The Battleship Potemkin

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The 1925 silent film, The Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, is one of the earliest and most influential propaganda films ever made. When released, The Battleship Potemkin was a controversial movie, portraying the 1905 massacre by the soldiers on a Russian battleship. Today, this film is considered a classic movie.

 In the film, Director Eisenstein uses his theories on editing in an attempt to fool with the audience’s emotions and cause for viewers to feel sympathy towards the soldiers who rebel against their leaders. He had a lot of success with the film overseas, although the reviews were originally mixed in the United States. However, over time, audiences have grown fonder of the film. The way the director portrayed the evilness of the regime and the pain behind the victims made it one of the first of its kind in propaganda filming. 

The most influential and popular scene of the movie comes when the evil soldiers are shown marching down the Odessa Steps. It is here that the gruesome massacre of innocent civilians takes place in what can be considered a controversial scene.  Director Eisenstein created the scene in his mind and it was not based on any reality.  As in today’s movies, most of the film is based on actual events with some fiction written in to keep the audience interested.  In this scene, many victims are shown being shot and executed including an elder woman, a school girl and a young boy with his mother. As if these slayings wouldn’t affect an audience enough, Director Eisenstein ends the scene showing a mother being shot to death as her baby’s carriage quickly begins rolling down the steps. The baby is shown crying as the carriage begins picking up speed with the massacre being shown in the background. In this gory montage, the director shows the carelessness of authority and makes the audience feel terrible for the victims as not even an innocent baby would be saved. At the time that this film was made, these scenes were some of the most controversial in the movie.  This is one of the first films made using this technique.

This film makes me think about all the gruesome war style movies today that intrigue audiences so much around the world. Examples are movies such as Pearl Harbor, The Patriot and Saving Private Ryan. Obviously these films are much more advanced in technology and contain great storytelling behind the gory war depictions. However, Director Eisenstein depicting the innocent people being shot dead and the mother yelling out to her child with a bloody and beaten face were the first war scenes an audience ever viewed. When I think of it in that perspective, it is pretty amazing all the editing and make up that went into trying to make the audience feel the devastation behind the actual 1905 massacre. This editing, once again one of the first films to use this technique, contributes to the classic movie classification of The Battleship Potemkin.