The Big Screen (13 page)

It's a film in six parts, like the six steps in a lesson—and what is the point? You know what to feel in advance; it's the great handicap that the film never quite confronts. The strikers are virtuous, brave, earthy, good-looking, energetic. They are wonderful. The bosses, the stockholders, and the police are ugly, fat, decadent—one has the lousiest teeth, which he bares as if they were weapons—prone or slouched in chairs, drinking, smoking, carousing, and issuing toxic orders on the telephone. Sooner or later you'll get the message. The strikers are honest and noble and saints. The bosses aren't. This could soon become tedious (and a threat of monotony hangs over state film), but for the rapture with which Eisenstein films it all, the unstoppable inventiveness of the actors, and the swaggering impact of the whole thing thrown up on a screen as if it were a blackboard in a classroom. This is theater, or pantomime, for a young experimental nation more than grown adults who realize that the struggle between capital and labor in a modern economy is very complicated. In 1925 no Soviet authority was prepared for the complexity. To strike was to overthrow corruption. Life was still very simple, even if the cinematic energy was without rival. So we never see the strategizing of union leaders or commissars. We are offered a plain choice, backed up by the terrible cruelty of the police. Yet in the real life of the Soviet Union, strike leaders became policemen soon enough. Nothing in Eisenstein's way of seeing was prepared to notice that in 1924–25.

Time and again in
Strike
(and this still works) we exult at the way Eisenstein the caricature artist has dropped pen and paints for a camera and the light. And if the topic announces itself as grave and brutal, the movie remains gorgeous. Nothing illustrates this better than the terrific range of gesture, attitude, and violent physical elan in the inspired company of the supporting cast. (There are no stars.) These are the Proletkult Workers' Theatre members, often staring straight into the camera, as bold as monkeys. In love with the screen, Eisenstein wants to advertise its stark role, so he rarely uses oblique angles to observe people “off guard.” (He never reaches for the privileged “intimacy” or private moments offered in American cinema.) This is film thrown in our faces. It's like a balletic newsreel, jazzy with urgency and attack. (Had Sergei heard the first Hot Five recordings from 1925?) And in love with his players and the savage, uncritical “types” they present, Eisenstein wants to get closer to them, like a nose with cocaine, so he loves big close-ups and seething compositions where bodies writhe together in talk or battle. Never a dull or still moment. How could there be if you're making a movie where political necessity requires that you keep a fierce hold on audience attention at all times?

The idea behind the film says the company spies are odious and treacherous, but in filming them, Eisenstein falls in love with their antics and masquerade, the dissolves that reveal disguise and cunning. You can hear the laughter between director and players—“Oh, yes, do that!”—even if you're watching a version of the film that now has a driving, pounding score by the Alloy Orchestra, added only ten years or so ago.

When the police turn power hoses on the crowd of strikers, we see their humiliation and distress, but only for an instant, before we're dazzled by the swirling white shapes of the water and the sight of drenched bodies trying to avoid it. It's as if Eisenstein can hardly look at anything without being captivated by its cinematographic beauty. So the strike and its consequences become a show. There is the superb confidence of an expert circus in
Strike
. Imagine Cirque du Soleil putting on a new version of
O
—“Overthrow the Bosses”—at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and doing it in black and white with the raw glow of gold just mined. We ought to be horrified at the police brutality and the bosses' cynicism, but the screen's frenzy is overwhelming. That flat form is bristling, pugnacious, and alive. It crawls with vitality and exults in the imitation of realism. I'm not sure that in 1925 anyone anywhere had made a film with a greater sense of discovery and miracle. Kino, we love you, the picture says. Does it add, you're better than life?

So why are we on our feet cheering at the end, when the portrait of working-class disaster is so grim? Of course that is the lesson meant for the huddled Soviet masses—believe in the great strike on which we are all embarked. Do what the union leaders tell you, and start off by seeing
Strike
! But then suppose the factory workers responded, “Great God! I don't want to stay in a factory all my life—not even a place as pretty as Tisse saw. I want to make movies!”

I don't think Eisenstein ever topped that debut. Of course, the next film,
Potemkin
, is better known. It made the director an international figure and the darling of film societies devoted to this lively Soviet art (and its promise of a new world), especially if they did not themselves have to live in Russia. For several decades,
Potemkin
and Eisenstein were emblematic of an alternative cinema to that of Hollywood—less controlled by money, more dedicated to the liberation of the human spirit, and supposedly more alert to social reality. For many judges, they were the acme of the art. That was wishful thinking, but we don't have to blame it on Eisenstein or lose sight of the conundrum in
Potemkin
.

There really was a battleship named
Potemkin
, and its mutiny was an incident in the attempted revolution of 1905, if not as clear-cut or rousing as Eisenstein would have it. The ship was briefly taken over by an indignant crew. (The meat on board was bad.) The mutineers sailed to Odessa searching for supplies. That harbor city was indifferent. The ship sailed away. The mutineers quarreled, and the ship ended up back in the hands of the navy. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps. But how many people would believe that now? Anything on film runs the risk of becoming a given for the future.

The film was shot in the late summer of 1925, and while Eisenstein had recently visited Odessa, he found more congenial steps in Sebastopol. Some commentators have claimed that the display of montage for which the film is most famous was the result of the prevailing shortage of film stock in the Soviet Union—so short ends of stock made for short shots? Not so. By the mid-1920s the Soviets had as much film as they needed. That's how Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep were able to make
Miss Mend
only a year later, at four hours and with so many entrancing, extended shots. No, Eisenstein did montage for his best reason in the world: it was what he wanted.

The question of why he wanted it is harder to answer.
Strike
is an accumulation of detail in which Eisenstein was less interested in developing a fluent sequence of events than amassing aspects of it. He liked to collage pieces of action. So the set pieces are a building up of angles and shots held in place by the scheme of the sequence. The editing in
Strike
seldom breaks into rhythm for its own sake, though there are cutaways near the end of the film to cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir—the slashing of throats, the rush of blood—that are cut into the reprisals taken against the strikers as nothing more or less than a metaphor or a symbol. The effect is clumsy and pretentious, a distraction from the film's heady energy.

But in
Potemkin
, the massacre scene was conceived and then edited as not just an accumulation or a buildup, but a buildup that vibrates with cutting's dynamic. If you need reminding, Eisenstein's setup has a civilian crowd (essentially middle class) gathering on the Odessa steps to applaud the mutiny, with the crowd then being attacked and dispersed by the tsar's troops (in white jackets and caps, dark pants and boots).

The script for the picture signals the design—both the termination of civilian life and the scourge of reprisal:

And so on—six pages in the script and seven minutes on the screen. It is more decisive and cruel as a movie, of course, because while uninterested in depth of character, Eisenstein had chosen his extras and their expressions with greedy acuity. These screaming faces are among the enduring images of the twentieth century. They are like the agonized horses' heads in
Guernica
, or the paintings Francis Bacon would make from
Potemkin
stills. And after
Strike
, no one could doubt Eisenstein's ability to choose faces or to catch them at peak emotional moments—mirth or panic, frenzy or rage. Further, while it is clear that in 1925 no one had ever seen editing or montage performed with such relentless authority and plastic beauty, the impact of the Odessa Steps sequence is still so compelling that it's easy to forgive the minor flaw: that the massacre never happened.

But massacres do happen, and it has been the automatic assumption of film commentary ever since that Eisenstein was possessed by the idealizing pathos (his word) of the event and only wished to make us feel that.

Consider a little more: if you mean to put a massacre in a film, it is in many respects easier to make a great list of shots, angles, and close-ups and to tick them off. It may take time to shoot them, and more time to construct the edited assembly. But it is harder and far more dangerous to say to a few thousand extras, “You fellows, the ones in uniform, attack those in their own clothes. Here are your rifles, your bayonets and swords. Now, on the word, disperse the crowd. Camera! Action!”

Think of the shower sequence in
Psycho
(not so weird a companion to the Odessa Steps). It runs about a minute on-screen, yet Hitchcock took five days to film it, using a detailed storyboard as his guide. No knife pierced Janet Leigh's skin, or that of her stand-in. The nudity of the character, Marion Crane, could be hidden because the angles were so precise, mannered, and brief. One day, another shard broke in—the screams and pounding of the music and the clear sound of a knife hacking through substance. (They used watermelon apparently, but they were out for blood.) The end result is devastating. But it may be an evasion or a fabrication compared with a single, unblinking, full shot that simply observes the ghost of Mrs. Bates murdering Marion. I think we know that would not have passed the censor in 1960, when films were still not supposed to show the act of murder. Instead, Hitchcock wanted to make it artistic.

But do we really need to be educated in the principle that massacres of civilians by armed troops are wrong? Is there doubt?

On the other hand, there are acts of violence in cinema accomplished in single shots—I think of the killing of the potter's wife in Mizoguchi's
Ugetsu Monogatari
(1953), the murder of Batala in Renoir's
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
(1935), the climax on the cliff ledge in Michael Mann's
The Last of the Mohican
s (1992), or the displaying of Lola at the end of Max Ophüls's
Lola Montès
(1955). No, the last is not a murder, merely the observation of a woman who is dying and cannot back off from the killing show made of her life. The violence there is tacit, everyday, and societal—and maybe more provocative than the massacre in
Potemkin
. We are old enough now to realize that camera attention can destroy some people. Those other moments are treatments of death in which a privileged thrill is replaced by its sickening consequences.

There's the conundrum I spoke of.
Potemkin
does urge us not to hack down innocent citizens who have come to see the big show. It even maintains that it is shocking to expect sailors at sea to eat maggots. But those things hardly amazed many audiences. What gripped them was this new, close-up scrutiny, this screening, of intolerable damage, to the extent that we watched it and came back for more and called it the height of cinematic art. It did this without ever drawing anyone's attention to the ways the film celebrated the “relentless” chorus line of bayonet-bearing troops coming down the steps.

I hope that's shocking, because sooner or later, if it's going to last, the cinema needs to be shocking. If all it can do is lull us into a kind of rhapsodic transport with the power of the montage and the beauty of the film, we will be inert long before the medium gets its death certificate. What I am saying is that Eisenstein was as thrilled by violence as Hitchcock or Sam Peckinpah, and by the ways in which montage permitted it—just as Hitchcock could not have murdered Marion Crane without the sharp blades of editing's tools.

Potemkin
opened at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on December 21, 1925. (He had been only three weeks at the editing, which shows how far the montage had existed in the script's concept.) He was so nervous that he prowled the corridors listening for audience reaction until he remembered (he said later) that the close of the film, the final length of physical film, was held together by spit, not film cement.

And here is the kid and the fantasist in Eisenstein, the way in which people knew him from the persistent but enigmatic grin beneath his wild, curly hair: