The Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 bombshell The Battleship Potemkin was cinema historys third great game-changer, after The Birth of a Nation and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Just 27 when he directed this montage-powered expression of kino-revolutionary fervor, Eisenstein was the original film intellectual to come to power. Commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905 revolution, Potemkin made historyliterally. Eisenstein used his new form of agitational montage to celebrate mass action and collective heroism. Shot on location, entirely with non-actors, Potemkin was designed to look like a newsreel and function as a dramaif drama is the word to describe the hysteria of the movies key scene, a massacre set on the steps leading down to Odessa harbor. The power and violence of editing has never been better demonstrated than by this space-pulverizing, time-distending, emotionally alarming barrage of two-second shots, half of them close-ups. In some ways, the movie is a war of machinesliberated battleship versus robot Czarist army. (NR) J. HOBERMAN
May 20-26, 7 p.m., 2011
