Micro-review · 1925
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
- Directed by
- Sergei Eisenstein
- Country
- Soviet Union
- Running time
- About 75 minutes
- Our rating
- ★★★★½ 4.5/5
It's propaganda and it's a film-school lecture, and it's also genuinely thrilling. The Odessa Steps sequence is six minutes that every action editor has borrowed from. The maggoty meat close-up still makes people gag. Watch it once for the cutting alone.
The longer review
Battleship Potemkin was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Russian revolution, and it never pretends to be anything else. It tells the story of a mutiny aboard a navy battleship, in five chapters, with the sailors as a collective hero and the officers as cartoon tyrants. It's a film with a message, and it says it loudly.
It starts with meat. The sailors are served rotting beef crawling with maggots, the ship's doctor peers at it through his pince-nez and declares it fine, and the close-up of the maggots is as repellent now as it was in 1925. From there the anger builds, an officer orders a firing squad, the sailors refuse, and the ship belongs to the crew.
Then comes the Odessa Steps. Townspeople gather on a great stone staircase to support the mutineers, and soldiers march down the steps, firing into the crowd. Eisenstein cuts between boots, rifles, faces, a mother carrying her wounded son, and a baby carriage rolling loose. The massacre on the steps is a dramatization, not a documented event, but as a piece of editing it's one of the most studied sequences ever filmed. Eisenstein's theory was that meaning comes from the collision between shots, and here you can watch the theory work.
It's not always easy viewing. There are no individual characters to care about, and the politics are flat. But the rhythm of the cutting, faster and faster, builds a tension most films can't match even now.
Before you watch
Look for a restoration with the Edmund Meisel score, which was written for the film's German release in 1926. The film runs about 70 to 75 minutes.