Sergei Eisenstein directs Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy and Grigori Aleksandrov in this silent historical reenactment of a 1905 ship mutiny and the tsarist massacre of supporters that followed. 

I never massively enjoyed school. I found the rigidness of sitting, listening and transcribing unengaging. I struggled to find friends with similar interests. College was different though. I chose the subjects, the young adults in those classes were also curious or passionate about those topics, giving us common ground to form friendships over mutual taste rather than enforced proximity… and there was oodles of free time throughout the day to pursue your own side projects with access to all manner of media, content and equipment. I made terrible short films using the bulky “pro” camcorders and cut them painstakingly on linear video editing decks. There was a darkroom (and an easy going, encouraging photography teacher) where you could fuck about for hours with no pressure of results, or even talent. There was a pub across the way, Finnegan’s Wake, who had never even thought of IDing their clientele and allowed you to sit around all afternoon chatting nonsense, surrounded by fake Irish tat. And there was… and here’s where I get to Battleship Potemkin… a media-centric library. It was small yet bright. But it had computers that hooked up to the internet (most people didn’t even have dial up in their homes back then), meaning I spent hours on the new, seemingly inexhaustible, IMDB. It had back issues of Sight and Sound which I spent days skimming through. And it had a whole wall bank of videos. Cassettes of old movies recordered off the TV. And I worked through these diligently. Devouring Hitchcocks, realising just how much John Ford and Howard Hawks I had unwittingly watched with my Dad as a kid, seeing Citizen Kane and Nosferatu and Doctor Strangelove for the very first time. And Battleship Potemkin. I must have borrowed their copy of Battleship Potemkin, taped from a silent film season on Channel 4, three or four times. Whichever former faculty member had built up this haphazard canon of timer recorded, possibly illegal, treasures at Ealing Tertiary College, I salute you. You stoked my passion for classic cinema by making it freely available yet curated. Battleship Potemkin is the cornerstone of just about every Introduction to Film Studies that I doubt I can say anything particularly new about it. It is the finest propaganda film, a clear example of montage theory and a silent movie whose vibrant accessibility keeps it from being a dusty, revered museum piece. The Odessa Steps massacre sequence reappears, or is copied, so often that even people who will never watch a silent film are familiar with it. That is how it has earned its place as an indisputable “great.” But how watchable is it now, a century on? Pretty captivating. It can be strange following a narrative with no obvious protagonist but Eisenstein evokes the feelings and aims of the rebellion humanistically. You know their motivations and the stakes at every setpiece. He has an eye for an interesting face, whether weathered and expressive or heroic and idealised. There are also moments that are somehow both surreal yet intense. That famous doomed baby bouncing down the stairs, its carriage being dragged to oblivion by gravity, the murdering soldiers pursuing it uncaringly. The cowed sailors put under a white tarp, facing a firing squad as a faceless mass. The rhythmic, suggestive editing helps keeps things propulsive. The metaphorical juxtapositions are rousing. A series of lion statues rise in shock. Men work with the harmony of a well oiled machine. This is basic, easy to decipher stuff, but it is framed purely without pretensions or artifice. Only the final sequence where the mutinous ship is engaged lacks the captivating grip of the first two acts. It is still a well put together chase sequence, just bereft of the bloody impact of the rebellion and the massacre. Battleship Potemkin isn’t an acquired taste or a mere rights of passage for movie fans. If you go into it with an open mind it is a thrilling and effective war pic achieved via compelling and confident storytelling techniques.

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