The Battleship Potemkin

Rating: 5/10 (13 February 2011)

In The Battleship Potemkin made by Sergei Eisenstein, he uses a form of film editing called Russian montage, which combines a lot of different shots shot in different settings and edits them to tell multiple stories at one time. It can also show different perspectives of different people at the same point in time so that the viewer is aware of the different effects that that certain event has on the different types of people experiencing it. This is the main reason why this film is so effective. And it has influenced many films up to this point such as, 2001: A Space Odyssey which starts at the beginning of mankind and jumps to a time far in the future. But this film presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers of the Tsarist regime. And the most interesting thing about this film is the organization of the shots. If Eisenstein would have reorganized these shots any other way he could have told a completely different story. But that's the beauty of the montage film editing, it allows the editors to bring the "invisible art" to life. It allows them to be the true artists and storytellers that editors can be.