#10: Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)

Battleship Potemkin is a difficult film to discuss, because it's an important film for good reasons, but it's difficult to enjoy with modern eyes. Stylistically the movie is beautiful. The cuts and the camerawork are brilliant, and really focus on and highlight the emotion of the characters in a way few films can do. But content-wise, it's a communist propaganda piece.

The story is very simple. The crew of a warship are forced to sleep in unsanitary conditions and eat disgusting low-grade meat. The commanders decide to execute crew members who refuse to eat the meat, and the workers rebel against their oppressive leaders. This leads to the civilian population back home joining the rebellion. When the military strike back against the population, this one battleship declares war on the whole system, their only hope for victory to rally all the workers on the other warships to their cause.

The way they present the idealized new system is very well done. Everybody is crowding together in a mob chanting that everybody will be equal. One man yells out "AND WE'LL SMASH THE JEWS!", and everybody shouts him down. There are no divisions, not even by religion. But, therein lies the hypocrisy of the message of the film. The ruling class are presented unilaterally as cold hearted, lazy, murderous tyrants. There's one scene where the military comes in and starts shooting people arbitrarily, which ends with a baby carriage rolling down a staircase because a soldier shot the baby's mother. One woman is carrying her wounded child, begging for mercy, and the soldiers shoot her down on the spot. So, in the revolution everybody is equal -- except for the prior ruling class, who are barely human, and should all be destroyed.

To me, the foremost expert on communist revolutions in history is George Orwell. Battleship Potemkin plays out the first two or three chapters of Animal Farm, where the oppressed workers cast out their tyrannical oppressors. What it leaves out is the ensuing corruption, and the leaders of the revolution who turn into the new ruling class. It's a propaganda piece for a cause that has been proven by history to lead to disaster.

So, if you're a cinema buff who watches films for cinematography and such, I would highly recommend it. Otherwise, avoid it.

Style rating: ***** / 5
Substance rating: * / 5
Overall rating: *** 1/2 / 5

81/101

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