The Hauntingly Familiar Battleship Potemkin

Rating: 10/10 (8 November 2019)

The screen has been used to showcase the brutal realities of war since the dawn of the medium, and Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein is one of the earliest examples, dating back to 1925. While grounded in realism, there are several stylistic elements that help to emphasize the emotions, utilizing the surreal to accentuate the reality of the events depicted.
Those events include the unease and revolt against the commanders of the ship, ultimately leading to the death of one the sailors "over a spoonful of borscht!" When the man's body is left in Odessa and news of the events reach the townspeople, crowds become frantic, drawing a military response. The governmental show of force by a government against its own people is depicted in a way that is eerily similar to the footage of the protests happening in Hong Kong today. Based on true events that took place in 1905, Battleship Potemkin depicts the mutiny of a Russian ship told over five acts.
For a silent film, it's incredible how much influence the sound design had on the tone. The orchestral compositions were well-timed and served well as the emotional guide, but impressively went beyond score to act as sound effects as well. As disorder ensues, a man steps on a piano, the sound breaking into the soundtrack, the fires a gunshot which is also audible. Shortly after, symbols crash as the men fall overboard and splash into the ocean. These "real-life" sounds are used sparingly and only during the height of the action, adding to the thrill of the chaos.
Another effective sound device is the impending doom of the ticking clock, gradually accelerating as the tension builds in the final act, the battleship hurtling toward certain disaster. This technique is still being used to great effect in modern war films, such as Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), released nearly one hundred years later.
Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Frank Miller's Sin City (2005) also both iconically used a special effect that worked extremely well in Battleship Potemkin: the single colour in an otherwise black-and-white movie. Eisenstein, of course did not have the same technology available to him at the time, so the director hand-painted each frame himself in order to get the flag to appear red. Impossible to miss and eye-catching to say the least, one can only imagine how incredible the effect must have appeared at the original time of release.
Battleship Potemkin covers the full range of what a good war film should be and manages to achieve that in such a way that modern films aspire to match, inspiring rage and hope in equal measure, and allowing the audience an outlet to come to terms and cope with the atrocities of war.