Battleship Potemkin as Propaganda
The Battleship Potemkin (Segei Eisenstein, 1925, USSR), an attempt to record the historical 1905 mutiny upon the Russian Naval ship Potemkin, is renowned for its application of the Soviet Montage technique; A methodology pioneered by Eisenstein himself. The aim of this brave new cinematic vision was to elicit emotional and intellectual responses from audiences; A dialectic approach to film harking back to the ideals of Karl Marx. This particular strategy toward filmmaking proved incredibly useful in terms of propaganda within the Soviet State and as a result Potemkin is often cast aside as an artifact from this point of history, merely regarded by some as a piece of agitprop. But how did Eisenstein capture his audiences’ minds and passions, and to what extent is the Montage technique responsible?
Montage’s origins can be traced back to Lev Kuleshov’s (referred to by David Gillespie, author of Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda as “...the father of Soviet cinema...” (2000:23)) experiments with editing. Heavily influenced by American filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, his view was that previously filmed fragments must be assembled and “...linked...” to each other, comparing this process to how “...a child constructs a word or phrase from separate scattered blocks of letters” (Eisenstein, 1929:163). However, in his essay “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”, Eisenstein condemns Kuleshov’s methods as “...outmoded...”. Eisenstein believed that it was not adding shots to one another that created a successful montage effect, but by “...colliding...” two shots independent to each other. The analogy he adopts to express this method is the structure of Japanese hieroglyphics. He reeled in the notion that two separate graphical representations, for example that of an eye and that of water, could be placed together (ie. collided) and merged to create a whole new meaning, in the case of the eye and the water, our new meaning would be to cry. Two separate,
Montage’s origins can be traced back to Lev Kuleshov’s (referred to by David Gillespie, author of Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda as “...the father of Soviet cinema...” (2000:23)) experiments with editing. Heavily influenced by American filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, his view was that previously filmed fragments must be assembled and “...linked...” to each other, comparing this process to how “...a child constructs a word or phrase from separate scattered blocks of letters” (Eisenstein, 1929:163). However, in his essay “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”, Eisenstein condemns Kuleshov’s methods as “...outmoded...”. Eisenstein believed that it was not adding shots to one another that created a successful montage effect, but by “...colliding...” two shots independent to each other. The analogy he adopts to express this method is the structure of Japanese hieroglyphics. He reeled in the notion that two separate graphical representations, for example that of an eye and that of water, could be placed together (ie. collided) and merged to create a whole new meaning, in the case of the eye and the water, our new meaning would be to cry. Two separate,