The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sergei Eisenstein · a film · 1925 · silent, about 70 to 75 minutes in most copies · scored on the film as released in Moscow in January 1926, without any later score · from a scenario by Nina Agadzhanova with Eisenstein
Mode
Revolutionary epic told by montage; an anniversary commission, a political argument and a tragedy of the crowd in one film
Mythos
Martyrdom and resurrection carried by a collective: the sailor who dies for the others and is watched over, the city risen from his death, the mother of sorrows on the steps, the stone beast that wakes, the brothers who will not kill
Phase
June 1905, in five acts: the maggots, the quarterdeck, the vigil on the pier at Odessa, the massacre on the harbour steps, and the waiting at sea for the squadron
Presentation
Silent feature film in black and white, about 70 to 75 minutes in most copies; photographed by Eduard Tisse; most parts cast by type from non-professionals; one passage coloured by hand, the flag raised over the ship
Register
From maggots under a folded pince-nez to fog over a harbour at dawn, from a massacre to engines driven toward the guns; exhortation in the titles, exactness in the images
Scale
One ship, one city, the state, and a class made into a single protagonist
Governing Proposition
The sailors of a battleship refuse rotten meat, are condemned, and rise at one sailor’s cry of brotherhood; the city of Odessa mourns the sailor who dies for them, pays for its solidarity on the harbour steps under the rifles of the state, and the ship sails out to meet the squadron, which does not fire. The wager of the film is that a story can be told by the collision of shots rather than by the continuity of action, so that the meaning is made between images as the revolt is made between men, and the viewer is assembled into a mass as the crowd is.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the revolution of 1905, and it takes from that year the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in June and the unrest in Odessa that followed. It is built in five acts, each with one action, and it begins with meat. The meat for the crew’s soup is crawling with maggots. The ship’s doctor folds his pince-nez so that one lens serves as a glass, looks closely, and pronounces the meat fit to eat.
The sailors refuse the soup. A sailor smashes a plate inscribed with the prayer for daily bread, and the gesture is broken into overlapping cuts, so that one movement of the arm is seen more than once and a single act of anger lands as a detonation. It is the first time the film shows its hand. Here the meaning is made not inside a shot but between shots, and the anger is not one man’s.
There is no hero in the usual sense. Aleksandr Antonov plays Vakulinchuk, the sailor who will speak for the others; Grigori Aleksandrov, who also assisted on the film, plays the officer Giliarovsky; most other parts are cast by type from non-professionals, faces chosen for what they are rather than for what an actor can make of them. Eduard Tisse photographs the deck from above and the faces in extreme close-up. One passage of the film is coloured by hand, the red flag raised over the ship, and everywhere else it keeps to its greys.
Movement II
On the quarterdeck the men who refused are condemned, and a tarpaulin is thrown over them. A priest is there, and his cross will be driven into the deck like an axe. The scene is the crisis of the film, and it turns on one word. Vakulinchuk cries out to the guards: “Bratya!” (“Brothers!”). The rifles do not fire.
The mutiny follows at once. The doctor who passed the meat is gone, and his pince-nez hangs in the rigging, the instrument of his false verdict left behind. In the fighting Vakulinchuk is killed. The man who turned the guards with a word is the one the revolt costs, and the film begins at once to make him into what the others need him to be.
Everything here is drawn in one stroke. The officers are cruel, the doctor is a fool, the priest is a tool of command, and the sailors are good together. The film does not ask what the revolt will cost or what it may become; it argues, and its argument is a party’s. But its method is already its own. The cry is the hinge of the film, and it will return at the end, carried from ship to ship, where it will mean the same thing on a larger scale.
Movement III
The ship comes in to Odessa. Before anyone in the city knows what has happened, the film gives a suite of pure images: fog over the harbour at dawn, masts and sails in grey. Nothing moves the story forward. The harbour mourns before a single mourner appears, and the form pauses to breathe before the crowd gathers.
Vakulinchuk’s body is carried ashore and laid out in a tent on the pier, a candle burning beside him. The people of Odessa come to look, first a few, then a crowd that fills the mole. Speeches are made over the body. A provocateur has his moment in the crowd. The mourning becomes anger, and the anger becomes solidarity: the city has taken the dead sailor as its own.
Then the yawls go out. Small boats loaded with food put off from the shore toward the ship, followed by Tisse in long pans across the water, and the people of the city gather on the steps above the harbour. For the length of this passage the city and the ship are one body. The film lets the gladness stand, and it stands at the top of the steps, where the film is about to show what the state does with it.
Movement IV
The boots appear at the top of the steps. A line of soldiers descends in rhythm, rifles levelled, and fires into the crowd below. The people have nowhere to go but down. The camera runs with them, hand-held, and stands with the soldiers above them, and cuts between the two until the viewer is in neither place and in both. The descent is cut so that it lasts far longer than any stair could; time on the steps is stretched and broken, and terror becomes a duration.
The violence falls first on the weakest. A boy is shot, and his mother walks up the steps toward the rifles with her dead son in her arms. A legless man flees with the rest. A woman in pince-nez is shot through the eye. A pram tips over and goes down the steps among the bodies. The film shows every one of these with an exactness it never gives the men who fire.
The massacre on the steps, as the film stages it, is the film’s construction: a truth about state violence made into an event. Then the ship’s guns answer, and three stone lions are cut together, one sleeping, one waking, one risen. Three shots of three statues make stone rise. It is the plainest display in the film of what the cut can do, and it closes the passage with the city’s anger given a body that cannot be shot.
Movement V
The ship puts to sea and waits. A squadron is coming, and the last act is the waiting: the engines driven up, the faces on watch, the squadron drawing on. The film builds suspense out of machinery and faces, and it takes its time. The question is whether the guns of the state will fire on the men who refused to fire.
The ships draw close, and the cry of brotherhood is carried across the water from deck to deck. The guns of the squadron stay silent, and the men who were sent against the mutineers are their brothers after all.
The last act adds what the steps withheld: the armed men of the state are men, and men may refuse. It is the argument’s resolution and its promise, and the film makes no attempt to hide that it is an argument. What it builds to get there is the thing that has lasted: a story told by collisions, a crowd made into a protagonist, and a sequence of shots on a stone stair that has been studied, quoted and imitated for a century.
Act III · The Twelve
Five acts, each with one action, and the subtractive test finds little to remove. The maggots are the cause: the doctor’s pince-nez folded into a lens, his verdict that the meat is fit, the soup refused, the plate inscribed with the prayer for daily bread smashed. The quarterdeck is the crisis: the tarpaulin thrown over the condemned, the one-word cry to the guards, the mutiny, Vakulinchuk’s death. The pier is the mourning that turns the city; the steps are the price the city pays; the squadron is the resolution. Each act requires the one before, and the argument cannot drop a step. What is charged: the speeches on the pier and some of the titles say what the images have shown, the provocateur’s moment repeats the work of the mourning, and the last act’s waiting is long for what it holds.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure is carried by image as fully as by words, and it can be stated: solidarity is born of shared humiliation, and the state answers it with violence against the unarmed, which falls first on the weakest, the child, the mother, the old, the legless. The steps hold it as a truth seen rather than argued: boots descending in rhythm, rifles fired from above into people who have no way out but down. The last act adds a second truth, that the armed men of the state are men who may refuse. Held well below the top because the film is an argument made for a party: the officers, the doctor and the priest are caricatures, the crowd is good by definition, and the condition is shown as doctrine rather than opened: the cost and the ambiguity of the revolt are concealed by design.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is high and grows act by act. The quiet heights come first: fog over Odessa harbour at dawn, masts and sails in grey, mourning the dead sailor before a single mourner appears; the candle in the tent on the pier. Then the dreadful heights of the steps, which are the summit: the mother walking up toward the rifles with her dead son in her arms, the woman in pince-nez shot through the eye, the pram tipping down. Then the three stone lions, sleeping, waking and rising, as the ship’s guns answer; and in the last act the engines and the cry of brotherhood carried across the squadron. Frequency holds the figure where it stands: the first act rises only through anger, and the summits gather in the second half of the film.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built and bears load in every act. Its structure is martyrdom and resurrection transposed to the collective: Vakulinchuk dies for the others, his body is laid out and watched by candlelight on the pier, and the city rises from his death. Around it stand the mother of sorrows on the steps, carrying her son toward his killers; the priest whose cross is driven into the deck like an axe; the sleeping stone beast that wakes; the brothers who will not kill. That construction is why the axis clears the gate. It is held just above it because the particular is not kept particular, by design: casting by type makes the figures emblems, the sailor, the officer, the mother, the bourgeois, so the archetype rests on types rather than on persons, where both are wanted at once.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance was the narrative cinema of the individual hero and the theatrical historical film. The turn: a collective hero; parts cast by type rather than by actor; a story told by the collision of shots rather than the continuity of action; time stretched and broken on the steps; a political argument carried by cutting. The stake was real: a state commission with a deadline, a political subject, a director of twenty-seven on his second feature, and a form no audience had been trained to read. Held below the top because much of the turn was made the year before in Strike (1924), which already had the collective hero, typage and the montage of attractions, and because Kuleshov’s experiments and Griffith’s Intolerance had prepared the theory of the cut. This is the turn perfected and made legible more than the turn first taken.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Montage is the argument: the meaning is made in the collision of shots as the revolt is made in the collision of men, and the viewer is assembled into a mass as the crowd is. The smashing of the plate, broken into overlapping cuts, makes one gesture of rage a detonation; the steps, cut so that the descent lasts far longer than any stair could, make terror a duration; the lions, three shots of three statues, make stone rise. The five acts answer to the dialectic of the argument. Told in continuous action with individual heroes, the same story would be an adventure; this form makes it the birth of a collective. Held below the top where the titles carry an argument the cutting has already made.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A century of return. Eisenstein’s own essays on the film, on its organic unity and on its structure, began a literature that has not stopped: every theory of montage since has analysed the steps, and the film is taught frame by frame. The formal yield is deep: the counting of shots, the rhythms, the shifts of scale, the overlapping editing and the composition of the whole by halves and thirds are studied still, and the reconstruction of 2005 brought new findings. The semantic yield is thinner. The meaning is stated and little contested; the arguments are about its politics, propaganda or art, the truth of the steps, rather than about what it means. Held where it stands because the yield is largely formal, and the readings converge on what the film says while they divide on whether to admire it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1925, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is at the top of its decade: the film made montage a language, showed that cutting can argue, and made the collective a possible protagonist. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a year it was a cause abroad, praised and feared, banned and imitated; montage became the core of film teaching and of the Hollywood montage sequence; the steps are quoted in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), and parodied; and Francis Bacon built his screaming figures in part, by his own account, from the scream of the nurse on the steps. The reach is among the widest of any film. The discount: much of what it taught, it taught as a model of technique.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. For eighty years the film circulated altered: cut by censors abroad and banned for years in Britain and elsewhere, its opening epigraph from Trotsky removed at home, its titles changed, its copies shortened and re-scored. The reconstruction of 2005 reassembled it from scattered copies, and what the alteration took was small, some shots, an epigraph, a few titles, so the form is whole and the restoration is repair. Presence has been as wide and continuous as that of any film of its decade, in cinemas, classrooms, histories and polls, through every ban and every regime. The charge is on the surface: the film is fixed to its moment more than most, a commission for an anniversary and a party’s argument, and part of its survival is as a document of Soviet art rather than as a living work. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With that charge laid, a form recovered whole and a presence unbroken through every ban would still carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Eduard Tisse’s camera gives the harbour in fog, the deck from above, the hand-held passages on the steps and the faces in extreme close-up. The cutting, rhythmic, tonal and metric in Eisenstein’s own terms, governs the whole and reaches on the steps a control of time and scale that no film of its decade surpasses. The crowds are staged on the steps and the mole, and the yawls going out with food are followed in long pans. The plate and the lions are cutting made visible. The costs: casting by type gives broad performances, the officers and the doctor near pantomime; the first act’s exposition is slack beside what follows; and some of the titles are bombast. The making is load-bearing, and it has seams.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the fog over the harbour, a still lyric of masts and water, and the massacre on the steps. One law governs both: the collision of images makes a collective feeling, mourning in the one and terror in the other, and the camera serves the mass, never a single point of view. The plate, the tarpaulin, the pier and the squadron obey the same dialectic, and the range from lyric to violence to suspense is wide. The strain is twofold. The caricature of the officers and the priest belongs to a cruder register than the steps, where the victims are seen with an exactness the oppressors never receive. And the hand-coloured flag, a placard in a film of shadows, breaks the film’s physics to make its point, although it does so deliberately.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many: the state, in the navy, the Cossacks, the squadron and the guns; labour and class, in the sailors as workers, the food and the city’s trades; the city as a social body, the people of Odessa on the mole and the steps; the Church, in the priest, held as an arm of the state; the family, in the mother and child and the pram; history, as 1905 seen from 1925; death and mourning, in the vigil on the pier; and a collective consciousness, built as the film’s subject. One event integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: individual consciousness is excluded by design, so no person is held from within; the sacred appears only as an enemy; and nature is a backdrop of sea and fog. The breadth is real, and the depth is single.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Made at 9.1, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 9.0. A film that made montage a language and the collective a protagonist, with a reach running from film teaching to Bacon’s canvases; a cutting that commands time and scale on the steps; heights that grow act by act from the fog to the lions; and a form in which meaning is made between shots as the revolt is made between men.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: the state, labour and class, the city, the Church, the family, history, mourning and a collective consciousness are held through one event, but no person is held from within, the sacred appears only as an enemy and nature is a backdrop. Above it, The Unconcealment at 8.4, a truth about state violence seen on the steps, inside an argument made for a party in which the oppressors are caricatures and the crowd is good by definition. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 8.6: martyrdom and rising built on types rather than persons, and a return that is deep in form and converges on what the film says.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Unconcealment at 8.4 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Bronenosets Potyomkin as Eisenstein released it, first shown at a gala at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in December 1925 and in general release in Moscow in January 1926: directed by Sergei Eisenstein for Goskino (First Studio), from a scenario by Nina Agadzhanova with Eisenstein, photographed by Eduard Tisse, with Grigori Aleksandrov assisting. The version that carries it most nearly is the reconstruction completed in 2005 for the Deutsche Kinemathek under Enno Patalas. Where copies differ, the film released in Moscow is judged, not any censored, shortened or re-edited version. The film is the work, and it is judged silent, as made: Edmund Meisel’s Berlin score of 1926, for all Eisenstein’s collaboration with Meisel, is not part of it, nor are the later Soviet soundtracks or any other added music. No print, script or list of titles was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; English renderings are for sense, and nothing here is charged to them. One word of the titles is held with certainty and quoted, in romanised Russian above the English; everything else said in the titles is paraphrased without quotation marks. The massacre on the steps, as staged, is the film’s construction and is judged as such, not as a record of 1905. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the shot count, the length of each act, the number of titles, the exact running time of the reconstruction, the titles of the acts, the day of the Bolshoi gala, the cast beyond the principals and the details of what the reconstruction restored, are not given.