Old propaganda

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2007)

I love battleships and all the stories about them. This film is hard to watch. Yes, Eisenstein made great filmatic beauty, lo these many years ago, with his play of the camera and his directorship. But it is hard to watch nevertheless, in light of the history that has passed in the 102 years since the events portrayed in the film, and in the 82 years since the film was first released, and in the 18 years since the final fall of the Soviet communist dictatorship that killed so many millions in Russia and in the territories that the Soviet Union dominated for so long. This is not to mention, of course, the nazi-fascist response to communism that killed so many millions more. No mention of this famous, much acclaimed, and truly artistic film can go without a mention of the millions who died as a consequence of the events portrayed here and which in 1917 began and continued for the next six decades until this brutal regime was finally put to rest by the efforts of the United States of American under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan. The scene with the peoples' sailing craft going to the famous Battleship Potemkin is beautifully dramatic, though little do they know the fate that awaits them. The famous and horrifying Odessa steps sequence, one of the most momentous and prescient cinematic displays in moviedom, portrays not only the response to the communist revolution but the communist revolution itself when viewed in the clearer air of the 21st century. Sad as it was that these hundreds were murdered by the "White Russian" soldiers, it pales to white in comparison to the millions killed by the "Red Russians" of the "revolution". The Odessa steps sequence, complete with the baby carriage and baby rolling down the steps is emblematic now not only of the horror of the Imperial Russian reaction to the "revolution" but of the effect of the "revolution" itself. The Battleship Potemkin for all of its supposed greatness, and Eisenstein's artistic genius, is merely another piece of propaganda for the murder and genocide for which the communist "revolution" and its evil spawn the nazi "revolution" were to use to compete with one another in the following decades. The Battleship Potemkin's ready accessibility to the gullible collegians of the 60's and 70's, was just another glorified piece of communist propaganda, so popular then, that has been enshrined into our present age as something we should treasure. Rather, in light of the millions and millions who have suffered and died as a consequence of communism and fascism, this film should be relegated to the ash heap of history along with the works of Mao, Hitler and Marx as mere curiosities, to be studied for what they are, aberrations in the progress of mankind.