Shatters preconceptions of silent cinema

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2008)

So, I approached this in the way I guess people might approach silent movies - as something that was going to be clunky but quite interesting. I'd seen Metropolis - I thought I knew the form.
I was impressed with the way Eisenstein captured everyday events on board the Potemkin. It has none of the fierce narrative drive of later movie, leaving the director free to show whatever he wants, anything he believes to be visually arresting. The use of boiling soup as a visual metaphor for conditions on board ship is inspired.
The propaganda aspects verged between odd and amusing. Make no mistake this is a communist film. the crazy priest with the wild hair showing the communist disapproval of religion. At times it verges on the unbelievable - could one cry of "Comrades!" really stop an entire firing squad? And then I got to the most famous sequence - The Odessa steps. And that was where all my tolerant amusement shattered and fell to pieces.
The Odessa steps sequence is savage. It's brutal. Like Salvador Dali's Un chien Andalu, it remains shocking even to this day. Blood, carnage and brutality. And of course, a baby in a pram falls to its death, in one has to be one of the most renown sequences in cinema.
You may thing you've heard enough about this film, but you really have to see it to believe it. Impressive to this day.