Battleship Potemkin (Dir Sergei Eisenstein, 1h 22m, 1925)

Cinema's role as propaganda is one that runs through the medium from its very beginning; as early as 1917, barely two decades after the medium's birth, figures such as Lenin and Kaiser Wilhelm recognised the marriage of image and narrative in its role as a political tool. As the artstyle evolved, cinema took on political dimensions, from Riefenstahl's Olympia and Triumph of the Will that revolutionised camera movement, aerial photography, long shots, montage, and, of course, the marriage of image, sound, and music to oil the wheels of the Nazi machine, and whose visual fingerprints can be seen as far as Star Wars, Citizen Kane, and The Lion King.

Move into the 1950s, and one comes face to face with science fiction cinema where all manner of alien menaces stand in for "sinister Russian Communists threatening capitalism", and even in modern action cinema gung-ho support for the military-industrial complex goes hand-in-hand with costumed heroes and giant battling robots. Cinema, even in its most simplistic, child-friendly works, is, to lesser or greater extent, political, or rests upon imagery from the overtly political films of cinema.

No film shows this marriage of the political and the cinematic better than Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent, black-and-white masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. Potemkin, undeniably, is propaganda-the film is comissioned for the 20th anniversary of the first revolution, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, by the Party, Eisenstein intended the film as propaganda, and its distillation of the entire struggle of the First Russian Revolution, as well as the concepts of Marxist Leninism down into the mutinying crew of the Potemkin is practically the point of the film. But through this propaganda, with Eisenstein testing his theories of montage throughout the film, most famously in the Odessa Steps sequence, arguably one of the single most famous moments in cinema, and an impact on art in general, including its most famous proponent, Francis Bacon, Potemkin becomes almost propaganda for cinema in general, a herard of what the medium can do, and say through editing and juxtaposition.

In short, Potemkin retells the story of the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin, triggered by maggot-ridden meat, the rising of the ship's crew against the officers, the death of one of the mutinying sailors, Valenchuk, who essentially, both in reality and in the film, became a martyr-like figure for the revolting sailors and populace, which leads, at least in the film, to the Odessa steps, an event that conflates the more general, if no less violent putting down of the already active uprising in Odessa, where the crew of the Potemkin stood by and did nothing. The Potemkin then, again purely cinematically, victoriously returns to sea - in reality, the ship and its crew left Odessa, attempted to start mutinies on other ships to little result, failed, and aimlessly sailed back and forth between Romania and the Crimea for several months till they surrendered

In the hands of Eisenstein and writer, Nina Agadzhanova, a figure that Eisenstein himself regarded as instrumental to the film's themes; "She instilled in me a true sense of the historical revolutionary past", Potemkin takes on greater themes. The Potemkin goes from mere mutinying ship to a microcosm of the ideas of Marxist Leninism- the downtrodden worker, left with little but rotten meat to eat, whilst the proleteriat captains dine in luxury, eventually overthrown by the power of ideas, not force, when the ship's marines join the revolting sailors. These ideas then spread, as the figure of Valenchuk is brought ashore in Odessa, and it is only through force, as it was with the 1905 Revolution as a whole, that the Tsar brutally puts down the revolution.

The righteous Potemkin opens fire, and then, through the power of its men, of the red flag that seems an almost otherworldly burst of colour in the black and white world of 1925, it makes its escape, its ideas spreading to the Tsarist forces that refuse to open fire on it. One could, certainly, take the allegorical element of Potemkin even further; the near-messianiac figure of Valenchuk is as much an allegory for Lenin, the progenitor and chief instigator of the revolution martyred for the cause, inspiring others to rise up, which, undeniably, can be seen matched in the ship and its crew as projentors of revolution.

But its story alone is only part of the film's impact upon not only Russian cinema, as propaganda, but also its visual impact upon cinema as a whole. Potemkin is stunningly verité in places-the fact that Eisenstein cast mostly unknown actors, some of whom were actual sailors, not to mention that several sequences simply, and naturalistically let the camera run as actors move through shot is, even today, remarkable-the closeups in particular are almost stunningly modern, even as Eisenstein reveals what, arguably, is Potemkin's masterstroke-Eisenstein's use of montage.

The Odessa Steps is not only the best example of this, but one of the finest sequences in cinema, a scene that, through its montage, depicts, in unflinching brutality, depicts the violence of the military, as they march down the steps, cuts giving way, gathering pace, as innocent children and their mothers are gunned down. And then comes, arguably, one of the single greatest shots in cinema, a crystalisation of the loss of innocence in the face of war, of an oppressive regieme destroying the most vulnerable in society. Ninety-five years on, the Oddessa Steps sequence, and Potemkin as a whole, is famous for a shot that lasts less than two minutes.

Having already gunned down a mother cradling her dying child, who staggers towards the camera, impassively held over the shoulders of the soldiers, who coldly gun her down, we see, as the film cuts back and forth, a solitary woman and her baby in a pram. The camera holds on her-her death is every bit as martyrlike as that of Valenchuk. She pushes, inadvertendly on the pram, as she falls, dying. It begins to roll. A brief cut to an injured woman with glasses. The pram rolls down the stairs, camera held verite, tracking its movement, either alongside or to the side, through the destruction. Cut back to the injured woman in glasses, cut to the baby, to gunfire. The pram tips. A shot of a furious man-the commander of the troops?- swinging his arm back and forth across frame. The sequence ends with that image that practically defines the art of Francis Bacon, and countless film makers, of the woman in glasses, blood running down her face, a bullethole in her glasses, abject fear, misery and pain on her face.

The sequence haunts cinema, a refraction of the ideas of Eisenstein's peer, Kuleshov on a colossal scale. The rest of Potemkin is, no doubt, a genuine masterpiece, but Odessa alone, even divorced from the rest of the film, is haunting, horrifying in its unflincing depiction and its use of montage. The relentless march of the soldiers and the massacre of innocent protestors pops up everywhere from George Lucas's depiction of Republican downfall in Star Wars Episode III-Revenge of the Sith, with his hero turned villain leading white-clad shocktroops up the stairs to murder innocents, to De Palma's The Untouchables turning the sequence on its head, turning montage into slowmotion and saving the child at the cost of any adult characters, to Gillam replacing innocent bairn with vaccum cleaner in Brazil.

At its heart, Battleship Potemkin is, undeniably, propaganda-his films of this period are the cinematic mouthpiece for and of Soviet Russia, and both Strike and October are as, if not more overtly pro-Party, whilst his later, more narrative films, Ivan the Terrible Pts 1 and II and Alexander Nevsky still retain a sense of Russia the bastion, the fortress, against the invading alien forces of Prussia, and the martial power of Russia's great figures. You cannot divorce Eisenstein from the conditions of Soviet Russia and the USSR any more than you can divorce the music of Shostakovich and Prokovief.

Undeniably, however, one cannot help but read Potemkin as propaganda for cinema as a medium; this, Sergei, declaims through the film, is the power of cinematic montage, the power of matching shot to shot to shot to depict and convey a narrative, that, even sans dialogue and with minimal intertitling, allows you, whether you be a Russian in 1925, or English in 2020, to understand the tale of Battleship Potemkin. Whilst this is so ingrained in modern cinema that we take the tricks of editing, sometimes at speeds that would have stunned Eisenstein, for granted, Potemkin's impact on cinema as a medium is incalcuable, and it rightfully deserves its place in its highest pantheon.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)