The Rising

Rating: 7/10 (24 September 2016)

I only became aware of Battleship Potemkin when Brian De Palma's The Untouchable's was released for the cinema and critics mentioned the pram down the steps sequence and how the director borrowed it from this film.
This Russian silent celebrates the Potemkin uprising of 1905 which Lenin regarded as an event that sowed the seeds of the The Russian Revolution. This is a fictionalised retelling by Sergei Eisenstein.
The crew of the battleship are mutinous because of poor rations, meat infested with maggots but the officers pass it as fit for consumption. The crew will not back down so the officers throw tarpaulin over some of the rebellious crew, give them the last rites and are ordered to be shot.
One of the crew members Vakulinchuk pleads to the firing squad not to fire and the firing squad does not and it leads to mutiny as the officers are overcome.
The uprising in the ship travels far and wide and in the town of Odessa, Vakulinchuk who was killed in the mutiny, his body is displayed to the public. In the Odessa steps a gathering crowd are fired on by Tsarist troops where women and children are killed leading to a pram with a baby plummeting down the steps. The massacre never happened, it was made up for the film.
The film is propaganda to symbolize the spirit of the Russian revolution. Sergei Eisenstein made an epic film with vast crowd sequences, montage editing techniques and is a technical accomplishment for the early days of cinema.