Battleship Potemkin (12A) |Close-Up Film Review
Dir: Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union, 1925, Dur: Silent movie with subtitles
Cast: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barskiy, Prokhorenko
Review by .Carol Allen
In case you don’t know, this classic of the silent cinema is the story of the naval mutiny in 1905, which preceded the actual Russian revolution by twelve years. It all starts with a protest about the maggot infested meat the crew, representing the proletariat, are served. The privileged officers attempt to repress the revolt, firing on the unarmed sailors and after that it all kicks off.
These early sequences are good in their use of silent film story telling but the film really becomes impressive when the ship docks in Odesa, the murdered leader of the revolt is laying in state at the dockside and the people of the city come out in support. Thousands of them, filling the screen. No computer generated extras here. The massacre of the unarmed crowd is moving (even if some of them do overact a bit by modern standards) and we’re all waiting for the shot of the baby in the carriage bouncing down the Odessa steps, famously referenced in in Brian De Palma’s film The Untouchables in 1987.
The final chapter of the film, in which the sailors on the ships sent out to eliminate the Potemkin, which is now flying its impressive red flag (hand tinted frame by frame by Eisenstein in an era where colour film was in its infancy), defy expectations and instead cheer the revolutionaries, is a bit of an anticlimax after what has gone before. It is though historically true and must have gained Eisenstein brownie points with Stalin, who’d just taken over the reins of the communist government.
And the Potemkin rebels themselves? Many of them went into exile. Others were executed by the Tsarist government. The last surviving mutineer, Ivan Beshoff, is reported to have lived to be 102, eventually running a fish and chip shop in Dublin. (That’s not in the film of course!)
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. MUSIC BY PET SHOP BOYS opens in cinemas in the UK & Ireland on 22 August 2025 and will be released on Blu-ray/CD & vinyl on 5 September 2025.
