Posted on May 24, 2011 - by Venik
1929: Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic Potemkin is revolutionary
Film director, Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government to immortalise the Revolution of 1905
A transcript of the review:
Everybody has heard of this film. Few people in England have seen it, and when it came on the screen at the Film Society’s show last Sunday the audience found they were watching the most famous of all Soviet films, familiar by hearsay, many of its scenes well known through reproduction of isolated stills and notorious from frequent bannings.
They found that they had to merge all the facts they knew into witnessing the picture as a whole; they had to see the famous scenes, such as the flight down the steps and the piece of bad meat, in relation to the whole, whilst at the same time recognising these scenes and finding others, that they did not know, were equally beautiful and just as effective. And they had to forget that the film was censored if they were to see it for what it was.
“Potemkin” has more than this. It is important, not for being Soviet propaganda, but for being Soviet kinema
It is curious, but perhaps natural, that though “Potemkin” was for long the only Russian picture about which anything was generally known, little was said about its importance as sheer kinema. There was no idea of what it stood for, of the picture as a whole. It was known to be Soviet propaganda. Various scenes had acquired a disproportionate significance; and so it is quite conceivable that many people, reacting against the vivid experience technically dragged out of them, should think that all they had actually seen was a story in which the population of a town, welcoming a mutinous ship were ruthlessly shot down and should take comfort in knowing that, historically, it was not true to facts.
But “Potemkin” has more than this. It is important, not for being Soviet propaganda, but for being Soviet kinema. While bans exist propaganda is bound to have a distorted significance, but the thing that matters is that Soviet kinema, while being propagandist, contains a use of all the different branches of film-making which is recognised and practised in no other country. This Pudovkin’s “On Film Technique,” reviewed last week, makes clear. But Eisenstein works differently from Pudovkin, and the difference is more radical than might appear. Pudovkin, it has been said, has characters, but Eisenstein has events, and his use of kinema in this direction is entirely new. It remains new in “Potemkin,” when he records the end of St. Petersburg, does so with characters. He uses individuals as symbols of the mass, and by the effect of incidents on the individual he shows the trend of events. The way he does it is his own, but it is a method which is not so revolutionary as Einsenstein’s.
It is the same method which gives us, in “The Crowd,” just one family, just one clerk who thinks he is better than the crowd. We are told that he is one of many, all alike. But we are only shown the one man. The routine, the pleasure, the disappointment, the vanity of the crowd centralise on the one man. And this happens in “The End of St. Petersburg,” where the strike and the revolution are shown by their effect on the peasant from the country who accidentally betrays the people he had hoped to stay with. Technically we see, in watching these films, that the mass is used to light up the central figures, and while we feel that the result is that the central figures are thus able to express the mass, we feel too, I think, that the method is different from the less deserving the word “great” than Eisenstein’s.
(Kinema is the old spelling for cinema.)
(Potemkin is also called the Battleship Potemkin.)
Popularity: unranked [?]
Related posts:
- From the archive: Battleship Potemkin on the screen
- A Room and a Half | Film review
- Khodorkovsky – the unexpected Berlin film festival hit
- Hollywood starts shooting film on Russia-Georgia war
- Mikhail Khodorkovsky film is Berlin festival hit – video
