessa send fresh food and supplies to the Potemkin as a token of comradery. Having said that, let me say that “Potemkin,” which I have seen many times and taught using a shot-by-shot approach, did come alive for me the other night, in an unexpected time and place […] Under the stars on a balmy summer night, far from film festivals and cinematheques, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 revolutionary call generated some of its legendary rabble-rousing power.’ – ‘Great Movies’ review by Roger Ebert, ‘[…] the dynamic of Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema – of drastic composition and editing fusion – had been displaced (thanks to Murnau, Renoir, Welles, Mizoguchi, Ophuls, and so many others) by fluidity, movement, and duration […] But Eisenstein and his colleagues were working in Russia in 1925, with the horror of tsarism recent enough to demand remedy. This stairway – extending 142 metres, constructed by 1841, and today known as the Potemkin Stairs – stands as the main entrance from the port into the city of Odessa. Hence, he imbued his films with conflict, starting at the most fundamental graphic level. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. But here too, the angled hammocks and overlapping bodies of the sailors resemble Bacon’s paintings of hanging meat. The offending sailors are covered with a tarpaulin, and the firing squad is brought out – as the ship’s priest looks on approvingly, proclaiming ‘Bring the unruly to reason, O Lord!’. At the bottom of the steps murderous Cossacks on horseback armed with swords cut off the escape routes of those who have survived to reach the bottom. Eisenstein, influenced by the experiments in Kuleshov's workshop, was acutely aware of how viewers' mental processes can heighten the emotional power of film. Eisenstein intensifies the spectator's horror (and fascination) at witnessing this spectacle by focusing on the very people who would have the most difficulty escaping from danger on stairs. Then ‘Suddenly…’, there is the first close-up of a shrieking woman’s face; the legless youth scurries down the vast stairway; and everyone is on the move. Learning About The Law Of Attraction And Getting An All Important Holistic Guide Can Have Amazing Benefits For Your Life And Success! While Griffith composed his shots primarily according to the meaning each shot conveyed through the action within the shot, Eisenstein believed that emotional effects derived not just from the content of the shot but also from the way the shot was graphically composed. Advertise Here he explains how his formal choices add to the impact of the film's content: In the first place, noticing the frenzied condition of the people and masses that are portrayed, let us go on to find what we are looking for in structural and compositional indications.
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