The horrors of making Battleship Potemkin, 100 years on

Vladimir Lenin insisted that “of all the arts, cinema is the most important”. But it was young director Sergei Eisenstein who proved Lenin right. Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, which premiered in Moscow in January 1926, created a new visual language for a revolutionary age. Eisenstein, just 26 years old when filming began, had to contend with the challenge of filming on board a working battleship stacked with dangerous munitions, lack of specialist equipment, a chaotic government committee that spent months approving about a script and a production schedule so tight that the final edited reel had to be rushed by motorcycle to an earlier preview screening at the Bolshoi Theatre even as the film had begun playing. But he made a film so unique that it still shapes the language of cinema and television today.

Nervous censors in the West saw Potemkin as a dangerous blueprint for revolution. German authorities dubbed the film a “risk to public order and safety” and refused to license it until 14 of the most violent scenes – mostly depicting murderous violence by the battleship’s sailors against their officers – had been cut. The British Board of Film Censors, spooked by the May 1926 General Strike, banned it altogether. Potemkin was only deemed suitable for general release in France in 1953 and the UK in 1954.

Making a heroic film to mark the 20th anniversary of the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, of which the real-life mutiny on the battleship Potemkin was a part, was a top-level political decision. The Bolsheviks’ last serious White Guard enemy had surrendered just two years previously and the government was struggling to feed and control a vast empire racked with famine and the aftermath of a civil war. Lenin had died in 1924, and the headless state needed a major propaganda project to cement its legitimacy and rally the people to its cause. Cinema, a new art form for a new era, seemed the best medium by which to accomplish that political goal.

Eisenstein and his 27-year-old director of photography, Eduard Tisse, were the rising young stars of the fledgling Soviet film industry. During the Russian Civil War, Eisenstein had abandoned a degree in civil engineering to join the Red Army, spending two years travelling across war-torn southern Russia building bridges. Fascinated by theatre from boyhood, he transferred to one of the new “agitation and propaganda” trains which the Soviet government had kitted out to teach illiterate peasants about the values of the revolution.

Equipped with a scratch troupe of amateur actors and boldly-painted sets, Eisenstein produced peripatetic variety shows that blended didactic sketches with excerpts from Macbeth and Puss in Boots. After the war, he worked with the groundbreaking modernist theatre Vsevolod Meyerhold, before joining Moscow’s brand-new Proletkult (short for proletarian culture) Theatre as a director. Thanks to a tie-in between Proletkult and the new state film studio Goskino, Eisenstein began to experiment with film and with radical new theories for a new form of montage editing, directing his first full-length feature in 1924. Strike was the story of a factory uprising in 1903, and served as a dry run for Potemkin.

Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet people’s commissar for enlightenment, was tasked with heading a committee to decide on the script for the epic movie of “1905”. Fellow committee member Kazimir Malevich, the avant-garde painter, recommended his friend Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko as a safe pair of hands. Agadzhanova was a battle-hardened female Bolshevik veteran whose husband, Kirill Shutko, also happened to be a high-ranking Soviet cultural functionary. Before the revolution, Nina had headed secret Bolshevik cells all over Tsarist Russia, edited an underground newspaper and infiltrated White Guard units in south Russia as an undercover spy, and had been exiled twice and imprisoned five times.

Agadzhanova-Shutko’s original script covered all the momentous events of the revolutionary year, including the Russo-Japanese war, the Bloody Sunday massacre, anti-Jewish pogroms, a general strike, the armed workers’ uprising in Moscow’s Krasnaya Presnya – as well as a segment about the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein, wisely, chose to focus on just the Potemkin segment. He began shooting in the newly-renamed Leningrad – now St Petersburg – at the end of March 1925 even as the committee was still wrangling over the script.

The young director had very different ideas to his screenwriter on how the story should be told. Agadzhanova-Shutko’s lengthy screenplay had love stories, hero and villain characters, and a complex plot. Eisenstein took just a tiny part of her text and simplified it even more. Stripped down into just five short acts, Battleship Potemkin tells the story of how a sailors’ protest over rotten meat turns into a bloody mutiny which spreads to the population of Odessa and is brutally suppressed by the Tsarist authorities.

There are no developed characters, only caricatures: the corrupt ship’s doctor, the arrogant captain, the heroic simple sailor who leads the revolt and is killed, the civilian victims of the massacre on the Odessa Steps. Eisenstein does not aim for realism or psychological insight. Instead, all the intense emotional and ideological impact of the film is created by striking montages of unforgettable images: the baby carriage bouncing down the Odessa Steps, inexorably marching lines of soldiers, an elderly nurse shot in the eye. In the process, Eisenstein coined many of the classic techniques of cinematographic narrative. Cuts to detail to emphasise dramatic effect, cutting from a character’s eyes to what they see, cross-cutting between two pieces of action unfolding at the same time, and most famously juxtaposing images of violence with reactions to that violence, are just some of Eisenstein’s groundbreaking innovations.

The production was a nightmare. Eisenstein had insisted on filming mostly on location in Odessa. Time was pressing as the events had to be shot in summer for historical plausibility – and to protect the fragile French-made Debrie Parvo cameras from the elements. But predictably for a project designed by committee, the final script was approved only in June. Basic equipment was also scarce. At the time, the USSR produced no film stock, so 2,000 metres of precious 35mm celluloid film had to be rushed from Berlin. The local film studios had no trolley for tracking shots, so one of the multiple cameras used for the iconic massacre on the Odessa Steps had to be strapped to the waist of a running assistant.

Eisenstein’s top-level backing gave him access to the Soviet Black Sea fleet and its battleships. The original Prince Potemkin of Taurida was being scrapped – but a near contemporary battleship, the Rostislav, was available. The vessel had been scuttled and sunk in shallow water off the port of Odessa to mark a sandbank, leaving the upper decks above sea level as a handily stable platform for filming. Archive footage of the real Potemkin and of the French fleet at sea were used for action shots of the rebel battleship’s daring escape to Romania. But scenes at sea and interior scenes were filmed on the cruisers Komintern and Twelve Apostles, a much more challenging environment. There was no time for the crew to stow ammunition and mines or clear the decks for filming, so strict measures were enforced. “No smoking, no loud noises, no running” was the director’s order, Tisse later recalled. “Safety was so prioritised that even necessary movement was curtailed.”

The movie’s most iconic scene, of the massacre on the Odessa Steps – actually then called the Primorsky Stairs and now known as the Potemkin Stairs – was shot using non-professional actors recruited by Eisenstein on the streets of Odessa for how they looked rather than whether they could act. At least one had actually participated in the 1905 revolution: Konstantin Feldman, a socialist activist who was present on the ship during the latter part of the mutiny but who later fell foul of Stalin’s purges and was shot in 1937.

Time for editing was extremely short. Eisenstein personally hand-tinted 108 frames to show a waving red flag at the end of the film, earning rounds of applause from audiences. On the night of the first private screening, to an audience of Soviet bigwigs in December 1925 at the Bolshoi Theatre, the final reel was delivered by motorcycle by assistant director (and actor) Grigori Aleksandrov after the movie had already begun.

Lunacharsky and the committee were sceptical that a movie without a love story or recognisable stars should be released. But the radical poet Vladimir Mayakovsky browbeat the commissar in his office, banging his cane on the floor as he insisted that Eisenstein’s film was a masterpiece. For Potemkin’s public premiere in January 1926, the facade of the First State Kino-Theatre on Moscow’s Arbat street was decorated with a two-storey-high mock-up of the battleship, with cinema staff in period Imperial Navy uniforms and trumpeters on the bridge playing fanfares. Over 300,000 Muscovites flocked to see it in its first run.

To this day, Eisenstein’s story of mutinous sailors on a Tsarist battleship, told in just 43 iconic shots, remains one of the greatest films ever made.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]