Watching\u00a0Battleship Potemkin<\/i>\u00a0confronted me with the raw power of a political film with no three dimensional characters. Each individual possesses individuality only inasmuch as they represent a certain aspect of a cause or argument. The child shot by the czarist soldiers and crushed by the stampeding crowd careening down the steps facing the Odessa harbor matters because of the innocence he comes to embody in the face of czarist barbarity. The same goes for the film\u2019s protagonist, the sailor and revolutionary Vakulinchuk, whose life, death, and words all act to symbolize the fundamental goodness of the communist cause, the heroism of its leaders, so unwilling to submit to fear in the face of their totalitarian enemy that their martyrdom suffices to drive crowds into a revolutionary frenzy.<\/p>\n
The men and women move as crowds, but we do not for a second imagine that they lack individuality; it simply does not matter. Here I find myself reminded of Prince Lvov\u2019s declaration of March 1917, on the subject of the Russian people\u2019s role in the European democratic movement, cited by Mark Mazower in the first chapter of\u00a0Dark Continent<\/i>. \u201cThe soul of the Russian people,\u201d he proclaims, \u201cturned out by its very nature to be a universal democratic soul…prepared not only to merge with the democracy of the whole world, but to stand at the head of it and lead it along the path of human progress\u2026\u201d While the rebellious citizens and sailors of\u00a0Battelship Potemkin\u00a0<\/i>do not stand for the Social Liberalism advocated by Levov, their bristling mass of clenched fists represents something similar: the helm of a movement in the name of human liberation.<\/p>\n
The attack of the Cossacks left the strongest impression on me of all the scenes. It reminded me of Mazower\u2019s section on the failure of Russian liberalism.\u00a0 Unlike the liberals, Russia\u2019s rural peasants and urban working class wanted peace and a higher standard of living, neither of which the liberals offered. \u201cIn the factories, in the countryside, social order was collapsing, and the middle ground in Russian politics disappeared\u201d. Nothing indicates this state of affairs better than the facelessness of the Cossacks in\u00a0Battleship Potemkin<\/i>. As the shock troops of czarism, they stand for nothing, save the brutality of power. Nothing denotes impotence better than repression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Watching\u00a0Battleship Potemkin\u00a0confronted me with the raw power of a political film with no three dimensional characters. Each individual possesses individuality only inasmuch as they represent a certain aspect of a cause or argument. The child shot by the czarist soldiers … Continue reading