Potemkin is a great film that moves me every time I see it.
Everyone knows it for its success as a technical achievement, one of the best and most thorough uses of montage. On this viewing, as always, I loved the way montage makes the lion statues stand to alert as the bombardment starts and the way the solders seem to march relentlessly for miles as they descend the Odessa steps. This time through, I was also more aware of how Eisenstein uses montage for other effects, uses we still see today. For example, as the Potemkin approaches the fleet at the end, the takes get shorter and shorter as the film cuts back and forth between the ship and the fleet, building suspense using faster montage. Likewise, as mutiny builds on the Potemkin earlier in the film, the cutting gets faster and faster. In fact, I even noticed a large, rhythmic pattern in parts like the scenes before and the scenes during the Odessa steps sequence. This film’s tour de force editing gets me every time I see it.
Now I’m cluing in on other things I like about the film, too. An insight this time is that Potemkin is about collective action, and that’s a theme I always respond to personally. It’s a 100% personality bias, but I like movies about teams, groups or, in this case, crews and citizenry. I always connect with seeing a collective come together and mobilize; I respond to portrayals of groups acting with a shared will. What’s interesting here is that we don’t have a team coming together and setting out to accomplish a mission like, say, in Seven Samurai. There are almost no individuals here at all. This is a mass movement filmed as a mass movement, the frequent silent-aesthetic close-ups notwithstanding. And I still wanted to support those sailors and face up to the Czar’s troops. 
My least favorite part of Potemkin has always been the middle part -- A Dead Man Calls for Justice – perhaps because the Drama on the Deck and Odessa Steps sections bookend it and those are two action-packed parts. But knowing the two bookends well this time around, I paid more attention to this slow part on this viewing, and I enjoyed it. There are artfully composed images of long lines of people going to the pier, some walking on an elevated path while others walk along the foreground. These images reminded me of we would find 20 years later in Ivan the Terrible with its artful lines of people curving into the background and made me think such composition is a part of the Eisenstein film vocabulary. I’ll have to watch for it in other films of his. And as I watched the citizenry of Odessa rise in support of the sailors after viewing Vakulinchuk’s body, I was immediately reminded of a story by Garcia Marquez: "The Handsomest Dead Man in the World." In the story, a body washes up on a beach, and as the villagers begin to take care of it, they become more aware of how they’re living and begin to change their drab, routine world; when the citizens find Vakulinchuk’s body, they too begin to realize the repressive forces that are holding them and begin to move toward renewal. I have to wonder if that most leftist of Latin writers Garcia Marquez saw this most leftist of propaganda films and took this section as a spark for a story. It was great to revisit this film. The new blu-ray release from Kino has some scenes I definitely hadn't remembered, scenes that make the Czarist troops even more vile. I was struck by the brutality of some of the images in the Steps sequence. But I think these scenes just add to the power of this great movie. Watching Battleship Potemkin., again, I enjoyed it again. I like its themes, I like its technique. What a classic.
