#adv1

“Battleship Potemkin” begins by informing the audience this film is about the spirit of revolution and the evolution of that spirit into the revolutionary elan. Director Sergei Eisenstein breaks up the film into chapters that provide structure for how this evolution happens: from the initial rage that sparked the rebellion on the ship (“Men and Maggots”) all the way to the bloody assault on the rebels (“The Odessa Steps”) and finally, a triumphant victory (“One Against All”). I found this film particularly strong in its use of raw, up close and personal displays of emotion. 

Firstly, I found the scenes of maggots on the meat on the battleship particularly powerful. Multiple times the film cutaway to close-ups of the maggots, leaving no doubt in the audience’s mind that this meat was not fit to eat. Close enough to leave the audience slightly nauseous. When the doctor comes to inspect the meat and declares one only needs to wash off the worms with brine, the audience understands the ridiculousness of this statement. Already, just in the first chapter of the film, I was already sympathizing strongly with the soldiers and their dire predicament and treatment. This feeling of support for the rebellion only grows throughout the film, peaking at the horrifying scene at the Odessa Steps. 

At the Odessa steps, I was shocked by the brutality of the troops shooting on innocent men, women and children. When a woman’s child falls behind on the steps, he is trampled and bloodied. She returns back to hold him, and walks back up to the firing soldiers to beg them to stop shooting. Her son’s face is covered in blood. Eisenstein makes sure to show the woman’s face clearly, especially when the soldiers decide to ignore her pleas and shoot her. The soldier’s faces are never shown; they are left nameless, cold, cruel. 

Once upon a time, there were two Maries. Were they sisters? friends? Were they symbols of female defiance? human decadence? Probably all of the above.  

           But wait, the start isn’t quite right. It should go something like “Once upon a time, in a land far far away”. So, where did they live?

Now, there’s the more interesting question. They lived in a sort of post WWII Czechoslovakia, but its more complicated than that. Before I saw either of them, I saw images of war, bombing, devastation, so I wasn’t sure whether I was watching some documentary or a fiction film. And then I saw them sitting there (like marionettes!) in black and white before WOOSH, everything changed to color. Come to think of it after that the colour never really stayed the same: there was the standard monochrome, then various coloured filters, and sometimes this rainbow sheen.

           Ok ok, stop, I’m getting dizzy just hearing about it. Their weird world sounds cool, but where did they actually stay? I want to know about their house. And fashion.

Well, that’s the thing, their tiny apartment was sort of fragmented and changing too. Actually, no first they were both in a garden, like Genesis, only with Eve and Eve (sounds pretty feminist to me!). And then their tiny apartment looked like the garden, with leaves and images of plants all over the walls. As if someone had exploded the garden. BOOM! And get this, they then actually burned their apartment down and redecorated it by scribbling graffiti and random dudes’ phone numbers on their walls. Fragments, into more fragments, into more fragments, into more fragments. Like their clothes too actually – polka dots, cheques, stripes, and then at one point just some butterflies, then towards the end a manifold curtain.

            Ok they sound totally nuts, I love them. But I know you, you’re probably going to want to find some kind of logic for why they’re doing this. Boooooring.  

So, this one professor, Bliss Cua Lim, tried to tell me that the montage, jump cuts, changes in colour tone, and especially their decision to chop each other into pieces like a collage is a feminist critique of surrealism using its own aesthetic language. I know there’s lots of academia jargon, but stay with me. Apparently, the surrealist bros like Breton, Ernst, and Bellmer depicted women’s bodies in quite violent ways in their art. No wonder Frida Kalho thought they sucked. So M&M (get it) were being surrealist and gleefully chopping up each other’s bodies and reconstituting them to show their agency over their own bodies.

           Ok I hear you. But is that it?

What do you mean?

           I thought that part of the anti-capitalist project of surrealism (see, big words too! Ha!) was to produce art that didn’t necessarily have a well-defined point or meaning. The “point” might just be about an aesthetics of pointlessness. Are we sure they were following a script? The scene in the dance hall seems pretty improvised to me (hey, I thought only you saw them ;) ) and there the action was driven by their drunkenness. And then we don’t really know how the night with the butterfly guy ended. It doesn’t seem to matter to the plot. What plot? And even this feminist-surrealist collage scene seems either like an allegory (see what I did there?) for the fluidity or the negation of the self. And at the very end, when they make the definitive statement that they’re “truthfully happy”, is when they seem to die.