Battleship Potemkin is a film considered one of the greatest achievements of silent cinema. It was made in 1925 by Serguei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, a Soviet film director who was born on January 23, 1898 in the small town of Riga, the capital of Latvia.
About this film Georges Sadoul expresses: “Battleship Potemkin was, to a certain extent, news reconstructed in the manner of analogous films made twenty years earlier by Alfred Collins, Zecca and Nonguet. Eisenstein had given up using his edition of the attractions on it.
But, under the influence of Vertov and avant-garde literary theories, he dispensed with the studio, makeup, scenery and almost the actors. His film had only the masses as its hero, the actors were reduced to an ‘intelligent group’ and the revolutionary leaders were nothing more than simple silhouettes.
“Hero-mass prejudice could have caused some confusion. But the script, very clear in its strictly chronological and historical account, created two coherent collective characters: the battleship and the city. The drama was born from their dialogue and their union.”
This film, a work of art, put Eisenstein in the forefront of world cinema. His first feature film had been The Strike, in 1924, performed by a group of actors from the Teatro Obrero.
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