A sense of proportion

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2007)

I don't want to be controversial just for the sake of it, but I have to ask if this really is the classic it is supposed to be.
It is often quite exciting in a purely visceral way and has some striking images and memorable sequences (the Odessa Steps being the most celebrated), but has little or no emotional depth and is rarely moving.
In essence it is a piece of fairly crude Communist propaganda, so its undoubted technical merits have to be seen in the light of what it was promoting. In 1925, the worst may still have been in the future but the Leninist wind had been sown and the Stalinist whirlwind was soon to be reaped. I feel as uncomfortable praising this movie as praising Leni Riefenstal's work.
As for its technical merits, have they not also been somewhat overblown? Of course, Eisenstein orchestrates images very well and any film company in the world at that time would have been happy to employ him. But as good as he was, there were many other film-makers doing similar things and sometimes doing them just as well.
If this movie has had any lasting influence on cinema (which is doubtful) it is probably on second unit directors, shooting crowd scenes and action sequences, rather than on other major artists. Some of the most striking moments (the famous lion statues, for example) were pure silent cinema and within a couple of years these 'innovations' were largely redundant.
The irony is that Eisenstein's own masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, has far more in common with Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc than it does with this movie. Similarly, more recent Russian directors like Tarkovsky were more influenced by Ivan than by Battleship.
I suspect this picture was lionised chiefly by critics and cultural pundits who were only occasional movie-goers and who were once memorably described by Andrew Sarris as 'slummers from the other arts'. In short, people who had no real idea how movies were made and had seen very few of the other movies that were crucial benchmarks for a proper evaluation of this one. They credited Eisenstein with inventing what all half-decent movie-makers had routinely been doing for a decade.
Battleship Potemkin is undoubtedly of some historical interest, but it is not a great work of art (by a long stretch), it is not nearly as original or innovative as movie-illiterates have often claimed and its ultimate impact on the development of movie technique has been hugely overestimated.
This movie is certainly worth watching at least once or twice on its own merits. It won't disappoint.
But let us keep a sense of proportion, please!