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Reviews
Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925)
One of the most compelling dramas of the downtrodden
Wow! Approaching Potemkin isn't easy because a lot of debris has accumulated in so much criticism and analysis that much like Citizen Kane one can wonder whether anyone actually watches this movie today or simply talks about it based on rumors. The movie's greatness doesn't lie only in the overwhelming montage technique, much more compelling in Eisenstein's earlier feature, Stachka. Potemkin is one of the best movies of the twenties because the technical brilliance present in Stachka has been completely assimilated by the director who now uses that technique proficiently not in an obtrusive way. From this perspective this movie looks more like The Magnificent Ambersons as compared to Kane. The technique in Potemkin is much more directed to achieving a certain artistic goal instead of simple bravado as it was the case with many shots from Stachka. In the latter movie we have some up-side down shots with mirrors that have little significance in the whole movie. In Potemkin every shot has a meaning in the larger frame of the whole film. The fact that Eisenstein controlled and perfectly balanced all the constitutive elements of his movie is what entitles him to the title of great director. He was much more than the improver of montage theory which he understood here and in the later Alexander Nevsky to function in a more subtle manner, very modern at that in the sense that the viewer should not be conscious that the cinema is "playing tricks". At its best Potemkin manages to draw the viewer in the medium so much that its "lesson" is much more compelling on an emotional level than that in Stachka. Take for instance the idea of child slaughtering. In Stachka we have a soldier dropping a child from a height. In Potemkin we have much more subtle technique where we are forced to feel the drama by placing ourselves in the same position as the tumbling unfaltering cart with the child in it. This is a technique striving for dramatic realism and it is much more compelling than a simple montage. It is an example of many dramatic shots that remain very fresh on a very emotional level until today.
That Potemkin is a very modern movie is obvious from the way the soundtrack serves the images; I am talking about the original Shostakovich soundtrack. One of the most compelling and dramatic shots of the film is the montage at the beginning with the images of breaking waves perfectly juxtaposed with the music in a very expressionist manner almost like a shout of outrage.
Much more than Stachka this movie shows us not only a developed collective character but the individual is much more obvious. The heroic element concentrated in a person as in Nevsky is not yet here but Potemkin shows some of the ideas that will eventually mark a break between Eisenstein and his Soviet patrons. Class struggle does not have the same humorous touch we see in Stachka, Potemkin has a more dramatic edge and I cannot remember a moment when I could laugh. This may be because the director understood that this film has a much deeper impact on the viewer with the Odessa steps episode for instance so any humor could have been damaging.
For what I know the cut I saw, something near 74 minutes is not the "original cut". I have no idea what the alleged cut material consisted in but I cannot imagine this movie being more complete than it already is. And the ending, rather anticlimactic is not as some have said flawed but actually very compelling. Eisenstein's idea was that the Revolution is something, as Lenin states in the motto at the beginning, fair and legitimate so that everyone will "see the light" and take the right decision when it comes to it. The fact that the other ships join the mutineers is something natural seeing as they were in the same "tight spot" under the tsarist regime.
And as a final comment: take the "propaganda" from this movie i.e. Lenin's motto and you get one of the most humane cries for freedom ever depicted in a film. What else is Potemkin if not a beautiful portrayal of man's endless and passionate struggle to escape slavery? I have always been impressed that unlike Riefenstahl's "documentaries" Eisenstein can be very easily dissociated from the Communist doctrine in a variant of which he deeply believed. As an artist he had such an integrity that he strived to put on screen what he believed was right. Up to some point he thought that his artistic ideals coincided with the Party doctrine. That he understood his art as serving a social purpose is something worth respecting, he wanted to change the world through art, to make people better. History has proved Eisenstein and his kin were fools whose ideals have been thwarted by the most abject interests of the Party. But there is no doubt at least for me that as a true artist (that is more than a technical wizard) Eisenstein was honest, much more so than his American counterpart Griffith. Both Griffith and Eisenstein need to be placed in their culture to assimilate their message today. It is not their fault that history proved them wrong, it is a simple fact of life.
Stachka (1925)
Industrial symphony of visual rhythm
This is Eisenstein's directorial debut and alongside Citizen Kane it may be one of the most important debuts in the history of film showcasing a fully-fledged artistic maturity. This is a fictitious narrative-driven movie though it is very consonant with reality. As a Communist Eisenstein's aesthetics was opposed to the "bourgeois" art style that considered the artistic object as a subject of contemplation. Eisenstein advocated in theoretical terms in his books and practically with movies such as this a pragmatic vision of art. Movies should have a purpose; they should mobilize the viewer into action by filing him with emotion.
This strategy is obvious early on with the use of the motto from Lenin that links the idea of organized workers and that of social action in an equation of efficiency. The movie tries to prove that the workers are entitled to organization and that only in such a manner they could achieve their full potential. The movie focuses on the workers as a group; there are no "characters" as we have grown accustomed to seeing on screen. The collective character of the workers, though, has a very powerful emotional impact on the viewer because Eisenstein knows how to present it:
1) The workers are presented in the factory, in what would appear to Chaplin, for instance as a medium of alienation. Here, the workers seem "at home" because they are so many they balance the non-human elements expressed by the machines. More than this the brilliant montage sequences emphasize that the workers are in peace in their environment, the visual patters give a clear feeling of the strength of the united workers. Later on with the advent of sound the beauty of an industrial landscape will be extraordinarily depicted by Vertov in Enthusiasm;
2) The workers are contrasted with the fat and greedy capitalists. Their environment is luxurious and far more "human" than a factory. However, Eisenstein makes it appear as a place of sin and debauchery. The cigar smoke emphasizes the strength of the exploiter much like the smoke from the furnace shows the force of the factory. There are many correspondences between the two environments which Eisenstein later uses to achieve some of the greatest and most emotionally engaging associative montages ever displayed. One of the most impressive shows a boss squeezing a lemon to fix himself a drink while the workers are squished by the police forces trying to repress the strike;
3) Individuals predominantly appear only when they are associated with heavy dramatic scenes, the innocent worker who commits suicide ( who only functions as the dramatic instigator of the plot without any real emotion displayed for the actual character who dies even if we know his actual name; it is insinuated that a human life has a meaning only as part of larger community), the child who is killed by the police, the spies who serve as much needed humorous debouches that relieve the tension associated with the workers exploitation but that also build up tension in the sense that they show the stupidity of the bosses and of their methods;
4) The key to the movie is its pragmatics. It is after all a propaganda piece and the ending clearly shows it. The advice addressed to the proletarians not to forget is charged with emotion because it discharges a tension that has been carefully build frame by frame at a rampant pace. Even if we disengage with his doctrine we should keep in mind that Eisenstein's genius can only be acknowledged in its cultural context and related to his conception of art's function in a society. We can screen out the propaganda but we must keep the emotion in order to understand this movie today at its full power.
Nanook of the North (1922)
Heartfelt documentary about people living in a harsh environment
The reason this movie is worth watching after so many years is that it is more than a documentary, it is the documentary of a family having to stay together in order to survive some of the most cruel living conditions on Earth. Apparently the scenes are not "real", in the sense that they are mostly staged, but they are staged in the harsh environment in which the Inuits are living and the whole thing is very believable, seeing as Flaherty himself spent quite some time with those people. I know of only one other film-maker to produce so warm documentaries, and that is Werner Herzog, Nanook of the North has that quality a Herzog movie will later have, it tries to understand the people under study by assimilating their culture with an honest intent and trying to look at one's own culture through the eyes of that under scrutiny. The moment the director shows the Inuits the gramophone is truly memorable. The majority of the scenes are not so thrilling today, but they are still above average from a documentary point of view and it is of course hard to believe that they were made in 1922. But what I appreciated the most at this film had nothing to do with the exotic images, you can find better stuff on any National Geographic documentary, but with the story of the family and the heartfelt depiction of their life-style. Much of this may have been distorted, I don't know but I am not able to spot anything in this film that can be seen as an argument for our culture as opposed to that of the Inuits. The whole movie seems more like an argument for variety and tolerance. Seeing as those people can find warmth in that harsh environment is indeed an argument for the essential good nature of humanity.