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DVD Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary sophomore feature has so long stood as a textbook example of montage editing that many have forgotten what an invigoratingly cinematic experience he created. A 20th-anniversary tribute to the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein portrays the revolt in microcosm with a dramatization of the real-life mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin. The story tells a familiar party-line message of the oppressed working class (in this case the enlisted sailors) banding together to overthrow their oppressors (the ship's officers), led by proto-revolutionary Vakulinchuk. When he dies in the shipboard struggle the crew lays his body to rest on the pier, a moody, moving scene where the citizens of Odessa slowly emerge from the fog to pay their respects. As the crowd grows Eisenstein turns the tenor from mourning a fallen comrade to celebrating the collective achievement. The government responds by sending soldiers and ships to deal with the mutinous crew and the supportive townspeople, which climaxes in the justly famous (and often imitated and parodied) Odessa Steps massacre. Eisenstein edits carefully orchestrated motions within the frame to create broad swaths of movement, shots of varying length to build the rhythm, close-ups for perspective and shock effect, and symbolic imagery for commentary, all to create one of the most cinematically exciting sequences in film history. Eisenstein's film is Marxist propaganda to be sure, but the power of this masterpiece lies not in its preaching but its poetry. --Sean Axmaker
To review "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) pose a difficult quest to anyone who attempts to do it. In one hand this is propagandistic piece; in the other this film is a monument to cinematography in itself.
Eisenstein was a convinced communist and all his filmography is a consistent propaganda tool: "The Strike" (1925), "October" (1927), "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) and the present movie are clear examples of this.
Nevertheless the images delivered by "Battleship Potemkin" are overwhelming. The czarist soldiers going down the Odessa's stairs massacring children, women and men indiscriminately is an iconic sequence.
Eisenstein was not an innovator as is usually believed; many of the techniques he used were already seen in Griffith's films ten years early. What is undeniable is that he was a mighty artist and a great director.
Cinematography is outstanding. Eduard Tisse usual Eisenstein's collaborator delivers great images.
The story is centered in the mutiny of the sailors of battleship Potemkin in 1905. The vessel has returned from the ill fated Russian-Japanese war and sailors were mistreated by their officers.
Finally rebellion explodes and the ship is captured by its crew. The Odessa population supports the rebels and is victim of military repression.
The battleship is surrounded by czarist fleet but the appeal of his crew to their "sailor brothers" is successful and they are able to fly away.
As is usual in historically based films do not expect accuracy. Here are two factual errors as a sample: the guns of the battleship never fired the General's headquarters at the Opera House; the fleet never surrounded the ship.
It is a very commendable movie for mute film fans, if you are one of them do not miss this opus!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.
Groundbreaking
As late as the mid-1980's panels had voted this the greatest motion picture ever made on a number of occasions, but one has to assume that it was for its groundbreaking cinematic techniques than for anything else. The story is simple and half based on fact: sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin mutiny against maltreatment, and then enter the port of Odessa with the ship to rally the town to revolution (it's 1905). Soldiers appear and slaughter the citizens of the town. The ship heads for sea, persued by naval vessels; they plead with the navy boys to join the revolution and they do (!). The end.
What makes the picture so noteworthy is director Eisenstein's use of montage: quick editing (over 1,300 different shots were used) and fade ins and outs - both new techniques. There is one very noted sequence, Part IV: The Odessa Steps, where a line of soldiers march down a long series of steps shooting innocent people, and as they do a baby carriage slowly rolls down the steps among the chaos (copied in many future films - remember it in THE UNTOUCHABLES?). Because of the quick editing, the horror of the scene is compounded to a terrible fierceness. A masterpiece of film making and definitely worth a watch.
Yawn!
God this film is dull. I would rather eat my own head than watch this again. Sure I know its a classic, but big deal. When will people realise that its not the olden days any more. I only want to watch films about robots fighting dracula in the future, not a bunch of dumb arse Russians moaning about food rationing. Anyone who says they actually enjoy this film is a lier!
Officially produced to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October quickly became another of Sergei Eisenstein's experiments in film form. As in his masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein uses explosive montage to create the spirit of revolution--in this case, the events in St. Petersburg during the months leading up to the Bolshevik revolt. Eisenstein's insistence on speaking the language of pure film (deploying space, shadow, movement, and rhythm to create his meaning) shoves his mad rush of images straight into the viewer's eye. A worker's rebellion in the streets, followed by the raising of bridges to isolate their neighborhood, becomes a visual symphony of panic. The film has also been known as Ten Days That Shook the World, its... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Boris Livanov Director(s): Grigori Aleksandrov - Sergei M. Eisenstein DVD Release Date: Released the 29 December 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A pivotal moment in film history. After The Birth of a Nation, nothing was the same: not the way audiences watched movies, not the way filmmakers created them. D.W. Griffith's jumbo-size saga of the Civil War expanded the boundaries of storytelling on the screen, conveying a richer, more complicated (and certainly longer) tale than anyone had seen in a movie before. The delicate relationships, the sad passage of time, the spectacular battle scenes all look as fresh and innovative today as they did in 1915. So do Griffith's brilliant actors, most of them--including favorite leading lady Lillian Gish--drawn from his regular stock company. What has become increasingly problematic about The Birth of a Nation is Griffith's condescending attitude toward black slaves, and the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lillian Gish - Mae Marsh - Henry B. Walthall Director(s): D.W. Griffith DVD Release Date: Released the 17 November 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Fritz Lang's Metropolis belongs to legend as much as to cinema. It's a milestone of sci-fi and German expressionism. Yet the story makes minimal sense, and the "theme" belongs in a fortune cookie; to experience the film's pagan power, you have to see the movie. But for decades we couldn't, not really--not with so many versions, all incomplete, often in public-domain prints like smudged photocopies. This Murnau Foundation restoration changes all that. Some shots, scenes, and subplots may be lost forever, but intertitles indicate how they fit into the original continuity and the characters' individual trajectories. Most crucially, the images are crisp, vibrant, and three-dimensional instead of murky and flattened. The composite sequences (the Tower of Babel, a sea of lusting... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Alfred Abel - Brigitte Helm Director(s): Fritz Lang DVD Release Date: Released the 18 February 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A milestone of the silent film era and one of the first "art films" to gain international acclaim, this eerie German classic from 1919 remains the most prominent example of German expressionism in the emerging art of the cinema. Stylistically, the look of the film's painted sets--distorted perspectives, sharp angles, twisted architecture--was designed to reflect (or express) the splintered psychology of its title character, a sinister figure who uses a lanky somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) as a circus attraction. But when Caligari and his sleepwalker are suspected of murder, their novelty act is surrounded by more supernatural implications. With its mad-doctor scenario, striking visuals, and a haunting, zombie-like character at its center, Caligari was one of the first horror films to... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Werner Krauss - Conrad Veidt - Friedrich Feher - Lil Dagover Director(s): Robert Wiene DVD Release Date: Released the 15 October 1997 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Sergei Eisenstein's debut film is more than a landmark of Soviet cinema; it's easily one of the most thrilling and inventive films to emerge from the silent era of Russian filmmaking. Eisenstein was a theater director and stage designer with some very specific ideas about the cinema, and he put them into practice telling the story of a worker's strike in pre-Revolution Russia, portraying the struggle not of leader against leader, but of the proletariat against the factory owners, enlivened by a conspiratorial subplot involving a quartet of insidious spies sent to infiltrate the ranks of labor. The subject matter is at times didactic and the acting often hammy and overwrought, but the technique is vibrant and the images striking. Eisenstein's compositions reflect the graphic boldness of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Grigori Aleksandrov - Maksim Shtraukh - Mikhail Gomorov Director(s): Sergei M. Eisenstein DVD Release Date: Released the 25 July 2000 Usually ships within 2 to 3 weeks
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