Sergei Eisenstein premieres in Moscow 'The Battleship Potemkin', the film that narrates the revolutionary uprising of the Russian sailors in 1905, considered one of the best films in the history of cinema.
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| Still from 'The Battleship Potemkin' (1925), massacre on the famous Richeliey staircase |
In 1925, on the occasion of the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the failed revolutionary coup in 1905, the Soviet government commissioned the young director Sergey M. Eisenstein - who had achieved great success with his first feature film The Strike - to make a film that included those facts.
Eisenstein's initial idea when writing the script was to film the 1905 uprising: on June 27 of that year, the crew of the Potemkin, one of the best battleships in the Russian Black Sea fleet, mutinied because of the harsh conditions of life to which they were subjected. The event became a prelude to the 1917 revolution, setting a precedent in the difficult digestion from the Russo-Japanese War to the uprising against the Tsar.
Filming in Leningrad was interrupted by weather setbacks and the crew moved to the port city of Odessa, where scenes for the film were scheduled to be shot. Once there, Eisenstein changed his mind and decided to focus the script around the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin.
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| The stern of the battleship in 1905, with its name Potemkin (in Russian, Потёмкин) |
The filming took place in just three months, during which time Eisenstein sought testimonies of the event and rewrote the project in five parts: Men and Worms, Drama in the Bay, The Dead Calls for Justice, The Odessa Ladder and Encounter with the fleet.
Filmed with non-professional actors, Eisenstein manages to highlight the expressiveness of the performers in the close-ups and an aesthetic where the exaltation of the group grows stronger as the film unfolds. Thus the sequence of the massacre on the now famous Richelieu staircase –the baby's stroller sliding down the stairs –has been honored by prominent directors such as Brian De Palma in The Untouchables of Elliot Ness or Woody Allen in Bananas.
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| Filmed with non-professional actors, the expressiveness of the close-ups and an aesthetic where the exaltation of the group is gaining strength as the film unfolds stand out. |
Eisenstein, only twenty-seven years old, made a film that reproduces a triumphant uprising despite the fact that the script does not fully conform to reality, since the massacre was a fiction created by himself against the tsar. Alluding to this, outraged, the film critic Roger Ebert would add: 'There was no Tsarist massacre on the Odessa steps ... it is ironic that (Eisenstein) did it so well that today many believe that it actually happened' .
Eisenstein made a film that reproduces a triumphant uprising despite the fact that the script does not fit reality: the massacre was a fiction created by himself against the Tsar
The real Potemkin, after escaping among the Russian army fleet, which did not open fire on the battleship, ended up in Constance, Romania, where the crew handed the ship over to the authorities, who returned it to the Russian government.
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| Scene from the film in which the crew indignantly observe the rottenness of the meat they eat every day |
The film opened on December 24, 1925 at the Bolshoi Theater. According to Eisenstein's own testimony, the montage (whose last roll he would connect with his own saliva), was finished moments before the film's screening. Today it is one of the most studied in film schools for his particular technique.
According to the testimony of Eisenstein himself, the montage (whose last roll he would splice with his own saliva), was finished moments before the projection of the film
Heavily censored, in Spain it was screened at ‘Studio Cinaes’ at the Lido Cinema on November 7, 1930 and circulated clandestinely until its re-release in Madrid in August 1977 and in September of the same year in Barcelona.
The jury of the International Exhibition of Brussels granted the totality of votes to the film. At the 1st International European Film Festival, a vote of 6,000 filmmakers chose 'The Battleship Potemkin' as the best European film of all time.
