The film school staple. Russian film genius Sergei Eisenstein’s take on the 1905 crew mutiny of a beleaguered battleship lives on mostly these days as required viewing in college classes. However, a classroom might be one of the worst places to see this movie. It probably plays best when you’re seriously plotting an other-throw, your guns are loaded, your prayers are said, your food supply is low and you don’t know if you’re going to live to see next week. There are NO characters in this film, but that’s intentional. It’s about collectives. It’s about groups of people all thinking the same thing at the same time and knowing what needs to be done. And then doing it.
If that’s not what’s going on in your life right now—you’re comfortable, you’re fed, you’re reading movie reviews on the internet, you’re complaining about The Walking Dead on Facebook—then you might at least can appreciate Eisenstein’s famous montages. Eisenstein’s camera is NOT the cumbersome, immovable hunk of concrete that you might expect from 1925. No, Eisenstein’s eye is everywhere. His camera flutters on bird wings. His camera creeps the Earth like a worm. It’s a remarkably agile creature, unafraid to shock (the close-ups on blood splatter and maggot-infested meat) and always spinning, flipping and leaping to new places. The editing is exquisite. It’s rat-a-tat stuff, quick and brutal and crazy about contrasts.
Though this film is set is set twenty years in the past (as of 1925), Eisenstein uses the scenario to tell us about the future of cinema. And he nailed it. It’s remarkable how modern so much of this film plays like today.
Don’t like silent movies? Sergei Eisenstein didn’t seem to like ’em, either. He was punching hard at the conventions and laying ’em out. That’s the real violence here.