Barnes & Noble

The great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein created a perfect synthesis of political themes and progressive film theory in his silent 1925 masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. This seminal film tells the story of a mutiny of oppressed sailors aboard a Russian battleship in 1905, portrayed here as an important step toward the nationwide Bolshevik Revolution that would occur a decade later. Eisenstein was one of the 20th century's foremost film theorists, and Potemkin is a vivid example of the power of his approach. The centerpiece of his technique was montage, and Potemkin has enough separate shots and cuts for a dozen conventional narrative films, each designed to have a carefully calculated effect. Subtlety of acting is deliberately avoided; all characters function as clearly defined types. The resulting pace and rhythm is mesmerizing and undeniably effective, guiding (some would say manipulating) the viewer through a series of precisely planned emotional reactions. Good and evil are clearly defined here, and the story's clear moral perspective and total lack of ambiguity puts Potemkin squarely in the realm of propaganda. Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest propaganda film ever made. The famous sequence on Odessa's seafront steps, where czarist soldiers ruthlessly massacre innocent civilians, ranks as one of the most famous single sequences in the history of film. Required viewing for any student of cinema, Potemkin is, shot for shot, among the most closely studied films in history. It dazzles, though, in any viewing context. Gregory Baird

All Movie Guide

After the success of Strike (1924), Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a film commemorating the uprising of 1905. Eisenstein's scenario, boiled down from what was to have been a multipart epic of the occasion, focussed on the crew of the battleship Potemkin. Fed up with the extreme cruelties of their officers and their maggot-ridden meat rations, the sailors stage a violent mutiny. This, in turn, sparks an abortive citizens' revolt against the Czarist regime. The film's centerpiece is staged on the Odessa Steps, where in 1905 the Czar's Cossacks methodically shot down rioters and innocent bystanders alike. To Eisenstein, this single bloody incident was the crucible of the successful 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the result was the "Odessa Steps sequence," which is often considered the most famous sequence ever filmed; it is certainly one of the most imitated, perhaps most overtly by Brian De Palma in The Untouchables (1987). This triumph of Eisenstein's "rhythmic editing" technique occurs in the middle of film, not as the climax, as more current film structure might do it. All the actors in the film were amateurs, selected by Eisenstein because of their "rightness" as types for their roles. Pictorial quality varies from print to print, but even in a duped-down version, Battleship Potemkin is must-see cinema. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 014381457421
• Source: IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: monaural, silent
• Time: 1:14:00
• Sales Rank: 44,900

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