Battleship Potemkin (Feb. 10th, 12th and 13th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN screens Thursday February 10th at 6:45pm, Saturday February 12th at 9:40pm and Sunday February 13th at 6:30pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Hello, it's me, Charles again. Bob Ignizio, esteemed founder of this website, was supposed to do this review of Sergei Eisenstein's classic BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN But Mr. Ignizio confessed he had no fresh take about this legendary, almost transcendent work of cinema. More pressingly, he wife went into labor with their first child. So the review is delegated to me...In other words I am in COMPLETE control here. Attica! Attica! No justice, no peace! Attention passengers, this is a hijack! This blog is going to Havana, Cuba! I have absolute power and can say anything I please. What I quite desire is revenge on people who have hurt me. Or, through inaction, have allowed hurt to come upon me (back when I used to hang out with left-wing artists and similar bad company a drunken gang of local Democrats laughed and said I talk like a robot; it's only fair I get to invoke Isaac Asimov).

Most, though not quite all, of the above-referenced hurting involves my long, fruitless job search. It's been a soul-eroding chronicle of near-total rejection, shame and humiliation that destroyed my personal life and self-esteem, not to mention financial stability. It would not have been so onerous had I not seen jobs handed out like candy to others, nothing for me. Woody Allen is quoted as saying 80 per cent of life is just showing up. I showed up - to near 100 per cent turndowns. I think Mr. Allen needs to clarify what he means by "life."


We all know the big fish in this city for communication careers is the Plain Dealer newspaper, right? I attended a costly Syracuse University specifically so I could come out of it a proud graduate of the Journalism school bearing the S.I. Newhouse name, the same chain to which the PD belongs. I figured that might open a door just a crack in Ohio's Largest Newspaper. Finally, after a dozen years of trying, I angled an actual PD job interview, for the only position they had available...a clerical position. Okay fine, I thought. I'll settle. It's Cleveland; settling for less is written into the city charter. But when the interviewer at the paper found out I possessed an actual, bona fide, Willy Wonka Golden Ticket Syracuse University degree in Journalism, he stopped the conference right there and ushered me out the door. They told me they did not want anyone with a Journalism degree.


Not a long time after that, I happened to read in the selfsame Plain Dealer that one of the paper's clerk's - holding the identical job slot - had been arrested. A crackhead, he'd been committing holdups of service stations and convenience stores to feed his habit. But this I can guarantee you: He probably wasn't a Journalism grad. Thank you, Plain Dealer Human Resources. You favored a dangerous junkie over me and protected 1801 Superior Avenue from trespass by a potentially unarmed and sober Journalism graduate. Keep up the good work.


Okay, then. Revenge impulse satisfied, if only for about ten seconds, after which I realize nothing has changed. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, ah yes. I remember first seeing this on Stu Levin's vintage WVIZ TV show Old Movies, The Golden Era in the 1970s, back before Mr. Levin fled this city for California (and I recently saw him in the Harlan Ellison documentary DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH in which Levin utters one of the wittiest insults to Cleveland I've ever heard). Even on my grandparent's old, fuzzy B&W TV the imagery from POTEMKIN was electrifying. It transfixed the young Charles with the magic of dynamic moving images and Eisenstein's incredible, rapid-fire editing montages. Hey, I thought, this is better than Saturday morning cartoons! I hope the callow film students today watching the thing feel the same say, even if they've been thoroughly spoiled by Final Cut Pro, MTV and Samurai Jack.



Mr. E had actually made an earlier Leninist-propaganda feature, STRIKE (which in its fashion, is just as stirring). He was assigned POTEMKIN by the Kremlin to commemorate a 1905 sailor uprising against the Czar that was a taste of the epic October Revolution to come (for you younger readers online right now, probably raking in enormous salaries at your cool Plain Dealer workstation, think of all this stuff I write about czars and Russian Revolutions as being like World of Warcraft; maybe then it will feel more real to you). As with STRIKE, and toeing the official strictures of proletariatism, Eisenstein avoids spotlighting a single character, though he comes close with a seaman in the Russian Imperial Navy. Sick of maggot-ridden meat aboard the title vessel, he spearheads a spontaneous mutiny against the bullying, aristocratic officers (and their toadying priests). The lead rebel sailor is killed during the rebellion, and when the ship puts into port at Odessa the martyr is laid out in a funeral bier with the placard by his dead body "ALL THIS FOR A CUP OF BORSHT" (no tears wept for the late naval officers and the priests). The pathos sways the city over to the Potemkin men, and when hordes of rifle-toting Cossacks arrive to crush the dissent they face an angry, defiant but tragically outgunned populace. The Cossacks then massacre the populace on the landmark steps leading down to the waterfront, an immortal sequence that has been quoted, hailed, parodied and rehashed (I guess most famously by Brian DePalma in THE UNTOUCHABLES), but deserves to be watched again on its own.

It says something that, as with Murnau's THE LAST LAUGH, you need barely a single title card or subtitle to understand what is happening. Certainly POTEMKIN was conceived as craven propaganda; it got the resources to be made while Russian peasants starved, and it serviced a regime that I think most of us can agree was a pretty nasty piece of work (and corporate-America Hollywood is morally superior, er, how exactly?). But the film rises above its dictatorship pedigree to become true visual art in the best sense, and it has outlived the deeply flawed Marxist political philosophy that spawned it, now defunct, bankrupt and dead (except among tenured professors lecturing at American college campuses, of course).


I can't say myself, as I first beheld POTEMKIN, awestruck, back in the Brezshnev years of detente, that this film made me eager to convert to Soviet Communism. But it doubtlessly planted some treasonous thoughts tormenting me yet. Too often I wonder, maybe if I'd been born behind the Iron Curtain in 1963, I'd be happier. I'd have had a far better chance of getting a job than I ever would have here in Failure-opolis, Ohio. The commie pinkos, out of necessity to uphold an image of 100 per cent employment (suck on that statistic, Woody Allen), created unnecessary and redundant positions just to pretend their system was better than the West's. Surely there had to be a small, shabby desk in there somewhere in the USSR, that the commissars would let me sit at for a few subsistence rubles.


I tell you, if Mephistopheles appeared in a puff of brimstone and offered me a deal like that, I'd think it over...Of course, chances are just as good I'd go the way of so many others of Eisenstein's comrades. Sent to a gulag or killed in a Red Army training camp accident. Or just firmly taken, elbow in arm, by a KGB agent, put against a brick wall and dispatched with a bullet through my head. In his report he'd explain: "Boy talk like robot. Never fit in. Execution was mercy."


Oh, hi, Bob Ignizio, congratulations on your blessed event and your beautiful, growing family. No, nothing much happening here, just doing the BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN review for you, in lieu of a proper baby-shower gift I couldn't afford. Yes, I found a fresh angle.(4 red stars)