Battleship Potemkin premiered in Moscow on January 18, 1926.

At the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958, a poll of film critics rated Battleship Potemkin and The Gold Rush as the two greatest films in history – in that order. It is remarkable that, a full 30 years after ‘talkies’ had become the norm, the two classics of the silent era still held sway over the minds and hearts of film aficionados. But there were other striking similarities between Potemkin and Gold Rush. Both the movies were shot in 1925 and released within six months of one another. Each was the work of a young director: Charlie Chaplin was 36 when he created Gold Rush, and Sergei Eisenstein a scrawny 27-year-old when he made Potemkin. And while Chaplin greatly admired Eisenstein’s work, Eisenstein simply loved ‘the Tramp’.

But all talk of similarity must end here, for in many ways you could not think of two films more unlike one another. In mood, in how the story plays out, in the kind of story it revolves around, the treatment of the dramatis personae, and in cinematic idiom, Chaplin’s saga of the bumbling gold prospector in the Alaskan wilds inhabits the antipodes to Eisenstein’s narrative of the insurgent battleship. And while Gold Rush seeks primarily to entertain, Potemkin is agitational to the core. Indeed, Eisenstein had been commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first Russian Revolution of 1905. And unlike Gold Rush, which pivots on the utterly irrepressible – and incomparable – Tramp, Potemkin does not have a hero, or a villain. For that matter, the one character in Potemkin who comes closest to answering to the description of a protagonist – the sailor Vakulinchuk – dies within the film’s first 15 minutes. The viewer’s eyes do linger for a few moments on one actor here, or on another there – but that is about all by way of our engagement with individual characterisation in Potemkin.

Eisenstein was looking to capture the essence of a great moment in the history of the 20th century, its ethos and its temper, and as important as the role of the individual was in the context of the unfolding events, the director saw it as subsumed in the spirit of that stirring time. The Revolution is the one overarching presence on the Potemkin canvas. Every other element in the panorama shows up only in its relation to the Revolution’s dynamic – sailors, the ship’s officers, the Odessa harbour, ordinary Odessans, the Tsar’s militia, the ship’s gun turret, and the ship itself. Indeed, even the ocean’s waves pounding the ship’s bow and the smoke billowing out of its chimneys to spread like menacing storm clouds across the night sky, seem to anticipate the riveting action that will follow.

Individual actors in this grand drama of history necessarily mirror the zeitgeist, and that is what their essential function is pegged at: Potemkin stops well short of visualising them as fully-etched characters. The few faces that nevertheless stay with the viewer long after she is done watching the film do so because of the extraordinary visual power of their presence on the screen. But more about those stunning faces later.

The idea of a movie to commemorate the 1905 Revolution had been broached by a Soviet government commission headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Culture. The State-owned Mosfilm was given the mandate. In March, 1925, Mosfilm contracted with Nina Agadzhanova, the well-known scenarist, for writing the script while young Eisenstein, who had won his spurs recently by making his first full-length feature Strike, was retained as director.

Agadzhanova produced an epic-scale treatment composed of eight distinct episodes dealing with, among other events, the Russo-Japanese War, the Bloody Sunday massacre, the great general strike of October, 1905, counterrevolutionary violence, and the June 1905 mutiny on the warship Prince Potemkin of the Russian Imperial Navy’s Black Sea fleet. Eisenstein began shooting soon thereafter, but quickly realised that it was too ambitious a project to be completed by the official deadline – which was December. He decided instead to build his film around the Potemkin episode alone. In the process he used only about 40 frames from Agadzhanova’s screenplay, writing/creating the rest of the script himself, much of it on the go even as he was shooting. Odessa was chosen as the location mainly because suitable warships were available around that port city. (The original Potemkin vessel was then in the process of being scuttled, so several other ships were used for the shooting. Stock footage of some Potemkin-class vessels was also drawn upon to show the battleship at sea.)

The fact that Odessa at the time offered excellent facilities for film production was an additional advantage. Eisenstein chose the classical five-act dramatic structure for his narrative. The acts are clearly identified as: ‘Men and Maggots’; ‘Drama on the Quarterdeck’; ‘A Call from the Dead’; ‘The Odessa Steps’ and ‘Meeting the Squadron’. They more-or-less fully correspond to the conventional dramatic arc of exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/resolution, and each act anticipates and sequentially flows into the next.

Battleship Potemkin was first screened on December 21, 1925 at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in a function dedicated to the Revolution’s anniversary. The formal premiere, also in Moscow, happened on January 18, 1926. Eisenstein had thought up an audaciously new artifice for the premiere. The red flag that the rebels raise over Potemkin had to be represented by a white flag while shooting because, on the orthochromatic film stock available then, red appeared black. Eisenstein turned this handicap into a brilliant expedient: he hand-tinted the (white) flag in red in all the one-hundred-and-odd frames in which the flag appeared. On the audience its effect was electric. The Russian Revolution had not yet fully turned its back upon its heroic phase, and the red flag was still the apple of many Russian eyes.

But Battleship Potemkin had a chequered distribution history. Inexplicably, SOVKINO (the apex film production and distribution organisation in the Soviet Union) was reluctant to distribute the movie widely across the country, let alone outside it. Potemkin’s premiere version had opened with a quote from Trotsky’s 1905 which read:

“The spirit of mutiny swept the land. A tremendous, mysterious process was taking place in countless hearts: the individual personality became dissolved in the mass, and the mass itself became dissolved in the revolutionary impetus.”

It was an unattributed quote and Trotsky was not named anywhere in the film, but the lines were too well-known to Russian readers not to be traced back to their origin. By 1925, Stalin had managed to gather up in his hands virtually all the threads of power, and Trotsky was being relentlessly pushed into a political wilderness from where he would never again find his way back. Was that one reason why SOVKINO was unenthusiastic? It is likely, because a few years later, Potemkin replaced Trotsky’s introduction with the following lines from Lenin’s Revolutionary Days (and this time the author’s name was duly mentioned):

“Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history, it is the only legitimate, rightful, just and truly great war… In Russia, this war has been declared and won.”

Eventually, it was thanks to repeated interventions by the poet Mayakovsky (and some others) that SOVKINO was obliged to stop dithering. The film was sent to Berlin where it became an instant hit. (Unbelievably, this was Potemkin’s only print up until then and SOVKINO gave that away.) Indeed, it was after that triumph that Potemkin again began to be shown to Russian audiences. But some scenes were still excised from it and some intertitles – or printed title cards inserted between shot frames to convey meanings – were either dropped or modified so as to ‘tone down’ the actors’ high-strung eloquence.

Subsequently, most countries where the film was released did their own bit with editing, leaving out portions they considered too explicit – or too subversive. In one or two versions that Eisenstein himself authorised, some scenes were moved around or rearranged.

The version that first reached the US and England went there via Germany where the Weimar Republic had already censored it copiously, but that did not stop the recipient nations from cutting some more. The German print travelled back to the Soviet Union after World War Two where, incredibly, it now became the ‘official’ print for future use. One estimate puts the number of Potemkin versions in circulation today at no fewer than seven.

In 2004, Russia restored the movie to what is now believed to have been its original incarnation, with the Lenin quote giving way once again to Trotsky’s words. It is doubtful if any other film anywhere ever had the distinction of enjoying so many parallel lives. But it is also a measure of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s mistrust of Eisenstein’s creativity that it so utterly neglected to preserve Potemkin as a masterpiece deserved to be preserved.

To add to its censor-induced woes, Potemkin was been banned outright in some countries now and then, for example in France, and even in Stalin’s Russia. In the UK, it was barred from public viewing for the most number of years for any film released in that country. And when the ban was finally lifted in 1954, British censors awarded Potemkin an unedifying ‘X’ rating, which remained in force till 1987. It is difficult to say which of the film’s attributes weighed more with different countries’ censors in their decisions: its unabashed political messaging, or its pervasive sense of violence. (In Potemkin, though, violence is oftener suggested than graphic. Plenty of brutality is in the air, but hardly any overt violence.)

But the labours of sundry censors (and their political masters) in different countries failed to stop Battleship Potemkin from becoming a sensation wherever it was shown. Even a badly mangled print was not enough to dampen viewer enthusiasm. Douglas Fairbanks was so taken with the movie in Berlin in July 1926 that he was instrumental in importing it to the US.

Later, in 1926, Fairbanks arranged for several private screenings for film-industry luminaries in New York and elsewhere. David Selznick, whose own Gone with the Wind was then a good 13 years into the future, considered Potemkin “one of the greatest pictures ever made”. He urged his colleagues in MGM to study Potemkin as “a group of artists might study a Rubens or a Raphael”. The Christian Science Monitor was convinced “that Potemkin is going down in screen history as one of the way-making films”. The National Board of Review identified it as the finest film of the year.

In Germany, the famed theatre director Max Reinhardt said that “after viewing Potemkin, I am willing to admit that the stage will have to give way to the cinema”. The leading German newspaper the Berliner Tageblatt wrote: “Eisenstein has created the most powerful and artistic film in the whole world”. Among Potemkin’s unlikely admirers was Joseph Goebbbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who praised the film extravagantly: “…(A) marvellous film without equal in the cinema”. Goebbels exhorted German filmmakers to “use Potemkin as a model of truthful art”, expressing the fond hope that the Nazi film industry would one day create “the National Socialist Potemkin”. The normally reticent Eisenstein was indignant. He wrote Goebbels an open letter:

“(T)ruth and National Socialism cannot be reconciled. He who is for truth cannot line up with National Socialism. He who is for truth is against you! … How do you dare, anyway, to talk about life …? You, who are bringing death and banishment to everything good in your country by the executioner’s axe and the machine gun!”

But the question is moot: where does a film whose storyline reads so much like standard agitprop derive its extraordinary appeal from? Why did Chaplin and Billy Wilder, both artists with very different temperaments to Eisenstein’s, single out Potemkin as their favourite film? And why does Sight and Sound continue to count it among the world’s greatest movies? It is three decades since the dream of social change that had propelled Potemkin went sour. The Revolution that Eisenstein’s art exalts lies in tatters. How is it, then, that all this has done nothing to undermine the film’s great power?

The answer is indeed not far to seek. Minus its immediate context, Potemkin tells the universal story of man’s struggle against injustice and tyranny, linking up effortlessly with humankind’s innate hunger for freedom and choice. So, however politically charged the narrative may be, Potemkin is not circumscribed by that politics and engages viewers’ emotions and passions with elan, like all great art does. Next, Eisenstein achieved what he did by his peerless mastery of film aesthetics, his radical innovations in camerawork, shot composition and, above all, the quick-cut editing he called ‘montage’.

The montage-editing accomplished several different objectives: It helped build both tension and momentum through the rapid counterpoint of different images, different points of view and different camera angles; it also allowed Eisenstein to manipulate and distend time across several different perspectives. Nowhere is Eisenstein’s virtuosity in sharper focus than in the iconic ‘Odessa Steps’ episode, probably the most influential (also the most copied) shot sequence in cinema’s history.

Many different things are happening in the sequence, simultaneously, but since they are being shown in separate frames, repeatedly, the viewer’s sense of time is considerably elongated: the harrowing tragedy seems to them to be playing out over a long time. By the frequent and rapid cutting between the shots, again, the viewer is overwhelmed with a flood of terrifying images. Trapped between the militia on the top of the giant flight of stairs and the mounted Cossacks at its feet, Odessans are petrified, and their sense of horror communicates itself powerfully to the audience.

Some faces and the shots that foreground them burn into one’s memory:the child trampled; the mother pleading with the soldiers to spare her wounded son; the pram with the child careening dangerously down the stairs; the woman screaming as she is shot through her glasses; the mass of the soldiers, rendered not as separate bodies but as graphic patterns of lines and shadows in inexorable movement…Eisenstein once said:

“I don’t make films to be watched by an impassive eye. I prefer to hit people hard on the nose.”

A full 95 years since its release, viewers of Battleship Potemkin still get smacked on their noses – but there are few complaints.

(Anjan Basu is a Bengaluru based journalist. Article courtesy: The Wire.)