This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.
The Battleship Potemkin could be subtitled "A Story of the Sea." For while the men who scurry about its frame - those anonymous and amorphous masses - instigate the action, it is the ambiguously gleaming waters around the ship, and the ship itself, that most reflect the narrative arc. When the film begins, the sea is forbidding, isolating, intimidating: a mass of impenetrable emptiness encircling the starving and discontented battleship. Its shimmering presence heightens our impression of the sailors as imprisoned by their circumstances, and zeroes our focus in on the ship that holds them; after all, there's nothing else to look at, for them or for us.
Yet the film concludes with another shot of these waters and suddenly our interpretation is quite different. At this point the battleship Potemkin steams toward the squadron sent to shoot it down, only to discover that the other ships have been overtaken by sympathetic sailors, more interested in saluting than shooting the mutinous barge. And suddenly the sea is an open field, a liberating space upon which anything is possible. Its shimmers seem friendly winks, its little waves infinite possibilities, its wide-open landscape a heroic horizon. Eisenstein's title tells us that the ship is waving the flag of freedom and it's as if this banner is clearing the air, swatting away the mosquitoes of reaction and the haze of oppression, parting the waves as crisply and cleanly as the ship's bow itself.
