• Jonny Best improvises to Battleship Potemkin

I had an illuminating and joyful day at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe this bitterly cold Saturday, attending another film screening event run by Northern Silents, the innovative organisation that specialises in putting on silent film screenings with live music across the North of England. 

In this case, the music was provided solely by the artistic director, Jonny Best, who improvised for several hours to provide accompaniment for a wide variety of films.

The event opened with a quartet of relatively obscure comedy shorts, Harold Lloyd’s High and Dizzy (1920), a Laurel and Hardy film from before they were a double act, Duck Soup (1927), the slightly surreal comedy by Max Linder, the French comedian who inspired Chaplin, Max takes a Bath (1910), and A Pair of Tights (1929), a brilliant comedy starring Anita Garvin and Edgar Kennedy (both of whom appeared regularly alongside Laurel and Hardy) that builds towards a bizarre climax in which everybody ends up flat on their backsides on the sidewalk. It is a good example of the way that ostensibly silly slapstick comedy can sometimes capture the profound absurdity of life; this is where we are all, ultimately, destined to end up.

• Jonny accompanying Visit to Pompeii

The second section of the day was a fascinating selection of films about the classical world that were introduced by Maria Wyke (UCL), who has been analysing these as part of a funded research project on cinema’s depiction of classical antiquity. This consisted of a documentary by pioneering British film-maker GA Smith, Visit to Pompeii (1901), two early Italian epics, Nero, or the Burning of Rome (1909) and The Odyssey (1911), and A Roman Scandal (1926) a wild animation by Charles Bowers and Bud Fisher featuring comic strip characters Mutt and Jeff transported back to ancient Rome to participate in a chariot race.

The event concluded with a screening of Battleship Potemkin, which I introduced,  and the film was accompanied with some of the most beautifully lyrical piano playing of the day. 

• Jonny accompanying Battleship Potemkin

This is the introduction I gave:

Battleship Potemkin is one of the masterworks of world cinema and was recognised as such on its release almost a century ago. When the famous Hollywood producer David O Selznick saw the film in 1926 in a private screening, he wrote to his boss at MGM, production manager Harry Rapf, that it was ‘unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures ever made’. He continued: 

‘I shall not here discuss the commercial or political aspects of the picture, but simply say that regardless of what they may be, the film is a superb piece of craftsmanship. It possesses a technique entirely new to the screen, and I therefore suggest it might be very advantageous to have the organization view it in the same way that a group of artists might view and study a Rubens or a Raphael’ (Selznick 2000: 10).

Battleship Potemkin was the second feature film directed by Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein and, as with almost all of his film work he tried with this film to find a form that suited the content – a revolutionary style for a film about revolution and so, as Selznick would have known, the ‘political aspects of the picture’ cannot be disentangled from its ‘technique’. Released in December 1925 to mark the 20^th anniversary of the 1905 Russian revolution, it tells the true story of the mutiny of the crew of the Potemkin against their appalling living conditions, and the way that this act of resistance snowballs when the captured ship comes into port in Odessa and government troops try to crush the revolt brutally, slaughtering civilians in the process. What makes this film so striking is not just this theme of the struggle against injustice, but also the way this story is told. 

Eisenstein was a film theorist, as well as a film-maker, and with this film he was interested in putting theory into practice. By the mid-1920s, Hollywood film studios had worked out a reliable formula for telling stories that allowed them to mass produce films as if they were cars coming off an assembly line. No matter the genre – comedy, Western, crime drama, social problem drama, melodrama – Hollywood stories tended to be based around a protagonist with clearly defined motivation, who battles obstacles in order to reach their goals allowing the film to reach a satisfying resolution.

Eisenstein’s approach to storytelling is very different. Rather than organizing the story around heroic, charismatic individuals like a Hollywood filmmaker would, he is much more interested in examining the way that groups of people work together, and of course these two ways of telling stories express two very different political understandings: Hollywood’s capitalist worldview on the one hand, in which society consists of individuals competing with each other, and a Socialist worldview on the other, in which individuals are members of a collective group; ‘All for one and one for all’, as the revolutionaries declare at one point in the film. This emphasis on collectivity is reinforced in Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein’s democratic decision not to cast actors, claiming, ‘there are only real people in the film’, so that we see very different faces and bodies from those of the breathtakingly beautiful stars we typically see on screen – people who look like us, rather than people who look exceptional (Eisenstein 1998: 66). 

However, the most striking difference in Eisenstein’s approach to storytelling is evident in the structure of the film and how individual shots are assembled into sequences. Rather than thinking about a narrative as a linear progression, he saw it as a series of disconnected moments of spectacle or excitement where the storyline is just a framework or pretext to get from one exciting moment to another, a ‘plot carcass’ as he said of the narrative of Battleship Potemkin. He described his films as a ‘montage of attractions’ – a series of set-pieces – and the reason he developed this method was to achieve the maximum emotional and intellectual impact on the spectator. Eisenstein called cinema a ‘lightning conductor’, arguing that its purpose was to shock the audience repeatedly, jerking them out of their complacency in order to hammer home an idea. 

Another signature of Eisenstein’s approach is in the editing of his films. By 1925, Hollywood cinema had already refined the continuity editing system that is still used in most film and TV, in which one shot follows so smoothly from the previous shot that when we watch a film we rarely notice that we are watching hundreds or thousands of separate shots in succession. Instead, we follow the actors’ movements, the dialogue and the unfolding of the story. Eisenstein’s aim was to break this convention and do the exact opposite with his films, so for instance, when there is a shot of a soldier moving from left to right, he follows this with a shot of another figure moving from right to left. If there’s a low angle shot, this will be followed with a shot from a high camera angle, if there’s a black image, it will be followed by a bright white image, and if there’s an image with diagonal stripes going in one direction, in the next shot we’ll see diagonal lines running in a different direction.

As you will see, the effect of this editing style, which emphasises discontinuity, is to give the film image a sense of rich visual dynamism and spatial complexity. This is amplified as the editing accelerates in the most dramatic scenes, resulting in a stuttering, machine-gun like torrent of images. This is especially evident in the very famous scene in which civilians are massacred by infantry and mounted Cossacks on the Richelieu steps in Odessa under orders of the Czar, and it was this radically innovative approach to editing and storytelling that excited viewers at the time, and led Selznick to declare him a great artist.

Eisenstein had an increasingly strained relationship with Soviet authorities in the 1930s and 1940s as they came to prefer stylistically conservative socialist realist film-making, but he continued making more ambitious films culminating with a vast trilogy of films about Ivan the Terrible, dying at the age of 50 before it was complete. But this early film is one of the most successful realisations of his concept of cinema, and the fact that it was banned in Britain for longer than any other film is a testament to its power as an ideological lightning conductor. The BBFC refused to grant this dangerous film a certificate in 1926 due to its ‘inflammatory subtitles and Bolshevist propaganda’, and it was only in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, that it finally received a certificate for release as an X-rated film (viewable by people 16 and over). 

References:

Sergei Eisenstein, 1998. The Eisenstein Reader. London: BFI

David O Selznick, 2000. Memo from David O Selznick. New York: The Modern Library