We are talking history, we are talking cinema of the
montage, a resurgence of Russian revolt - an epic. So this is tribal....this is
primal....this is Sergei Eisenstein’s battleship Potemkin!. An ostentatious masterpiece,
it’s about a society where injustice and domination leads to mutiny and
emancipation. The film is a powerful deterrent for an ex-soviet citizen
speaking of the times the Russians were facing then. It’s That most famous of
all Russian films, boasting of all the features that were once a trusted
formula in many Hollywood flicks but which have now faded into obscurity while
the unsinkable battleship is almost invariably in pride of place.
In Battleship Potemkin, The powerful communist propaganda
was treated deftly in its portrayal
of a then oppressed Russian society. The history of its release in the west is
trailed with constant attempts by the censors to ban the film. 1954 saw the ban
lifted in Britain.
The film lives revolutionary method of montage
that makes it one of Einstein classic. But it is not answer enough since incendiary
as the event may have been it can’t Willy Nelly its way to proclaiming the
status of numero uno! Even now in the aftermath of the demise of Russian
Communism, the Potemkin battles on. As its two dimensional semblance of bally- hoo festers, the film has hit upon yet
another layer which feeds the eternal need for rabble rousing (protest) against any form of oppression.
When the film was shot, the use of the twelve apostle’s cruiser
had swift impact. For the seven years that saw the film ban from theatres, there
were no free seats in German cinemas. Even as Hitler rose to power, the crowds
in Munich were craving for a glimpse of the battleship!. Goebbels, the German propaganda
minister, called on German film-makers to channel Eisenstein’s brilliance in
their own films saying, “I am convinced that if some cinema showed a film which
portrayed our epoch in a true way, and if it was a true national socialist
Potemkin, in such a cinema all the tickets would be sold Battleship Potemkin would
fall flat as poll was called for. Film makers are not too fond of the montage
technique anymore, it being dispersed and demystified - becoming a truism. Andrei
Tarkovsky, the much celebrated master of “post Stalin” Soviet Cinema, publicly
depreciated montage as effeminate and artless, because it
"buttonholes", the audience and does not amount to an accurate
entirety. The film doesn’t entertain a linear narrative and thought its black
and white the absence of shading rather than color is an
People from post war era are much more used to a
three-dimensional depiction of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy, members of
which were shown advocating decadence, romance, confusion and decline making
them more human than some mighty, relentless and outright revolutionaries. Adaptations
of Chekov, Bondarchuk and Balgakov were frequently staged and televised
inspiring nobility with profound implications. The film on the other hand cultivates
a rather subliminal and streamlined story of real events, acted by dull,
two-dimensional marionettes but nonetheless it was heartfelt to me for the way
it harbors the need to disobey and strive for freedom against any form of
inhuman oppression. Not for its numerous interpretations of reality, nor its
montage technique. All of us have that basic instinct to crush that which holds
us back; establish justice. Potemkin is more “anarchy” than “Communism” - more
“early Christianity” than “Marxism-Leninism”. The film only pictures what
triggered the mutiny on the ship – (the rotten meat) rather than explain the
reasons for the revolution. Even then some scenes from the film strike upon
orthodox icons – that lady with the murdered child as the reification of Mary,
the mother of Jesus , benign citizens as modern martyrs And the battleship
firing its mighty cannons at the tyrants is perhaps the image of God punishing
the evil-men. The turbulence that Russia faces as Political chaos clouds the
country almost a century after the film is not too different from the images in
Eisenstein’s Potemkin!