Lenin wrote these sentences at the end of January 1905, in an article ‘The Plan of the St. Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, rightful, just, and truly great war…in Russia this war has been declared and begun’. Eisenstein opens his film moving between shots of violently breaking waves then cuts to a title showing a quote from Lenin attributed to the year 1905: ‘Revolution is war.
Eisenstein’s early career was also marked by a focus on decisive crowd sequences, and by the use of untrained actors.īattleship Potemkin is split into five parts, each clearly stated with its own title card. Soviet filmmakers of the period became obsessed with the power of editing, and their films tended to feature many more shots than those of their Hollywood counterparts. Though his works have been variously interpreted – and his final film, the second part of Ivan the Terrible, so incensed Stalin that it would not be released until 1958, ten years after Eisenstein’s death – he remains most associated with his early propaganda efforts, and with his influential theories of montage. Eisenstein was not unique in the Soviet cinema of the 1920s in developing montage – the technique was also utilised by Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Boris Barnet – but along with Lev Kuleshov, who he briefly studied under, he was its foremost theorist.ĭrawing crucially from the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eisenstein believed that the rapid and jolting juxtaposition of images was the best way to manipulate the emotional response of an audience.
Battleship potemkin soviet montage series#
From the beginning of the year, social unrest had swept throughout the Russian Empire, in what became known as the Revolution of 1905, and resulted in a series of political reforms including the establishment of the State Duma.īorn in Riga in 1898, Eisenstein served in the Red Army, and began his career in the theatre before turning to film. The ship had been built for the Imperial Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet and at the time, many of its senior officers were away, engaged in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War. Battleship Potemkin, released at the end of 1925 as only Sergei Eisenstein’s second full-length film, was an elaboration on the real-life mutiny which took place on the battleship Potemkin in June 1905.
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