Of Men and Maggots...

Rating: 10/10 (6 March 2007)

Battleship Potemkin is by general consensus Eisenstein's masterpiece. Coming between the over-the-top action melodrama of Strike and the formalist documentary style of October, it's the most "normal" looking of his silent films. Rather than being overly stylised it best demonstrates how the montage technique can be used in regular cinematic storytelling.
Eisenstein here takes the editing techniques he perfected in his first film Strike, and uses them to greater effect in telling the story, creating tension and staging action. Whereas the action in Strike was almost relentless, Potemkin contains moments of stillness and calmness which act as a counterpoint to the more exciting situations, making them tenser and more effective. He stretches out time to an incredible extent, sometimes even splitting sentences over two title cards. He also slows things down to give certain scenes greater consideration. The section in which Vakulinchuk's body is brought to the pier and visited by Odessa citizens has a slow tranquillity to it, which gives it an air of sadness.
When Battleship Potemkin does burst into moments of action, the direction is tighter than ever. Looking at the most famous sequence  The Odessa Steps massacre  the scenes of mass panic begin before we are actually shown what is causing them. If you watch closely, you can see how well directed the crowd scenes are. It's not just a hundred or so people dashing madly down the steps, there are also for example some people confusedly trying to cut across the crowd, implying Eisenstein directed the group at the level of individuals, and took real care composing each shot.
On that note, although Eisenstein's silent cinema is characterless and based around the actions of masses of people rather, he still has respect for the individual, and often uses the action or experience of one person to hammer home a message. For example, the opening sequences with the sailors becoming tense and angry all builds up to that one man smashing a plate. Later in the Odessa harbour, shots of the crowd are intercut with close-ups of fists clenching. And of course although the Odessa Steps sequence involves hundreds of people, it's the individuals that we remember most  the mother and child, the woman with the pram, the man with no legs and so on. Eisenstein also makes the impact of the set pieces all the greater by introducing us to these "characters" just prior to the massacre.
Eisenstein's symbolism, which was rather heavy handed in Strike, is here much subtler and cleverer. It is also much more skilfully woven into the narrative. For example, when Vakulinchuk makes his first big speech, he is both literally and metaphorically waking up the other sailors. Later, the boiling soup is used as a metaphor for the sailors seething with rage. Even the title of the first part  the Men and the Maggots can be taken as a reference to the difference between the sailors ("real" men) and the despicable officers who command them.
Eisenstein is also now a little more reserved in his use of artificial cinematic techniques, such as superimpositions and lens masking. These techniques were all over the place in Strike, but here they just crop up once or twice, giving them greater impact when they do appear. It also shows more confidence in his own direction  he doesn't have to rely on cinematic trickery to hold the audience's attention anymore.
Eisenstein's silent pictures are arguably the most totally cinematic of their era. By taking the possibilities of the editing process to their extremes, he follows on from D.W. Griffith to further cut cinema free from its ties to theatre and literature, helping establish it as a unique storytelling form. As a result Eisenstein's other silent pictures sometimes suffer from too much style over substance. However, in Battleship Potemkin, he not only perfects the use of montage, but does so without compromising as much on the drama and storytelling, and that is why it's his best film.