346. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Starring: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Running Time: 73 mins

Battleship Potemkin is a Soviet propaganda film that dramatises the true events of an uprising on the battleship ‘Potemkin’, that swiftly leads to demonstrations on the streets against the Tsar, amidst the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Well, I think I’ll stop watching these propaganda films now, because they are just a tiny bit boring. However, I thought that this film was actually relatively engaging in truth, as it had quite a bit of action and fighting in it, as well as quite an interesting story.

Of course, with a silent film, it’s always easy to lose concentration, and that did happen to me on one or two occasions throughout the film, especially in the first stages while the background of this uprising was being set up, when very little happened at all.

Once the revolution on the Potemkin had been won, though, all hell pretty much broke loose. The mad stampedes on the stairs during the street protests, and the pictures of a baby falling down the stairs, and a young boy being trampled by protestors running away from guns firing at them, were all very exciting to watch, and that proves that you can make a film with no sound or colour that still has a bit of drama to it.

I have to say that this was also one of the most blatant pieces of propaganda I’ve seen. Most propaganda is quite forward, but this really rammed the ideas of the Communist Party down your throat, which was quite annoying to see, but as history shows, it was pretty effective, but overall, I’ll give this film a 6.0.