Hacker Cinema
Battleship Potemkin
Броненосец Потёмкин
1925 · Film · 75 min
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
In the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin revolt against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel's officers. The resulting street demonstration in Odessa brings on a police massacre.
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21 comments on Hacker News
> Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil.
Yeah, well, they were wrong and I'm right.
> You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.
100% critic & 86% user approval on Rotten Tomatoes, 97/100 on Metacritic. Universally acclaimed, massively influential. Have you considered that Battleship Potemkin might just be a good movie? Have you tried watching it?
Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil. It was argued that they were addictive and antisocial.
You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.
I don;t think so — it's just that if you have 100-ish years to choose from, this doesn't seem like a very even spread. To be sure, I would feather off anything too early — the silent era seems only interesting to film historians that want to see where the modern ideas of film began (example: "Battleship Potemkin" (1925)).
But at the same time, Hollywood does seem to have fallen into the trap of mediocrity for some time now — probably since the 1980's to be honest (having only gotten worse over the ensuing decades). "La La Land" was popular in large part because it was something of a throwback to 1930's Hollywood. Tarantino's success seems to stem from his mining of gritty 1970's Hollywood.
So why not go back and watch "Gold Diggers of 1937" for the "La La Land" stuff, or "Straw Dogs" (1971) to see what Tarantino is making homage to.
Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, because a film is made by a large crew of people. And there's the obvious other skills too (this interview is from American Film magazine):
Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.
Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
Sure, but it was also very predictable. Even 20 years ago individual European states started wielding the censorship bludgeon to keep their societies from exploding.
Heck, has there ever been freedom of speech in Europe? Just consider the classic films France has censored (paths of glory, Battle for Algiers) over the last 70 years while allowing the most deprived smut unchallenged. The UK's censorship has a wiki entry (including reservoir dogs and Battleship Potemkin!!). And those are the most liberal speech countries in Europe.
I’d wager most aren’t familiar with the term, and the majority of those who are will think of the battleship/movie, not the villages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_battleship_Potemkin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
> I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today
I can't say what constituted "most film" in 1926 (are we going by what sold the most tickets? big blockbusters versus daily newsreels & cartoons?) but if you look at the era of 1925-1927 it includes Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, The Vanishing American, The Bat, Metropolis, and Wings. Many of this list is iconic to this day to where they continue to be referenced & emulated in pop culture that many people recognize even if they haven't seen the originals before.
Granted this discussion will be hamstrung by how much film has been "lost" with so much of that content no longer in living memory at all (to say if it was masterpieces or crappy filler).
The best way to watch these movies would be by pirating them from the RuTracker, as that way you will be sure that you are not contributing any views or advertisement money to the Mosfilm, with a bonus of much higher bitrates.
Here are the links:
Solaris — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6191155
Stalker — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6182463
Ivan's Childhood — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194960
The Mirror — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194964
Andrei Rublev — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194948
The Passion According to Andrei — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5820633
Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein is in public domain, and so you can legally watch any other upload on YouTube instead of Mosfilm's, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQcljysO-8
In my movie Meetup, we were having DVD night, and once after the main feature, I showed The General. Everyone loved it.
Speaking of The Battleship Potemkin: I really, really tried to get hold of the musical score for it, with the idea of having the Google Orchestra (yes, there was such a thing) play along with the movie when we showed it. No luck.
The Internet Archive has a section devoted to silent films:
https://archive.org/details/silent_films
And a Silent Hall Of Fame:
https://archive.org/details/silenthalloffame
And a Georges Méliès collection:
https://archive.org/details/georgesmelies
Specific films:
Battleship Potemkin:
https://archive.org/details/BattleshipPotemkin
The General starring Buster Keaton:
https://archive.org/details/TheGeneral_201312
Le Voyage dans la Lune
https://archive.org/details/LeVoyageDansLaLun
I'm not sure if he could read Russian, but in addition to the Snow Queen by Lev Atamanov, Miyazaki frequently cites Soviet animator Yuri Norstein as a major influence, and lists two of his films (Hedgehog in the Fog, and Tale of Tales) as among his favourites of all time.[1] Several of his movies do have shots that seem strongly reminiscent of the Battleship Potemkin so I'd be surprised if that film wasn't an influence as well, although I don't know of a source that states it.
[1] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/hayao-miyazaki-25-favourite-films/
I manage to make it through a lot of movies that might, not unfairly, be described as "so boring I'd rather be at the DMV" or "so confusing I don't think even the director knew WTF was happening".
I bailed on Birth of a Nation about halfway through. I can usually suffer through a historically-significant film even if I'm not really loving it (I made it through Battleship Potemkin while hardly enjoying a minute) but Birth was just too much. It wasn't the offensiveness (that can be its own kind of entertaining, in a pinch) but that it was really long, and really dull. Maybe it picked up in the back half, but I doubt I'll ever find out.
I'd say the director's sort-of followup Intolerance also counts as a bit of a challenging watch for modern audiences, but I found that one way more fun.
Because wealth can be turned into power.
Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many.
To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a revolution and ultimately they made this feature film about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin
A few months back we had the spectacle of Elon Musk possibly buying Twitter (maybe he was in the running for asshole-in-chief) but I think he got some sense scared into him and he is keeping his head down these days.
I watched Battleship Potemkin the other day. Sure, some of it is a bit pokey compared to modern films, but the editing doesn't drag and there aren't many films in history with better shot composition.
Prokoviev also wrote the score to the movie Ivan Grosny by Sergey Eisenstein (The Battleship Potemkin), the first part of which is portraying the csar unifying Russian clans and became one of Stalin's favourite movies, while the second part describing the csar's mental decline and general degeneration was forbidden by Stalin.
The Bolsheviks and (to a lesser extent) the Nazis had plenty of good art that also saved as propaganda for the most despicable causes. You can appreciate Eisenstein or Harlan as great directors without thinking them to be fine human beings. Of course beyond art that is purely formally fascinating, there is a tension between artistic quality and serving a narrow propagandist agenda, and personally I find Battleship Potemkin utterly dull and overrated. But the best films these directors created in the service of totalitarianism transcend this narrowness: try Ivan the Terrible, for the example.
Russia has been doing it since the dawn of cinema. e.g. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm, soviet propaganda, and amazing advances in movie-making have all marched together from the very start. You'd be surprised at how many of the tropes and techniques that form a part of modern movie language have their origin in soviet propaganda.
The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.
Mosfilm, the Soviet/Russian film studio also uploaded a lot of their old films to youtube[1] including Stalker, Solaris, and Battleship Potemkin. Many of them also have English subtitles. Here's a small list of more examples: http://366weirdmovies.com/your-guide-to-mosfilm-in-english-on-youtube/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm
Avatar and TDK historic points in film. AKA Dancing with Smurfs, and The Movie With More Plot Holes Than The Titanic. Hum, I beg to disagree.
Overall, I got a good laugh from the list. Seriously, this list should be called "things white US kids (of my age, granted) like". Rather than a history of cinema, it belongs more in the "comedy generated by computer" genre. Exhibit one: City Lights isn't there. Exhibit two: Modern Times isn't there. No Le Voyage dans la Lune, no Man With Camera, no Great Train Robbery, Rashomon isn't cool enough to make the list, Vertigo is too weird, and Battleship Potemkin is, like, too commie, you know. The final straws would be Independence Day and It's a Wonderful Life making the list.
I mean, On the Waterfront looks like it's very good (I haven't seen it), but, but, it was released in the same year than motherfucking Seven Samurai!
There's another bias, where things are overrated because they're unusually good for their time. For instance, "Battleship Potemkin" is often considered one of the greatest films ever made because it was so innovative for its time, despite the fact that when you watch it now, it's easily a shitty propaganda film. It may have been a greater achievement, but as a film, it's somewhat lacking by modern standards. Likewise, MASH and Seinfeld were groundbreaking, but largely because of MASH and Seinfeld, we can and do make better television series today. I think the two biases largely cancel out.
This has some interesting consequences. For instance, in the restricted realm of science fiction TV, it's clear that Star Trek: The Next Generation is strictly better than the original Star Trek, just as the recent Battlestar Galactica is strictly better than TNG, because these series responded to and innovated on each other.
On balance, I still wouldn't say it's necessarily true that newer series are better than older series. It's still rare that a TV series tops The Prisoner, for instance.
Actually, there are pretty good methods of this for piracy. If you search for the torrent title (IE: "Battleship Potemkin aXXo", etc) and "subtitle", you can generally find a subtitle for your version in my experience. Have a listing for movie, then version of movie (German edition, Director's Cut, terrible American theatrical release that cuts out the bit where last part was all a dream, etc). If piracy and fans can solve an issue like that, surely the studios can too.