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Battleship Potemkin Screening Report

Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin uses rapid editing and crosscutting between individuals and crowds to illustrate how individual actions spark and relate to revolution on a larger scale. Through editing techniques that increase tension, the film shows how a single funeral ignites unrest among the populace. It also emphasizes that revolutions emerge from many individuals playing their part and working together as a unified whole.

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103 views1 page

Battleship Potemkin Screening Report

Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin uses rapid editing and crosscutting between individuals and crowds to illustrate how individual actions spark and relate to revolution on a larger scale. Through editing techniques that increase tension, the film shows how a single funeral ignites unrest among the populace. It also emphasizes that revolutions emerge from many individuals playing their part and working together as a unified whole.

Uploaded by

rudeboydreaming
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin explores the triumphant mutiny of

Russian sailors at the beginning of the 1905 Revolution. Rather than following a
traditional Hollywood narrative, the film follows the crew’s collective efforts to
overcome their tyrannical commanders, while still showing glimpses of individual
efforts and occurrences. Through rapid editing and the use of crosscuts, Battleship
Potemkin illustrates the chaos of revolution and how, in that, the individual relates
to the people as a whole.
Quickly paced editing and crosscutting between individuals and crowds
emphasizes the developing disarray at the funeral of Vakulinchuk. The scene begins
with a long procession of people coming to view the fallen hero, but eventually, the
film cuts in shots of individual characters’ responses. As the duration of time
between shots decreases, the tension of the scene increases. And, as the tension
mounts, the shots become increasingly crosscut between different characters and
their responses to the death. This creates a juxtaposition of the singular versus the
populous, accentuating the role that each person must play in the revolution.
Eisenstein also crosscuts shots of a man’s fist to presumably indicate the anger of
the crowd against which the shots are edited. All of this works together to create a
dynamic by which the crowd’s importance is only established within the context of
its composition by individuals. Near the final shots of the scene, however, it is the
crowd that triumphs, strengthening the importance of the populous in revolution;
by editing in title cards—that declare unity—with increasingly deep shots of the
crowd, the film illustrates how the revolution creates unification.
Similar principals are also evident when the soldiers attack the crowds,
allowing Eisenstein to edit the shooting of two Russian mothers against the fighting
as a whole. Here, again, the film heavily utilizes crosscutting. A mother’s grieving is
chronicled amidst shots of the scurrying crowd. This editing similarly relates the
crowd’s emotions to those of the individual. As she becomes angry and militant, the
people run ever more frantically down the steps. In much the same manner,
Eisenstein shows the tragic shooting of a mother with a carriage, this time using
overlap editing, as well, to dramatize the sequence, while still showing her as part of
the overall populous. In both instances, rapidly successive editing between shots
keeps the pace quick and tense, mirroring the rapidness of revolution.
Overall, Battleship Potemkin shows, through editing, the place of the
individual within the populous, and his/her importance in a revolution. Even the
film’s structure emphasizes the relationship of the part to the whole: the mutiny on
the battleship is an isolated incident which sparks the mainland revolution much the
same way that individual accounts of the fighting and unrest on the mainland drive
the narrative of the revolution. Furthermore, because of rapid editing and the
juxtaposition of shots focusing on a single character versus wide shots featuring
large crowds, the film argues that revolutions are necessarily a product of many
different people working in unity.

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