Film

Although agitational to the core, Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. In the first of these, "Men and Maggots," the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the second, "Drama on the Quarterdeck," presents the actual mutiny and the ship's arrival in Odessa. "Appeal from …

…that far outweighs the shots' narrative significance. Through Eisenstein's! accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps--where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below--acquires a powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world famous. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**