In early June , he and Potemkin crewman Grigory Vakulenchuk joined with other disgruntled sailors in plotting a fleet-wide mutiny. Their audacious plan called for the rank and file to rise up and strike a concerted blow against the officers. After commandeering all the navy ships in the Black Sea, the conspirators would enlist the peasant class in a revolt that would sweep Czar Nicholas II from the Russian throne. The mutiny was scheduled to begin in early August aboard the fleet flagship, but events conspired to see that Potemkin took the starring role.
The trouble began on June 27, a few days after the ship set sail from Sevastopol to conduct practice maneuvers. That morning, a group of conscripted crewmen discovered that the beef intended for their lunchtime borscht was crawling with maggots. Led by Matyushenko and Vakulenchuk, they resolved to protest by refusing to eat the tainted food. The Potemkin mutineers—Afanasy Matyushenko is in the center left in the white shirt.
He and his short-tempered first officer Ippolit Gilyarovsky both suspected the protest was tied to revolutionary factions lurking in the bowels of the ship, and they were determined to single out the ringleaders for punishment.
Before the officers could react, Matyushenko, Vakulenchuk and a few others ran to the weapons room and armed themselves. A vicious firefight broke out when they tried to force their way back onto the deck. First Officer Gilyarovsky succeeded in mortally wounding Vakulenchuk, but he and several other loyalists were promptly gunned down and pitched overboard.
Matyushenko and his revolutionaries took advantage of the chaos and fanned out across the ship. His bag of tricks centered around shot composition, casting for types, and montage, used in a way never before seen. Instead of editing to create a smooth or seamless narrative, Eisenstein threw disparate images against each other to elicit an emotional response or to stimulate an intellectual association.
To explain his approach, Eisenstein often used the example of Japanese characters, which he had thoroughly studied. This technique is used throughout the onboard rebellion sequence to create suspense, dread, and revulsion.
Refining these methods in what was only his second film, Eisenstein reinvented cinema. The world would not see another brash wunderkind like Eisenstein until Orson Welles made Citizen Kane.
In , Enno Patalas, working at the Munich Filmmuseum, also began reassembling the film, a process that culminated with a new restoration by the Deutsche Kinemathek, which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in This new version with 1, total shots includes all the material that had been cut by the German censors in the s and had been missing ever since.
Photos by Pamela Gentile and Tommy Lau. Sailor : Shoulder to shoulder. The land is ours. Tomorrow is ours. Sign In. Original title: Bronenosets Potemkin. Play trailer Drama History Thriller. Director Sergei M. Nina Agadzhanova script by Sergei M. Eisenstein re-writes Grigoriy Aleksandrov re-writes. Top credits Director Sergei M. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Battleship Potemkin. Photos Top cast Edit. Glauberman Wounded Boy as Wounded Boy. Daniil Antonovich Sailor as Sailor. Sergei M. Eisenstein Odessa Citizen as Odessa Citizen.
Andrey Fayt Recruit as Recruit as A. Korobey Legless Veteran as Legless Veteran. The German censors cut a scene when an officer is thrown into the water and a close-up of a brutal Cossack. A few years later, after Stalin came to power, a written introduction by Leon Trotsky was removed by the Soviets and replaced by a quote from Lenin. This latest version reinstated the original as well as some other intertitles felt too inflammatory at the time.
Despite the festival's claims of restoring a few missing scenes, there is not one frame that I had not seen previously. However, the one aspect of The Battleship Potemkin that has never aroused any censorship is Eisenstein's mischievous homoeroticism, which is more evident to modern audiences than ever. In the s, Nestor Almendros, the exiled Cuban cinematographer, wrote: 'From its very beginning, with the sailors' dormitory prologue, we see an "all-male cast" resting shirtless in their hammocks.
The camera lingers on the rough, splendidly built men, in a series of shots that anticipate the sensuality of Mapplethorpe, and at the great moment when the cannons are raised to fire, a sort of visual ballet of multiple slow and pulsating erections can easily be discerned. Although subjective, Almendros, and other gay commentators, cannot be accused of special pleading.
Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic obsessive.
0コメント