Battleship Potemkin is a film classic that gets reduced to the Odessa steps sequence. Even if you’ve never seen Battleship Potemkin, you’ve seen that sequence or a reference of it in another movie like The Untouchables. Even though I am fairly certain that I’ve probably seen the entire movie, I decided to watch Battleship Potemkin before it expires on Netflix on October 1st.
I know very little about Russian history, and after watching a film, I usually do a brief bout of research to learn more about the background, production and critical reception of the film. Here are some fun facts that I learned about the movie. Battleship Potemkin is based on a historical event that predated the Bolshevik Revolution. Sergei Eisenstein, the director, believed in montage and not central characters. Battleship Potemkin was consciously a piece of Soviet propaganda. Many of the most memorable moments such as the Odessa steps sequence and throwing a tarp over a group of condemned men came from Eisenstein’s imagination.
But did I like it? Battleship Potemkin is an objectively impressive film, even for a silent film, but I don’t like it for what it accomplished. Battleship Potemkin condemns the dehumanization of the masses by the elite when they make condemned men faceless or act like a machine against women, children and disabled then is guilty of same dehumanization of the elite by only showing legs or their buildings whereas in early sequences, the elite is at least embodied by the ship’s officers and chaplain. On one hand, American movies take it to the other extreme by reducing complex social problems into a single villain, but it is similarly problematic and erroneously reductive to make an entire group as a problem/bad and another group as good instead of a systemic and bureaucratic frame of reference that makes one group privileged and another not.
I did enjoy the representation of gas lighting of the crew. The crew claims that the meat is rotten and filled with maggots. Based on a system of rules that requires the blind obedience, instead of receiving common sense input from the lower ranked members of the crew, the leadership and chaplain delegitimize their authority by trying to recharacterize the truth- the food is fine, and the crew is rebellious. Some of the most powerful juxtaposition images of condemnation are directed at religious slogans, the cross, which looks more like a sharp weapon, and the cowardly chaplain who pretends to be unconscious during the battle.
Side note: most of the sailors were buff and hot. The imagery of maintaining the ship was quite sexual. Why so many images of men sleeping at the beginning and the end of Battleship Potemkin?
While I can appreciate its objective brilliance, I would not willingly return for repeat viewing like Vampyr or Metropolis. Still, at 75 mins, Battleship Potemkin is must see viewing for any film lovers who respect their elders.