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Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
What more can be said about Potemkin - the celebrated re-creation, in documentary style, of the key events of the failed 1905 Kronstadt revolution against Tsarist oppression - re-issued (in 1998) in a new print, with music by Shostakovich replacing Meisel's original score. It exemplifies, we know, Eisenstein's facination with 'montage' (the use of dialectical forms of editing to create meaning) and 'typage' (non-actors cast for physical characteristics). This, however, is propaganda, just as much as art, and looking back after more than 70 years there's something cold, academic, even manipulative about the meticulous compositions, schematic characterisations and complex choreography of massed movement. It lacks the genuinely fiery passion of Eisenstein's earlier Strike, not to mention the lyricism of Dovzhenko or the perky wit of Vertov. Edward Tissé's camerawork remains impressive, and there's no doubt that the whole is a technical tour de force, but the obsession with forces of power, as opposed to individual experience, is ultimately oppressive.Author: GA
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