Battleship Potemkin (1925)
(Bronenosets Potyomkin)
Country: USSR
Technical: bw 75m (16fps)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Cast: A. Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov
Synopsis:
The dramatised account of a mutiny which broke out in the Black Sea during the 1905 revolution, temporarily threatening the port of Odessa.
Review:
Eisenstein's film, like Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, shows that failed revolutions make better art than successful ones. It is celebrated still for its use of dialectic montage, soon to be known simply as Soviet montage, primarily in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Cossack infantry and cavalry brutally put down a peaceful profession of solidarity on the part of the populace for the action of the mutineers. The rest of the film makes for fitfully palatable drama, but as a whole it has been rendered bulletproof by decades of critical adulation. It was not the first treatment of the incident in the movies: Lucien Nouquet produced a 'from the headlines' treatment as early as 1905, in La Révolution en Russie (qv).
(Bronenosets Potyomkin)
Country: USSR
Technical: bw 75m (16fps)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Cast: A. Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov
Synopsis:
The dramatised account of a mutiny which broke out in the Black Sea during the 1905 revolution, temporarily threatening the port of Odessa.
Review:
Eisenstein's film, like Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, shows that failed revolutions make better art than successful ones. It is celebrated still for its use of dialectic montage, soon to be known simply as Soviet montage, primarily in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Cossack infantry and cavalry brutally put down a peaceful profession of solidarity on the part of the populace for the action of the mutineers. The rest of the film makes for fitfully palatable drama, but as a whole it has been rendered bulletproof by decades of critical adulation. It was not the first treatment of the incident in the movies: Lucien Nouquet produced a 'from the headlines' treatment as early as 1905, in La Révolution en Russie (qv).
(Bronenosets Potyomkin)
Country: USSR
Technical: bw 75m (16fps)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Cast: A. Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov
Synopsis:
The dramatised account of a mutiny which broke out in the Black Sea during the 1905 revolution, temporarily threatening the port of Odessa.
Review:
Eisenstein's film, like Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, shows that failed revolutions make better art than successful ones. It is celebrated still for its use of dialectic montage, soon to be known simply as Soviet montage, primarily in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Cossack infantry and cavalry brutally put down a peaceful profession of solidarity on the part of the populace for the action of the mutineers. The rest of the film makes for fitfully palatable drama, but as a whole it has been rendered bulletproof by decades of critical adulation. It was not the first treatment of the incident in the movies: Lucien Nouquet produced a 'from the headlines' treatment as early as 1905, in La Révolution en Russie (qv).