A corner stone of cinematographic art but too romantic a story

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2008)

EISENSTEIN  POTEMKINE Ir is a technical masterpiece. Eisenstein managed to do with the camera he had at the time things that no one else managed to even come close to. That's why this film must be watched and studied. The subject is romantic and it was done as pure propaganda, and the later Soviet period could not resist adding some good old narrow-minded commentary. But the film has some scenes that are so well done that we are wondering how it was possible. The baby perambulator going down the hundreds of steps in that staircase leading to the harbor is phenomenal. The way the actors are able to express thousands of emotions with no words, just body and face language is admirable. If you want to understand how humanity can see its future in a lighter color than the dark grey of today, Eisenstein is the man to demonstrate that creativity has no limits, no borders and that for these imaginative minds the sky and only the sky is the limit. But I have completely lost any sympathy for the romanticism of life and the world. No matter what we do there will always be some violence in human society and there are so many forms of violence that we can't even enumerate them all. Just ask the Ossetes who speak an Indo-Ruropean language and were called descendants of Iranians by some French paper lately: actually all Indo-European people and languages are descendants of the Indo-Iranian languages. So what? But to use that affiliation for the Ossetes right now and after the Russians have accepted their pledge for independence is an attempt to make them look like fanatics. That is violence. That is absurd. And compare the Ossetes and the Tibetans and then you see the difference in treatment. That is violence too. But that kind of violence is considered normal by the west.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines