The film "Battleship Potemkin" is a very intersting one, in a large part due to its overwhelming propagandistic qualities. Being from a culture where the propaganda is no where near as blatant many of the elements pretained within the film seem very alien. A chief example is the part where they throw the religous figure, that vaguely resembles the western image of what God would look like, down a flight of stairs. The communist party in Soviet Russia was extremely against the entire concept of religion, and in this film they demonized this religous figure in an attempt to turn the viewers against it. The way they demonized him was by having him egg on the admiral to have the disobedient soldiers shot. When the mutiny commences, the religious figure holds a cross in the face of the rebellion sailors to fear God. They then end up throwing him down a flight of stairs to subdue him. It is extremely difficult to believe that something remotely similar to this would be accepted in the slightest bit in western society.
Another aspect I found interesting was that the protagonists are never seen killing anyone. During the mutiny the sailors are seen punching and throwing the officers overboard, whereas the officers and later the soldiers are frequently seen shooting people and it shows the aftermath and the people slowly dying. This contrast is most likely an attempt to make the working class of both the town and the sailors as more civilized than the bourgeois they are fighting against. The extent of violence seen by the protagonists is when they blow up the headquarters of the leader of the soldiers, but even this does not compare to the violence committed by the bourgeois because in this act it is in conclusive if any of the soldiers or their leader had been hurt. The explosions consist of nothing but a gate and a few statues being blown up.
I thought the portrayal of the religious figure was interesting too, how he had all that wild hair and came off as kind of crazy. I thought of how in the reading it had mentioned that the Soviets wanted to downplay the clergy partially because of the influence of Rasputin on the royal family at the end of the Czarist regime. It seemed similar to the separation of church and state idea that we have here.
ReplyDeleteAnd as you can see from the handout I distributed--it was actually Eisenstein who played that priest/God or whatever you want to call him (apparently they referred to him on the set as "the Pope"). We'll definitely talk more about that figure tomorrow in class.
ReplyDeleteI like your observation that we never actually see the Bolsheviks *kill* the opposing tsarist forces--though we can guess that they will obviously drown. It's almost as though the film is trying to emphasize that the proto-Soviet sailors are casting out the old and dispensing with it (or liquidating it, if you will) rather than specifically murdering or killing it.
PS. Actually, there are varying accounts on who played the priest though. The tradition is that it was Eisenstein who played the part--though others (among whom is Birgit Beumers, the author of one of the books we are reading for this class) assert that he chose a gardener for the role! I actually think the latter suggestion is probably true, because the "Pope" here really doesn't look that much like Eisenstein.
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