Battleship Potemkin (Goskino, Mosfilm, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I turned on the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase,” which this time wasn’t an obscure or little-known (or recently rediscovered) movie but a film that has been part of the lingua franca of cinema since it was originally made: Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from 1925. Commissioned by the government of the Soviet Union to commemorate the unsuccessful revolution against the Tsarist regime in 1905 (in Soviet iconography 1905 was acclaimed as the precursor to 1917, the event that revealed the vulnerability of the Tsarist state and the inevitable – at least in Soviet historiography – success of the Bolsheviks in 1917). I first saw Eisenstein’s revolutionary movies Potemkin and October (the 1928 film that was intended for the 10th anniversary of 1917 but got delayed because Stalin took over and insisted that the actors playing Trotsky and his allies be removed from the film) at the Surf Theatre in San Francisco in 1970 and was as impressed at the sheer rhythm of these films as the sophisticated “montage” style of editing Eisenstein used and a lot of subsequent filmmakers copied.

It’s also a weird time to be watching Battleship Potemkin because – unlike Germany, which overcame its authoritarian history and started a functioning and lasting democracy in 1949 – Russia has remained mired in authoritarianism, first under the Tsars, then under the Soviets and now under the Right-wing dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Right now thousands of Russians are daring the repression of the Putin regime and marching in the streets to protest Putin’s arrest of Alexei Navalny, his principal political opponent, who was poisoned by a Russian nerve agent, was sent to Germany to be treated and for reasons at once admirably heroic and utterly stupid returned to Russia on January 17 and was immediately arrested – as were his family and friends. The reminder that whatever form it takes, Russia remains a relentlessly authoritarian country puts a far different spin on Battleship Potemkin than both Eisenstein and the Soviet cultural bureaucrats who greenlighted it intended: not the triumph of a revolution but a reminder that these battles have to be fought again and again and again in the face of a relentless dictatorship that only seems to hone its repressive skills with each new incarnation.

One of the ironies of Battleship Potemkin is that the ship on which it takes place (and which some incarnations of the film have referred to as an “armored cruiser” rather than a battleship) is named after the chief adviser to Catherine the Great, the founder of the concept of “Potemkin villages” – fake towns he had erected along the way as she made her royal progresses through Russia so she would think her people were living better than they actually were. To add to the irony, the actual Potemkin had been scrapped in 1922 and Eisenstein was forced to shoot his movie on another battleship from the same era called The Twelve Apostles – and one of the principal villains in the movie is an Orthodox priest who serves aboard the ship and tries to talk the sailors out of complaining about their lousy food and overall conditions by saying any questioning of their officers’ authority was “against God.” Battleship Potemkin is also an example of what Russian filmmakers called “typage” – casting people in the movie who looked like (and often actually were) what the script called for instead of using professional actors – and the non-star ensemble casting Eisenstein and his contemporaries used to challenge the whole idea of “great men” and insist that the great social changes were achieved by the masses themselves without traditional “leaders.” (When Stalin took over and started creating his “cult of personality,” that part of the Soviet “line” changed in a hurry!) The closest person this movie has to a star role, the sailor Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov), gets killed midway through when the officer corps impales him on a grappling hook and drowns him as an example to the other sailors to get them to stop their mutiny – and the sailors exhibit his body on the shore of Odessa, with a sign reading “Dead for a Bowl of Borscht” (earlier versions of this film just said “soup,” but this one’s titles specify it) to build popular support for their mutiny.

Battleship Potemkin is in five parts, dealing first with the rotten food the sailors are served, including maggot-infested meat and bread so stale it’s virtually unchewable; their determination to demand better rations and their refusal to eat the spoiled borscht put before them; their successful mutiny (I suspect Eisenstein had seen F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu since there are a couple of long-shots of two officers that make them look like the vampire on board a ship in Murnau’s classic), the gathering of the sailors’ on-shore supporters on the Odessa steps, the famous (and oft-quoted – Woody Allen parodied it in his film Bananas) scene of Tsarist troops massacring the sailors’ supporters; and a final scene in which the sailors on the other ships the Tsarist navy has sent to recapture the Potemkin and kill the mutineers instead refuse to fire on their comrades and join the revolution instead. Battleship Potemkin is an acknowledged classic that holds up even though our current feelings about the Russian revolutions are considerably more mixed than those presented here (it doesn’t help that we’re all too well with the historical sequel – the repression, the political murders, the Gulag). A lot of people who saw it in 1925 were impressed with the movie even if they detested the Soviet regime it was propagandizing for, and it remains a seminal film in movie history and technique even though I think Eisenstein’s next film, October (released in the U.S. as Ten Days That Shook the World to capitalize on John Reed’s best-selling book, even though the book and the film have nothing in common except both being depictions of the same historical events), is his masterpiece.