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Samoorganizatsiya biosistem

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Author: lerotube

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vladimir kobrin

SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN 1925 Part 1

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Author: GriffithMovies

Tags: eisenstein potemkin russia russiancinema sergeieisenstein

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 favored 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. 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. 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. 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 (because we read left to right, top to bottom in English, our brains process screen information better in this direction, enabling us to read the images faster).

SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S BATTLE SHIP POTEMKIN 1925 PART 2 ODESSA

Length: 24:58
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Author: GriffithMovies

Tags: eisten russiancinema sergeieisenstein silentfilms sovietcinema

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, 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 When Eisenstein went to Hollywood in 1928 he was feted by movie moguls and powerbrokers like Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin and Paramount's Jesse Lasky, all hailing him as the genius who would teach the philistines who populated this commercial hell how to make film. Eistenstein churned out scripts by the cartload, but Paramount failed to green light any of them for actual production. Eventually Eisenstein accepted the financial backing of novelist Upton Sinclair and commenced filming Que Viva Mexico! but Sinclair pulled the plug following one too many interventions by Stalin. Eisenstein's near complete work was sold to studios for use as stock footage. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, finding a vastly different climate to the one he had left. Proletkult had petered out. Few of his friends remained active. Many of them had been purged. So, years after making October, Eisenstein was denounced as a Formalist. The Formalism movement used the method of defamiliarisation - making objects strange in order to make them seem more real. Eisenstein's technique expressed their idea that mere reproduction is never valid unless it is a deviation from the norm, a risky thing to do under Stalin. Subsequently he directed Old And New, which advanced the arguments of Stalin's collectivisation policy. Toeing Stalin's nationalistic line with Alexander Nevsky (1938) at a time when the Soviet state was gearing up for war with Germany, Eisenstein portrayed medieval Russian knights as heroic defenders of the motherland. Ivan The Terrible I (1944) depicts a tough but misunderstood tyrant battling single handed against the evil Boyar conspiracy, the enemy within. Eisenstein's brilliant earlier technique has congealed: the storytelling is stolid and turgid; the performances verge on self parody. The 1,376 editing cuts of The Battleship Potemkin, double that of the average film, give way to long, repetitive shots of actors mugging to camera. In 1946, with Eisenstein recovering from a near fatal heart attack, his work print of Ivan the Terrible II was screened and critically mauled. Finally released in 1958, during Khrushchev's 'thaw' and ten years after Eisenstein's death, its antiquated style rendered it an ill received dinosaur. Eisenstein threw in the towel shortly before he died in 1948, weakened by poor health and the stultifying political climate in which he was trying to work. What, then, remains of Eisenstein's legacy? Without the Russian Revolution we might never have heard of him at all. He was at his most inventive and innovative during the initial throes of the revolution, in unprecedented conditions of mass creative liberation. In the early days state finance allowed him to pursue his ideas to their limits, whereas even Griffith encountered great difficulty in securing backing for his films in the US. Griffith and his successors eventually defined the art of film for the mass market, if not for the masses; but whilst little of Eisenstein's work transcended brilliant experimentation, it was nevertheless Eisenstein who embodied the promise of the fulfillment of human potential under socialism.