Here for its hundred-year anniversary is a restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering silent classic from 1925, itself commissioned for the 20-year anniversary of the events it showed and reimagined. It is in black-and-white of course, apart from the vivid red flag flown from the battleship’s mast. This rerelease is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Pet Shop Boys in 2005; it is a fervent, continuous score but not, for me, one that engages fully with the drama’s light-and-shade. It also perhaps reopens the debate about when and how a silent-movie musical accompaniment should be content to fall silent in favour of discreet ambient background sound.
The subject is a 1905 anti-Tsarist mutiny on an Imperial Russian Navy battleship in the Black Sea near Ukraine. It is an uprising of sailors demoralised by losses in the Russo-Japanese war, resentful of the officers’ arrogance and incompetence, electrified by news of revolutionary enthusiasms on land, and finally triggered by the maggot-infested meat they were expected to eat.
In real life, the mutineers fired on the Odesa theatre where military top brass were discussing how to suppress the rebellion and the mutineers later found that another craft sent to attack them itself underwent a mutiny in fraternal support. Eisenstein shows this, but also boldly invents an entire fictional sequence in which the Potemkin docks at Odesa (it didn’t) to display on the quayside the martyred body of their leader Vakulinchuk, played by Aleksandr Antonov (who, as he lies in state, rather resembles Joseph Stalin, who had assumed power a year before the film’s release). The passionately supportive citizenry is shown swarming down the Odesa steps to greet them, cheering wildly – only to be fired on and massacred: from above by Cossacks and by cavalry from below.
Through this, Eisenstein audaciously created from nothing a foundation myth of injustice and resistance. And for the century that came afterwards, Potemkin was an inspirational template for epic movies, action movies, war movies, period movies and thrillers. With wonderful confidence and flair, Eisenstein moves between wide shot and closeup, the panoramic scene and the telling detail; the vivid, sweaty faces are startling.
It all comes together in the masterly Odesa steps scene, with that tense, Hitchcockian moment as the baby carriage begins to roll heartstoppingly down the steps. Hitchcock, though, would perhaps not have dared withhold from us, as Eisenstein does, the facts about what exactly happens to the baby. Was it all right? Or is that a bourgeois individualist question to ask?
And then there are the piercingly important individual images. Eisenstein repeatedly emphasises the spectacles of the ship’s doctor inspecting the rotten meat and airily pronouncing it more or less sound; these are not maggots, he says, but mere larvae, which can be washed off. His spectacles ironically symbolise his inability to see the truth, and there is a sickening echo when we see the blood-spattered spectacles of the woman shot in the face on the steps: she has certainly seen the truth.
Perhaps as much as anything, Battleship Potemkin shows how Eisenstein saw warfare and military humiliation as vital revolutionary conditions. “Russian prisoners in Japan are better fed than we are!” shouts one maggot-maddened sailor. The original audience for Potemkin would have remembered how Russia’s suffering on the eastern front in 1917 was to contribute to the October revolutions. The army, or in this case the navy, instils in its rank and file learned habits of disciplined aggression and obedience that, in the right conditions and at the right moment, can be appropriated and rerouted into revolutionary fervour.
The Potemkin brought the unquarantined spore of outrage into Odesa, revolution making a kind of landfall.
• Battleship Potemkin is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August and on Blu-ray and CD on 5 September.
