The Battleship Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potёmkin) is Sergei Eisenstein’s second feature film. Produced in 1925 and premiered in January 1926, the film was a watershed moment in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. In addition, in its home context, Potemkin has asserted that experimental montage is the dominant mode of cinematic storytelling in the Soviet 1920s. Likewise, Potemkin asserted, more vociferously than any other early Soviet film, a specific type of relationship between film/art and state ideology. In the international arena, the worldwide success of the film put the Russian and Soviet cinema on a map for the first time. The triumph of Potemkin announced the advent of the short-lived golden age of early Soviet filmmaking style, hallmarked by the aesthetics of short cuts and fast editing that aimed to challenge the viewers’ perception of the world and posit a revolutionary message. Thematically, the film is set around a historical event, the mutiny on the Imperial Navy armored cruiser Prince Potemkin of Tauris, which took place in June 1905. The events are dramaturgically organized in five parts, emulating, as Eisenstein later recalled, the structure of a classical tragedy (see Eisenstein 2010, cited under Typage Acting). These parts were titled as follows: “Men and Maggots” (Liudi i chervi); “Drama on the Quarter-Deck” (Drama na Tendre); “Appeal from the Dead” (Mertvyi vzyvaet); “Odessa Steps” (Odesskaia lestnitsa); and “Meeting the Squadron” (Vstrecha s eskadroi). Each of the parts is endowed with dramatic function and facilitates a transition to a different mood. The events in Part 1 gradually build narrative tension toward a culmination point in Part 2, and, similarly, the events in Part 3 set the scene for the culmination in Part 4, with Part 5 functioning as an epilogue. A believer in traditional aesthetics and concepts such as organicist whole or golden ratio, Eisenstein argued that dramaturgy of the moving image, facilitated through conflicting montage sequences, can deliver the task of revolutionary art, bringing the viewer into a desired psycho-emotional state that would make one susceptible to the right ideological messages. For all these reasons, the apprehension of Potemkin requires the researcher to acknowledge a number of aspects of the film. Given that Potemkin is a historical film par excellence, the relationship between the fictional narrative, historical period under consideration, and historical time of the making of the film ought to be given due attention. In addition, the production history of Potemkin also matters, as it tells much about the position of the film in the nascent Soviet cinematic “dispositive.” Last, but certainly not least, Potemkin is an artistic tour de force that deploys complex cinematic devices, the understanding of which will be a demanding task as well.