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Battleship Potemkin: Six Minutes On A Staircase

Battleship Potemkin: Six Minutes On A Staircase

@Steph2

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

A propaganda commission became the film that taught cinema how to cut, and one sequence that never happened.

Runtime

74 minutes

Director

Sergei Eisenstein

Box office

$46,653 worldwide

Cinematography

Eduard Tisse

Montage As Argument

Eisenstein was commissioned to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 uprising and delivered a thesis about editing. His claim was that meaning does not live in the shot but in the collision between two shots, so a face plus a plate of maggoty meat is an argument, and a line of boots plus a child's body is a verdict. The famous Odessa Steps massacre is staged with that theory running at full power: the descent broken into fragments, the pram released, the boots advancing in rhythm, the stone lions cut together so that sleeping marble appears to wake and roar. No massacre happened on those steps in 1905. The sequence is so convincing that it is still described as history, which is both Eisenstein's greatest achievement and the reason the film is taught in ethics courses as well as film schools.

journey·5 Scenes

Watching Battleship Potemkin

Intensity

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Scene

Men and MaggotsDrama on the QuarterdeckA Dead Man Calls for JusticeThe Odessa StepsMeeting the Squadron12345
Sailors are shown the meat they are expected to eat, the ship's doctor says it is fine, and the flies disagree.
A tarpaulin is thrown over the condemned men and a firing squad is ordered to shoot their own crewmates.
The body of a sailor is laid out on the harbour with a note, and the city files past it all night.
Six minutes of cutting that put boots, faces, a wheelchair and a pram into an order cinema has never got out of its system.
The rebel ship sails to meet the fleet sent to sink it, and the film ends on a question asked at point blank range.
"

Brothers! Who are you shooting at?

"

Vakulinchuk to the firing squad · Battleship Potemkin · 1925

The stone lions are three separate statues at the Alupka palace, cut together so that a single lion appears to rise. It is the clearest demonstration of Eisenstein's theory in the film.

Banned outright in Britain until 1954 and censored across Europe, the film was studied closely by Joseph Goebbels, who wanted a National Socialist equivalent.

The Odessa Steps has been quoted so often that the quotations have their own lineage: Brian De Palma restages the pram in The Untouchables, Terry Gilliam sends it through Brazil, Woody Allen jokes about it in Bananas. The uncomfortable part is that the sequence is fiction. Eisenstein proved that assembling true looking fragments in the right order produces something an audience will remember as fact, a discovery that belongs as much to the history of propaganda as to the history of art.