Battleship Potemkin on DVD
Sergei Eisenstein's 1926 Classic Is Restored And Released By Kino
It's existed in various versions for years. Now, Eisenstein's classic is unleashed in its most definitive form to date.
She Sails Again
It sails again, the mighty Battleship Potemkin, first launched in 1925 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Russia's October Revolution. Since then, it has weathered dangers from Stalinist censors to indifferent distributors, but has managed to keep afloat in a number of patchy incarnations.
Now, she is as sturdy as ever, thanks to her most extensive restoration yet, including frames formerly filed forgotten and her original musical score. Kino, the venerable DVD classic and foreign film distributor, will be launching her in the coming weeks, and once again we will be fully privy to her persuasive brand of intellectual showmanship.
In-Your-Face Propaganda
Sergei Eisenstein's muscular masterpiece was an enormous international success upon its initial release, and has lasted the ages despite the increased polarization of international politics. This, of course, is largely due to the film's still-impressive editing, at once clever, crass, self-conscious, and subversive.
This showy piece of in-your-face propaganda recounts the tale of the 1905 mutiny aboard the Odessa - a not insignificant baby step in Russia's march to a new political order - and its ugly Cossack v. proletariat aftermath. Save for the mouthy sailor Vakulinchuk (and this being a silent film, by "mouthy" I mean he has the most title cards,) the film is without a human hero; it's very much the Russian equivalent of the simplest of American "Hearts and Flowers" melodramas, with white hats pitted against black. The villains, in fact - the officer class - twirl their elongated moustaches and gnash their misaligned teeth like so many Simon Legrees.
The Odessa Steps
Anything truly human is reserved for the film's fourth (of six in this restoration) acts, after the iconic battle aboard the ship in which everything - religion in the form of a soothsayer-style priest, art in the form of a much maligned piano, the self in the form of Vakulinchuk's martyr-like murder - is sacrificed for the cause. Only then do we get close-ups that truly evoke empathy, as every sympathetic sector of society is systematically slaughtered in a public protest know as the famous Odessa steps sequence.
Perhaps only this stylized way of shooting and cutting could convey the true, surreal madness of the cold blooded killing of children and seniors. If this sequence - with its mega manipulative capper: the runaway baby carriage sent helplessly down the steps - has been so widely imitated (insert reference to Brian DePalma here) it's because filmmakers past and present have never wrestled its gimmicky grandiosity out of their collective craw. Eighty some years later, they are still planning and shooting select parts of it for their own ends, the same way primitives once drew animals against cave walls in order to figure out how to hunt them down.
The Film Today
The film's final minutes - in which the Potemkin makes a convert out of a ship sent to destroy it - may be necessary but it is definitely anti-climactic, and, dare I say it, that least Russian of things, grossly sentimental. Already one longs for more of the metaphoric inserts, unforgiving close-ups, and accelerated cubism that marked the film's most virtuosic sequences.
Still, it takes nothing away from the film's greatness - though one must wonder how this communist-rouser plays in its land of origin today. As an invalid promissory note? Perhaps. If so, then the film is just another broken off piece of the Soviet Union, another once great technical achievement gone to rust and contempt. It belongs to only one world now, its full, original value valid only in the annals of cinema.
