Of The Cuff Reactions To A Great Movie.
May. 9th, 2021 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI watched Battleship Potemkin last night- in a crummy transfer that looked like it had been taped off the TV.
Had Potemkin been a film I love the crummyness of the transfer might have made me switch off- but how can you love a movie that was conceived as an advert for a political system?
The crummyness helped me to achieve some distance from the action- and with a movie as manipulative as Potemkin that's not a bad thing.
Montage- as developed and used so powerfully by Eisenstein- is a great propaganda tool. It moulds an audience's response. It selects, juxtaposes, underscores its images- sometimes to aesthetic effect, but also to prompt a desired response. This goes some way towards explaining why some filmmakers eschew it- including some of the greatest and most humane- Ozu and Mizoguchi for instance- and Dreyer in his later work. Chaplin too, now I come to think of it. They all want the viewer to see the bigger picture, to come to their own conclusions.
Cinema can't help but be tricky- and selective in what it shows us- but some films are trickier than others.
So much of cinema is political advertising.
Mistrust any movie that sets up a certain group as "the enemy" and refuses to show us their faces. The Potemkin sailors have faces- handsome faces, noble faces; the soldiers who march down the Odessa Steps, firing at intervals are faceless. Both groups are grunts, under authority, under orders, all drawn from the same peasant stock, but one lot is set up for our admiration, the other lot dehumanised.
Only suppose Eisenstein had given one of the soldiers a face, a sympathetic face- allowed it to express fear, reluctance, horror. He would suddenly have been telling us another story. A richer one...
As it is he deliberately chooses the half-truth which is little better than a lie.
A lot of movies, of all political stripes, tell us the same lie. The enemy doesn't have a face- therefore it's OK to hate them- therefore it's OK to sweep them off the face of the earth.
(Stalin approved of Eisenstein, allowed him some latitude, didn't ever see the need to kill him.)
Another strategy is to give the enemy a face but an ugly one. The Potemkin officers are a horrid bunch- perpetually sneering, smirking, looking down their aristocratic noses. It's therefore entirely proper to smash them.
Why, they're no better than orcs...
I notice that the late Roger Ebert- whose site I regularly visit- places Potemkin on his list of "Great Movies". Well, he has to. There's no denying its artistry and historical importance. Also on the list is Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will. No denying its artistry either...
Had Potemkin been a film I love the crummyness of the transfer might have made me switch off- but how can you love a movie that was conceived as an advert for a political system?
The crummyness helped me to achieve some distance from the action- and with a movie as manipulative as Potemkin that's not a bad thing.
Montage- as developed and used so powerfully by Eisenstein- is a great propaganda tool. It moulds an audience's response. It selects, juxtaposes, underscores its images- sometimes to aesthetic effect, but also to prompt a desired response. This goes some way towards explaining why some filmmakers eschew it- including some of the greatest and most humane- Ozu and Mizoguchi for instance- and Dreyer in his later work. Chaplin too, now I come to think of it. They all want the viewer to see the bigger picture, to come to their own conclusions.
Cinema can't help but be tricky- and selective in what it shows us- but some films are trickier than others.
So much of cinema is political advertising.
Mistrust any movie that sets up a certain group as "the enemy" and refuses to show us their faces. The Potemkin sailors have faces- handsome faces, noble faces; the soldiers who march down the Odessa Steps, firing at intervals are faceless. Both groups are grunts, under authority, under orders, all drawn from the same peasant stock, but one lot is set up for our admiration, the other lot dehumanised.
Only suppose Eisenstein had given one of the soldiers a face, a sympathetic face- allowed it to express fear, reluctance, horror. He would suddenly have been telling us another story. A richer one...
As it is he deliberately chooses the half-truth which is little better than a lie.
A lot of movies, of all political stripes, tell us the same lie. The enemy doesn't have a face- therefore it's OK to hate them- therefore it's OK to sweep them off the face of the earth.
(Stalin approved of Eisenstein, allowed him some latitude, didn't ever see the need to kill him.)
Another strategy is to give the enemy a face but an ugly one. The Potemkin officers are a horrid bunch- perpetually sneering, smirking, looking down their aristocratic noses. It's therefore entirely proper to smash them.
Why, they're no better than orcs...
I notice that the late Roger Ebert- whose site I regularly visit- places Potemkin on his list of "Great Movies". Well, he has to. There's no denying its artistry and historical importance. Also on the list is Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will. No denying its artistry either...
no subject
Date: 2021-05-09 05:18 pm (UTC)I haven't been able to touch LoTR for years. Might puke if I tried. I don't mean to offend you if you are a fan yourself. (You have mentioned it but I cannot remember what you said about it.) I just personally had enough of it during that intense process of writing.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-09 06:05 pm (UTC)