The propaganda of this movie was what stuck with me the most. I especially liked the scene when the sailors were sleeping heavily in the bay of the ship and were roused by Vakulinchuk's communist speech. The sailors awakened from the deep slumber that they had been in under aristocratic control and Vakulinchuk slowly opened their eyes. Of course, the red flag hoisted over Battleship Potemkin being the only thing in the entire movie that was in color was another captivating example of propaganda. This made the flag jump out at the audience. People's eyes were undoubtedly drawn to the flag. Not suprisingly, the flag also looked more beautiful than anything else around because of the uniqueness of its color in comparison with the black and white. I was amused when beautiful women and children were shown waving at the flag and the soldiers on the rebel battleship. This reminded me of advertisements that we see on television today of men that get girls because they have a certain product (such as a Harley).
Oddly enough, the scene that horrified me the most was not the scene with the baby carridge but rather the scene with the young boy that was shot. A young, innocent boy was gunned down for something that he was not responsible for and then his 'commrades' trampled his body instead of helping him up. I could not believe that they trampled on his body! Apparently, "all for all and all for one" was only applicable to situations of the Bolshevik's choosing. I guess I just could not believe how far this film went in order to make the Imperial Army out to be a group of bloodthirsty killers. In addition to killing the boy I mentioned, they also shot his mother while she was holding him in her arms, the mother of the baby that was pushed down the stairs, and helpless, dying citizens of Odessa. Imperial forces were depicted as being the destroyers of innocence as well as refusing to listen to the opposing view of the Bolsheviks (as made evident when the mother of the trampled boy begged them to listen to her and they would not).
In contrast to the Imperial Army, the Bolsheviks were depicted as the killers of the old traditions that people had grown to hate during World War I. They killed ruthless naval officers as well as a priest. People struggled with religion after the atrocities of World War I. I was interested by the fact that Eisenstein had chosen to play the part of the priest that was killed himself. Was Eisenstein a religious man that wanted to make people feel horrified by the evil of murdering a priest or was he too simply fed up with religion and wanted to display the death of something that he hated so badly that he refused to trust anybody to bring that to the audience but himself? I also noticed that many of the Imperial officers on the Battleship Potemkin were skinny and small while most of the Bolshevik sailors were large and strong. This further depicted the weakness of the aristocrats and the strength of the Bolsheviks.
I never even really thought about montage in films before. However, I was pleased that this movie made use of montages. The pace of this movie seemed faster than that of the Bauer films that we watched. Eisenstein's use of complexities between scenes rather than complexities within scenes was apparent as sooon as the movie began. He cut to many different shots of the sea. Bauer would have maybe focused on one shot of the sea for much too long of a time for my taste.
There was one scene from this movie that made little sense to me. When the people in Odessa were rallying after the death of Vakulinchuk one richly dressed man in the crowd yelled something along the lines of, "Down with the Jews," after which he was mobbed by the crowd. I guess I always assumed that anti-Semitism was strong in Russia. I am guessing that the man bearing a close resemblance to Hitler was purely a coincidence and yet I cannot figure out why this was put in the movie. Did the Bolshevik's think that anti-Semitism was an evil of Imperial Russia? The only answer that I could possibly come up with for this would be that the Soviets wished to place an emphasis on 'brotherhood' for this film and thus wanted to let people know that Russian Jews were also their 'brothers'.
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Odessa had a very large Jewish population. In fact, by 1897 (and the film Potemkin is set in 1905) Jews comprised 37% of the city's population. This means that what we are essentially seeing during the Odessa staircase sequence is a pogrom (i.e., an anti-Jewish riot, often state sponsored). Eisenstein himself was Jewish--and he may have wanted to add the Jews to the numbers of the downtrodden who were rebelling and being oppressed by the tsarist regime.
Eisenstein himself was not religious (he was very much a Communist in the Leninist-Trotskyist mold)--so I suspect he's trying here to demonstrate religion as wrongheaded, hateful but ultimately impotent institution.
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