Saturday, January 15, 2011

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemki Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin at Film Forum in New York. "...One of the genuinely exciting legends of the cinema, Eisenstein’s epic revolutionized screen editing, treatment of violence, and propaganda: the Battleship Potemkin incident, conceived as a single episode of a planned pageant on the 1905 revolt, in celebration of its 20th anniversary, comprised only one-half page of the original script. The devastating 'Odessa steps' sequence ('a few minutes in cinema as brilliantly organized as a movement in a Beethoven symphony' – James Agee), conceived by Eisenstein only when he arrived on location, is still perhaps the most famous, anthologized, and imitated in film history."