In perspective: Sergei Eisenstein, film director 1898-1948, page 3
The Revolution trilogy
Eisenstein's three great films about the Russian Revolution - Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October - were all made between 1924 and 1928, before Stalin had consolidated his power and gained an iron grip on the arts. During this period the Communist Party initially favoured Proletkult artists. Strike, made in 1924, Eisenstein's second film and the first of the trilogy, was originally planned as the first of a series of films documenting the pre-revolutionary working class. It turned out to be an artistic success as well as an educational aid and it won an award at the 1925 'Exposition des Arts Décoratifs' in Paris, as well as being commercially exhibited in Germany.
In this fictionalised account of a factory strike, a highly stylised collection of capitalist exploiters do battle with the striking workers of a factory in a surreal series of set pieces. Midget bourgeoisie tango on table tops amid the detritus of excessive consumption; three identical top-hatted bosses make up a single composite capitalist; spies metamorphose into animals; a panorama of barrels sunk into the ground spews out troglodyte lumpenproletarians. Against this backdrop, the film presents the workers as a single group protagonist instead of as individual heroes. Eisenstein maintained that this was the first time collective and mass action had been seen on the screen in contrast to individualism and the 'triangle' drama of bourgeois cinema (which distils down to boy meets girl and then has to overcome obstacles - invariably in the form of a rival - in order to keep girl and resolve drama). Years later he criticised his 'beginner's piece' for its tricksiness and overuse of effects such as the cross-dissolve which proved 'the "infant malady of leftism" existing in these first steps of cinema',35 and also because the development of the individual within the collective, 'a conception irreconcilably opposed to bourgeois individualism', had been neglected.36
Strike, Sergei Eisenstein (1924)
On its release in 1925, Strike was poorly received by the Russian public, whose imagination had already been gripped by American films and the comfy folkloric familiarity of their conventional questing heroes and tightly developed narratives. The Battleship Potemkin, however, proved more successful. David O Selznick, then an MGM associate producer, wrote to one of his executives in 1926:
"It was my privilege a few months ago to be present at two private screenings of what is unquestionably one of the greatest of motion pictures ever made, The Armoured Cruiser Potemkin... the film is a superb piece of craftsmanship. It possesses a technique entirely new to the screen... The film has no characters in an individual sense; it has not one studio set; yet it is gripping beyond words - its vivid and realistic reproduction of a bit of history being far more interesting than any film of fiction... Notable, incidentally, are its types and their lack of make-up, and the exquisite pieces of photography."37
Running one of the major Hollywood studios, Selznick might also have been impressed that The Battleship Potemkin was made for a fraction of the hit German movie Metropolis's budget of five million marks. A domestic flop in the Soviet Union, Potemkin was loved by German audiences, although the armed forces were forbidden to see it for fear of mutiny, as were Pennsylvanian audiences on the grounds that it gave American sailors 'a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny'.38 When it was eventually screened in the US in 1926, Chaplin declared it to be 'the best film in the world'. In France the authorities burnt all copies they could find - it received only a limited art house screening at Paris film clubs. Despite being banned in the UK until 1954, The Battleship Potemkin has rarely been out of the annual BFI critics' top ten list, and only then when another Eisenstein film has been voted in.
Odessa Steps sequence stills from The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
It is easy to see why. The Odessa Steps sequence has even now the power to move and excite: '...Eisenstein, in forcing the spectator to create the image by putting together all the relationships between attractions (relationships existing because of the interpenetrating theme), gives to the spectator not a completed image, but the "experience of completing an image".'39 All Eisenstein's elements come together in this perfect piece of cinema and the audience participates in the process of producing meaning.
The film documents an event that helped precipitate the 1905 Revolution which shook the Tsarist regime. The Battleship Potemkin is a microcosm of Russian society. The ship's officers, doctor and priest - all representing the ruling power structure - pile abuse on top of abuse until maggot infested meat and a threatened mass execution push the sailors to mutiny. The mutineers eventually find sanctuary at the Black Sea port of Odessa, the setting for the film's penultimate sequence, showing Odessa's population supporting the Potemkin mutineers anchored in the bay. The sudden appearance of Tsarist soldiers abruptly reverses the joyous mood as the troops mercilessly advance, shooting everything that moves. Rhythm (cutting) builds with tempo (the pace of action within the frame) as the soldiers descend the steps in relentless solid formation behind the chaotically scattering crowd. This descending action travels left to right across the screen for rapidity (for those of us who read from left to right, top to bottom, such as in English, our brains process screen information better in this direction, enabling us to read the images faster).40
Furthermore, Eisenstein plays with the planes of the shot so that we are not simply looking through a window at staged action, but also at a flat surface where the picture is composed, like a painting on a canvas. The film is not so much a substitute for the real world as 'an image existing for significant perception'.41 Every visual and musical element is an aspect of a composition specifically designed to elicit the audience's participation in the construction of the scene in their minds. When the mother carries her murdered son towards the troops, she travels right to left against graphic lines formed by the edges of the steps and the fleeing crowd. Trudging up the steps and against the descending mass, she occupies her own distinct emotional space. At the point where she stands in front of the rank of anonymous soldiers, her figure is caged in by the diagonal lines of the steps; the prison bar like shadows of the soldiers and their rifles below her; and, foregrounded nearest the camera, the actual figures of the soldiers pointing their rifles straight at her.
Eisenstein increases the illusion of depth in this shot by clothing the many small far-off dead bodies in dark shadings which recede into the distance; and foregrounding three soldiers and their officer in brightly-lit white uniforms, utilising conflict of mass and volume to locate the power in this scene. This is where this sequence's central idea reaches its peak, expressed in the graphic representation. With the corpses of the townsfolk behind her, the agents of death in front of her and their shadows falling across her, the mother is now the sole point of humanity within the frame. In the shot, she occupies the point of maximum tension - about two thirds towards the right and a little above centre, conforming to the proportions of the classical composition: compelling evidence of the virtuosity with which Eisenstein applied lessons learned from the study of centuries of classical painting to the new medium.
Odessa Steps sequence stills from The Battleship Potemkin
The full exploitation of suspense and tension highlights Hitchcock's artistic debt to Eisenstein. Will the nanny be shot? For how long can the baby carriage teeter on the top step before it begins its fall? The tracking camera shot which introduces the runaway pram increases the scene's tempo so that the pram runs at double time against the march of the soldiers, also raising the dramatic stakes. The final climactic destruction of innocence - the death of the baby and the attack on the conciliatory, bespectacled old woman by the sabre wielding cossack to whose better nature she vainly appeals - puts paid to any notion that verbal persuasion in powerless isolation can ever be an effective part of any revolutionary's armoury against monstrous reactionary forces.
Eisenstein's next film, October (also Oktober), was based on Ten Days That Shook The World, journalist John Reed's eyewitness account of the period leading up to the 1917 revolution. Released in 1928, the film takes the director's experiments in juxtaposition to new heights. October reconstructs the critical period between the revolutions of February and October 1917, when prime minister Kerensky's Provisional Government clung to power. (Incidentally, Bergan quotes Grigori Alexandrov, the assistant director on October, as saying, '...it has long been a joke in the Soviet film industry that more casualties were caused by Eisenstein's storming of the Winter Palace in June 1927 than by the attack of the original Bolsheviks in October 1917.' He attributed this to enthusiastic extras who had served at the front bringing along their ancient live cartridges. The original storming had ended in a peaceful surrender.)42 Influenced by the climate of the rising bureaucracy and its conflict with Trotsky, the film shows Trotsky arguing for postponement of an armed uprising, finally voting reluctantly with Lenin on 10 October for immediate action. Once the counter-revolutionary forces are repelled, Kerensky escapes. At the election of the Second Congress presidium, the Bolsheviks win an overwhelming vote against the Mensheviks on the eve of the storming of the Winter Palace. As a result of their victory, the new revolutionary government under Lenin wins peace and grants bread and land to the masses.
October, Sergei Eisenstein
Some critics have observed that in making October Eisenstein displayed a 'lack of interest in the simple mechanics of storytelling and... ruthless suppression of any footage not directly relevant to his thesis'.43 The lack of a conventional bourgeois hero means that there is no emotional door into the story; the group protagonist - the revolutionaries and working class - is fragmented across the film. However, the mostly episodic narrative still contains a few vestigial plot points such as the entrance of the Tsarist general Kornilov, which presents a major moment of crisis: a short lived turning point maximising both jeopardy and opportunity for the revolutionaries before the resolution.
Trotsky's role in these events - head of the Military Revolutionary Committee based in Petrograd - is reduced to a single appearance as a craven weakling pitted against Lenin, warning against immediate action and nearly wrecking the revolution. Yet, according to John Reed's absorbing account, Trotsky was operating at full revolutionary throttle, urging the Bolsheviks to yield no ground to their detractors: 'All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Bund - let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept away into the garbage heap of history!'44 Foreshadowing Stalin's infamous predilection for rewriting history, all other scenes featuring Trotsky were cut from the film. At the time there was a major power struggle surrounding Trotsky's opposition to, among other matters, Stalin's directive that the Chinese communists should unite with the Kuomintang nationalists against Japanese imperialist invaders. Although this led the communists to their slaughter, the Stalinist bureaucracy was still able to grab total power in the Soviet Union. Bergan notes that after Stalin's interference with October, 'Eisenstein did confide to his diary his disgust at "the barbarism of Stalin".'45
Technically, October was Eisenstein's most ambitious project. It places excessive reliance on cross-cutting between the story and shots of details commenting on and shaping the main action. However, Eisenstein uses these details chiefly within the realm of symbol - where an image is juxtaposed with another, unconnected, image which has no subtext and therefore can sustain only a single interpretation. For example, relatively lengthy screen time is given up to crosscut shots of Kornilov and Kerensky with plaster busts of Napoleon, '...a juxtaposition of purely symbolic significance',46 which draws obvious parallels and underlines their ambition. Elsewhere shots of Kerensky enjoying the opulence of the Tsar's Winter Palace are matched with shots of a gilded mechanical peacock, suggesting his vanity. Such heavy handed symbolism would not work for a modern cinema literate audience, who would get the point way ahead of the film. Even Eisenstein was aware of potential pitfalls: 'As soon as the film-maker loses sight of this essence [emotional dynamism of the subject] the means ossifies into lifeless literary symbolism and stylistic mannerism'.47 He is critical of his own work:
...the sugary chants of the Mensheviki at the Second Congress of Soviets - during the storming of the Winter Palace - are intercut with hands playing harps. This was a purely literary parallelism that by no means dynamised the subject matter.48
Eisenstein has been taken to task for frequent obscurity. In the scene that introduces Kornilov:
In illustrating the monarchist putsch attempted by General Kornilov, it occurred to me that his militarist tendency could be shown in a montage that would employ religious details for its material... So we intercut shots of a Baroque Christ (apparently exploding in the radiant beams of his halo) with shots of an egg-shaped mask of Uzume, Goddess of Mirth, completely self-contained. The temporal conflict between the closed egg-form and the graphic star-form produced the effect of an instananeous burst - of a bomb or shrapnel.49
It is unlikely that many viewers would follow Eisenstein's exact line of logic, making the connection between Kornilov's militarism and what the film maker reads as an explosion.
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© 1998 Anna Chen