Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Stars: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ivan Bobrov
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, Rovi
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