Potemkin
Eduard Tisse

In the years following the Bolshevik revolution, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was anxious to show its populist side to a world which in large part regarded the Communists as brutes. With this goal in mind, the USSR gave the go-ahead to a feature based on the 1905 rebellion staged by the crew of the Czar's battleship. The tale includes scenes of the cruelty that led to the mutiny, the violent rebellion itself, the crew winning over of the people of Odessa, the massacre of the citizens by Czarist soldiers on the city's great steps, and the triumphant surprise ending when the Russian fleet steams in and, instead of attacking, cheers the mutineers.

Sergei Eisenstein, the country's most promising film director, helmed the picture, and it was photographed by a young firebrand who became the Soviet Union's most celebrated camera artist, Eduard Tisse. Their technique was innovative and influenced filmmakers all over the world.

Tisse came from Stockholm, where he had worked on Swedish films. Moving to Russia, he became a newsreel cameraman during World War I, filmed the first May Day celebration in Red Square, and co-photographed the first Soviet feature, Signal. He began working with Eisenstein in 1924, and photographed all of his pictures afterward, including Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Eisenstein's last pictures, Ivan the Terrible Part I (1945) and Part II (not released until 1958).

Eisenstein called Potemkin a "shock attraction," and he and Tisse explored every method they could use to stun audiences, including a revolutionary use of cross-cutting. Although the photography is as realistic as a newsreel, it is far more artistically composed, and has been desribed as "photography like painting-in-movement" and "photography like verbal imagery." Both men had backgrounds in art — Eisenstein was a theatrical set and costume designer, and Tisse had studied art in Stockholm. The scenes they crafted are sharp and biting, with no apparent diffusion. Close-ups are merciless in their detail.

The realism of the shipboard scenes is impressive; we even see the rotten meat the sailors are expected to eat. The fight aboard the ship is shown in both large-scale action scenes and close shots. By far the most famous sequence is the massacre on the Odessa steps, which more film students have studied frame by frame than any other. It begins with the citizens waving at the ship from the long series of wide steps that lead down to the quay. The camera passes over the crowd, showing families and individuals of all kinds. The soldiers come down from behind, in formation, firing into the populace in unison at regular intervals. The details are shown in a montage of flash shots of varying length, some as few as 10 frames. Sudden close-ups were used to great effect, the most famous being a woman struck in the eye by a bullet.

—G.T.

© 1999 ASC