Battleship Potemkin

1925's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN is roundly described as the best propaganda film ever made.  Director Sergei Eisenstein was firmly committed to the cause of the October Revolution, or at least merely in their employ.  His film is a celebration of the working class, long mistreated and marginalized by Tsarist rule in Russia.  A rousing, surprisingly brutally realized drama of a battleship crew on the Black Sea (and their comrades on land) who rebel, are put down, and reemerge.   In 1905, the Revolution was dawning.  An uprising was in the air.

Eisenstein's film is divided into five parts.  Early chapters document the disgruntled sailors, rejecting the maggot ridden meat and borscht they are fed, lamenting that even Russian P.O.W.s get better victuals.  A mutiny will commence on deck, one where rebellious crewmen are separated for certain execution under the orders of the senior officer.  The "brothers" are ultimately successful, casting their oppressors into the sea, but their leader, Vakulinchuk, will not survive.  He will become an icon, a symbol as his corpse is publicly displayed in Odessa, whose citizens rise up and rally.  But the Cossacks are waiting with their muskets at the top of those steps, and no one, not even infants, will be spared.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN's celebrated editing is present from opening to closing, but the Odessa steps sequence is the most famous and imitated (see THE UNTOUCHABLES from 1987).  It's nothing short of masterful.  The timing of those baby carriage wheels as they succumb to gravity is near gasp inducing.  Eisenstein was experimenting with montage but his film feels like anything but a dry run.  It is largely an assemblage of montages of critical events, focused on collectives rather than individuals (this is not a film in which performances are singled out for excellence).   Hordes of landlocked extras fill the frame and are intercut with the sailors' struggles at sea in a fashion to build the blood in viewers' bellies, even those (especially?) who just can't look past the Leftist paradigm and appreciate the film as the work of furious genius that it is.  It's a ferocious, violent, manic, and sobering experience that doesn't feel any less potent after nearly one hundred years, despite scores of similar stories before it and since.

Whether the version you watch begins with a quote by Trotsky or Lenin (the film has been re-edited and banned numerous times over the decades), you are in for cinema for the ages.  A partisan red flag waver that transcends political leaning, even as it plays aggressively as a Bolshevik recruiting poster.   An undisputed must for cineastes.