Poetry in Editing

Rating: 10/10 (13 June 2006)

The power of the moving picture, focusing on creating a tightening noose that has become the blueprint of how movies are made and released to audiences today. This is the movie BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, a film that was made in 1925 to commemorate a historic uprising, and one with images so potent that it was banned in several countries because it apparently contained propagandist images. Because of its documentary feel it has effectively led people to believe that the massacre at the Odessa steps actually did happen -- and such is the power of film, the strength of this breathtaking movie.
Divided in five parts, like a Shakespearean play, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN narrates a plot that barely focuses on one character for too long -- a technique that only enhances its symbolism. An uprising on the Potemkin takes place as a protest from the sailors from getting ill-treatment from their superiors and being fed rotting food. The leader of this uprising, a brave sailor, is killed by one of his superiors and transported to the city of Odessa, where civilians are so moved by his plight that they mourn his death (over a bowl of soup) and decide to revolt against the Czarist regime.
At the height of the movie, and the film's most powerful sequence that literally starts with a bang, the Czarist soldiers appear from behind and systematically shoot down the citizens as they run down the Odessa Steps. Of the victims, a couple stand out in abbreviated story lines: a boy who gets separated from his mother who goes back to retrieve him and defiantly walk up the steps to certain death, and most notably, the death of a young mother who's baby, cradled in a carriage, crashes down the steps as the infant cries.
The Odessa Steps sequence is even now a masterpiece of editing, focusing on loose elements to tie in an all-encompassing picture of mounting horror as the faceless, almost inhuman soldiers advance upon them. It creates an overwhelming sense of destructive horror even when never a drop of blood or actual carnage is seen, and because these citizens have been introduced as peaceful, feeble people, it's even more numbing. This sequence has become one of the most imitated in cinema, most notably in Brian de Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES which had a similar sequence that was shot in slow motion and in its own right, truly breathtaking.
However, nothing can come close to this movie. It's too bad that extant prints make it seem a little fuzzy here and there, but there is no denying its sheer power of storytelling even in a couple of its slower segments. I believe BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN doesn't need a musical score to be fully enjoyed; I turned off the volume of my own equipment, sat down, and was able to literally be moved to the edge of my seat when the Odessa Steps sequence began. Horror and mass destruction made poetry by the force of its own message, it's an essential movie for anyone into movies.