Amazon.com Essentials:
Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary sophomore feature has so
long stood as a textbook example of montage editing that many have
forgotten what an invigoratingly cinematic experience he created. A
20th-anniversary tribute to the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein portrays
the revolt in microcosm with a dramatization of the real-life mutiny
aboard the battleship Potemkin. The story tells a familiar
party-line message of the oppressed working class (in this case the
enlisted sailors) banding together to overthrow their oppressors (the
ship's officers), led by proto-revolutionary Vakulinchuk. When he
dies in the shipboard struggle the crew lays his body to rest on the
pier, a moody, moving scene where the citizens of Odessa slowly emerge
from the fog to pay their respects. As the crowd grows Eisenstein
turns the tenor from mourning a fallen comrade to celebrating the
collective achievement. The government responds by sending soldiers
and ships to deal with the mutinous crew and the supportive
townspeople, which climaxes in the justly famous (and often imitated
and parodied) Odessa Steps massacre. Eisenstein edits carefully
orchestrated motions within the frame to create broad swaths of
movement, shots of varying length to build the rhythm, close-ups for
perspective and shock effect, and symbolic imagery for commentary, all
to create one of the most cinematically exciting sequences in film
history. Eisenstein's film is Marxist propaganda to be sure, but the
power of this masterpiece lies not in its preaching but its
poetry. --Sean Axmaker
