Josef von Sternberg | Morocco / 1930

safe sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Furthman (screenplay, based on a novel by Benno Vigny), Josef von Sternberg (director) Morocco / 1930

Josef von Sternberg’s appealing 1930 film, Morocco, is a curious work—in part simply because it is difficult to explain just why anyone might find it appealing. The film makes a few nods to being an adventure: the setting is in the exotic outpost in Mogador, Morocco—made even more exotic through von Sternberg’s use of a far-flung range of sets and costumes, transforming the spaces into a mix of a never-ending bazaar, a gypsy camp, a backstage play, and a desert battleground—in which, at moments, we actually experience the remnants of wartime fighting and the occasional free moments of its highly testosteroned soldiers. Yet the viewer recognizes that if he is truly seeking an adventure story, he should look elsewhere, perhaps to Beau Geste, Gunga Din, The Life of a Bengal Lancer or, more obviously, King Kong—all filmed in the 1930s, two even starring Gary Cooper.

      Many have described Morocco as being a great romance, and there is little question that von Sternberg was one of the most romantically-inclined (a born Romantic and an inveterate romantic) directors of the period. And clearly, something immediately clicks between the new singer in town, Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) and the Foreign Legion private, Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) which results in an attraction that, despite the enormous wealth and suave demeanor of the outrageous named Kennington La Bessière (Adolphe Menjou)—who offers a weary sexually-seasoned woman everything she might need to salve her heart—she is willing to give up everything for Brown. But strangely this absurdly romantic duo only kisses twice, and the first time is certainly not very convincing if you compare it, for example, to the first kiss of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert (also a former Legionnaire) in Flesh and the Devil of just three years before. In the most intimate meeting between Jolly and Brown hardly anything one might describe as “romantic” happens; in fact, they both use up their precious time trying to explain to one another how they are not truly to be trusted, suggesting they are both a bit exhausted from their lives of intense love-making. Finally, both try everything they can to convince the other that they don’t really “give a damn” about one another. So, despite the fevered décor and the heat of the air, signified by the intense rhythm of perpetually beating fans, in which they intact their two ineffectual encounters, no spark seems to ignite them, and the scenes in which they play out their muted desires, one has to admit, are quite cinematically static, with not even a lush musical bar to egg them on. Their “romance,” in fact, is diluted by Tom Brown’s attempted murder and his knifing of the two local assailants—after which he can only warn his would-be lover something to the effect that she better “get lost,” because “there’s going to be trouble.” And trouble does follow with Brown’s arrest, the suspicion of his being romantically involved with the Adjutant’s wife, and his punishment of being sent off into battle at the Amalfi Pass. 

      Rather than being a true adventure, a musical, or even a real romance, what most defines von Sternberg’s work might be a kind of sex comedy—but not in the way things usually happen in that genre. First, I think, it’s important that we admit that Morocco, behind all its décor and heaving layers of chiaroscuro, is a love triangle played out by three individuals who are all a bit worn out from their past lives. They’ve all come together in order to get away from the sexual liaisons and lurid business transactions they’ve endured previously. And they’re also soured on the opposite sex, particularly Jolly and Brown.

    In passing, I should explain that I also see La Bessière as equally disenchanted, if not because of his past relationships, simply because of personal nature; in terms of the mores of the film, the wealthy La Bessière is an effeminized being who “loves” Jolly so passively—offering her only possessions instead of kisses and hugs—that he hardly blinks at having to give her up, suggesting his only happiness is her happiness, a viewpoint which transforms him almost into a subservient eunuch.

     But then that is not so very different from the role Brown himself plays in abandoning Jolly so that she can enjoy the wealth and protection that La Bessière can offer her, and becoming—as my young movie-going companion Pablo described him—“mean,” rejecting her at the healing way-station when she has clearly made the decision that he matters to her. Despite the woman sitting upon his lap, Brown has been quite literally crying in his suds—busily carving out a love-post like some rugby-playing schoolboy, after whom he was probably named—an act that surely would have made Hemingway snort with derision.

      Indeed, as Jolly makes clear from the beginning she too is dismissive of popular sexual norms, appearing in her premier scene at the hurly-girly Lo Tinto’s transgressive nightclub dressed as a man and, in the midst of the act, asking for Madame Ceasar’s (Eve Southern) decoratively-worn flower—and in that act symbolically stealing her virginity, sealing it up with a mouth-to-mouth kiss. It hardly matters that Madame Caesar has no virginity to abandon, for, in a sense, through that act Jolly is proclaiming not only her preference, at the moment, for her own kind, but is hinting that she may soon return the woman’s sexual purity by stealing her lover way.

     During their encounter together soon after, both Jolly and Brown speak with great disdain about the opposite sex, making it clear that neither of them is to be trusted. And both speak of their failures to revitalize themselves in their relationships with the opposite sex. If Brown has inexplicably joined the Legion to get away from his lurid past, so too does Jolly explain that that there is a foreign legion for women as well. Their conversation summarizes their respective positions:

 

               Tom Brown: What in the name of 10,000 corporals did you come into

                                     a country like this for anyways?                         

             Amy Jolly: I understand that men are never asked why they entered

                                  the Foreign Legion.

               Tom: That's right. They never asked me and if they had I

                      wouldn't have told. When I crashed the Legion, I ditched

                      the past.

             Amy: There's a foreign legion of women, too. But we have

                           uniforms, no flags, and no medals when *we* are brave;

                        no wound stripes where we are hurt.

             Tom: Look here, is there anything I can do to help you?

               Amy: No. I've thought that before. Or, do you think you can

                      restore my faith in men?

               Tom: Not me. You got the wrong man for that! Anybody who has

                      faith in me is a sucker

               Amy: You better go now... I am beginning to like you.

             Tom: I've told women about everything a man can say.

                      I'm going to tell you something I've never told a woman

                      before: I wish I'd met you ten years ago.

 

     Even though they are clearly attracted to one another, these two hurt beings realize that if they dare to get involved sexually, it can only result in further pain and suffering. And, in that sense, they purposely pose as beings who are asexual, particularly to anyone whom they might respect. Sex, as Brown suggests, always involves trust, a faith that is sure to be misplaced. Furthermore, what can either of them truly give to one another: Brown a penniless private, Jolly a needy woman of loose morality? The only thing they can honestly offer each other is a later meeting.

 

     When Jolly, soon after, breaks her vow of asexuality and goes after her man, it ends, predictably, in a series of further betrayals, with Brown rejecting Madame Caesar and Madame Caesar ordering up her former lover’s murder. Sex in this world is not only not generative but is non-regenerative.

     In the very next scene, Brown is caught standing next to his guard with his leg resting upon his hip in the manner of another eccentrically asexual comic, Harpo Marx.* Bodily contact is definitely safer with the same sex. After all, isn’t a man’s decision to join up with the Legion similar to the decision of women of previous ages to get themselves to a convent, to join up in a world so closeted that heterosexual relationships are restricted and controlled. The film even begins with Brown being dressed down for having let his eyes stray to the body of a nearby native girl.

    One might describe Morocco, accordingly as a kind of comic burlesque about “safe sex,” a position, one might argue, similar to one in which the director himself had been positioned in relationship to his beloved star, Dietrich. Is it any wonder, as Cooper reportedly complained, that von Sternberg filmed the tall, lanky Cooper so that he too had to keep “looking up” to the leading lady. Von Sternberg was no fool, and, of course, he knew, from the example of his fellow German-speaking Wagner, that by denying his audience something that they had come to expect, they’d long for it even more. The woman we see hugging onto Brown’s towering frame throughout the movie offers him no more sexual satisfaction than the two dolls (racist representations, presumably, of black sexual fulfillment) that Jolly carries about with her everywhere. They are simply sexual surrogates.

      To find sexual satisfaction, from this film’s inevitably macho perspective, the woman has to be able to give up everything, to toss off her shoes, as Jolly does, and wade out into the desert sand to follow behind her man like the other sexual slaves trailing the Legion everywhere they go. It hardly matters how she might be dressed, what her gender might be.** In a few hours, it is clear, the wind will whip everything away. But at the end of a long day’s wandering, at least sex is a real possibility. After all, she’s entering a fairy tale, isn’t she?

 

*Although Harpo is presented as a chaser of the fairer sex, he gives equal treatment to the male characters in most of his movies, grabbing their legs, and using their torsos as handy resting posts.

**It reminds me a bit of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, where, after Port Moresby and his wife Kit’s relationship falls apart in Morocco, Kit (autobiographically based on Bowles’ lesbian wife Jane) dresses in a robe and wanders off into the desert to be picked up by a passing Arab trader who hides her from his harem, the women believing she must be a beautiful young boy.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2014).

 

Sergei Eisenstein | Бронено́сец «Потёмкин» Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925 [LGBTQ reading]

nights of anxiety

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nina Agadzhanova and Sergei Eisenstein (screenplay, with intertitles by Nikolai Aseyev and Sergei Tretyakoy), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Бронено́сец «Потёмкин» Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925

 

How does such a volume on queer cinema deal with figures such as the great Russian film director theorist Sergei Eisenstein, long rumored to be homosexual—although he assertively denied it, arguing that he may have had intellectual interests in bisexuality or even be asexual, he is not attracted to men—but who obviously had no way of showing that, given the Stalin regime, in his films. Of course very few noted directors of the time would have been willing to admit to homosexuality, and even fewer could have represented that in their films. The situation, after all, was not so very different in the US, France, England, and elsewhere, except perhaps for pre-Nazi

Germany and the Scandinavian countries. George Cukor’s and James Whale’s sexuality, for example, may have been an open secret within their communities, but their films were certainly not. Indeed, it is fascinating that some of the most friendly LGBTQ movies of the 1920s and 1930s were made by ardently heterosexual directors. 

       Yet certain of Cukor’s films and many of Whale’s works most certainly do give us hints. And especially in Whale’s case we see evidence coded into the films. Eisenstein arguably could never have done that. Even his revolutionary heroes such as those in Battleship Potemkin were brought into question given his use of montage and other formalist techniques.

       And his most openly praised Soviet works such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible I could not alter the memory of his greatest Soviet failure, Bezhin Meadow, commissioned by a Communist youth group and shot from 1935 to 1937 until the entire project was closed down. That film—based on the life of Pavlik Morozov, a young Russian boy who became a political martyr following his death in 1932, after he denounced his father to Soviet government authorities and subsequently died at the hands of his family—may have seemed to be the perfect project Eisenstein could have undertaken to bring him back into being an official approval, but its failures, its reliance on religious symbolism and the blurring of historical events, saw government interference coming from the highest levels, perhaps from Joseph Stalin himself. The Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party rejected several early versions of the film, decrying the director’s confusion of the class struggle with the battle between good and evil. Even the director likened the murder of the boy Stepov to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

        But the reaction was also likely part of a larger project to rid Soviet society of all avant-garde or innovative art, and the film’s financial overruns, the fact that Eisenstein had chosen unknowns to play the film’s “types,” and numerous other excuses forced the de facto head of all Soviet cinema, Boris Shumyatsky to shut down the film’s production, particularly since Eisenstein had come down with smallpox followed by influenza. The director had no choice but to himself recant his work as an error, pledging he would "rid myself of the last anarchistic traits of individualism in my outlook and creative method." In a tract that declared Bezhin Meadow a failure, he wrote  "What caused catastrophe to overtake the picture I had worked on for two years? What was the mistaken viewpoint which, despite honesty of feelings and devotion to work, brought the production to a perversion of reality, making it politically insubstantial and consequently inartistic?"

       During the bombing of World War II, the unfinished and unreleased film reels were destroyed in a bombing

      Accordingly, LGBTQ critics tend basically to either ignore Eisenstein or represent him as yet another figure who was silenced from making any significant contribution to queer cinema.

       Miraculously, in the 1960s film connoisseurs learned that Pera Attasheva, Eisenstein’s wife, had saved splices of the film taken from every major scene on the editing table for Bezhin Meadow, and in 1964 it was reconstructed by Russian film director Sergei Yutkevich and Eisenstein scholar Naum Kleiman, the fragments being set to music by Sergei Prokofiev. New intertitles were created from the script, and a new spoken introduction was added, resulting in something like a 36-minute slide show—all of which revealed stunningly beautiful images that suggest it had been a kind of hidden masterwork.

       It also perhaps revealed what few have discussed as further reasons why Eisenstein’s project was closed down and which might point to Eisenstein’s own coding of his gay sexuality.

        But before I swim into these shallow waters, I perhaps should first like to approach the great Soviet filmmaker from the perspective of Nestor Almendros’s 1991 essay about the director in Film Comment.

        First all Almendros reminds us that, despite Eisenstein’s continuous denials, he is more than probable that he was gay, even though may have begun to physically express his sexuality only on his European tours with his collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and his cinematographer Eduard Tisse to Berlin, London, Paris, and Zürich beginning in 1928 when he was under fire for his film October: Ten Days That Shook the World. One can only imagine their adventures—a bit like those of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka—in the Weimar Republic and Paris where they were sent to learn about the talkies and to present themselves as Soviet cinematic ambassadors to the West. Certainly like the Soviet representatives in the Lubitsch comedy, they must have truly uncovered the delights of those cities, and in the US trip that followed actually got into some trouble. Almendros describes some of the lesser known aspects of Eisenstein’s Hollywood visit:

 

“Yet Eisenstein seems to have yielded to his irrepressible desires while abroad, in more relaxed societies and away from the eyes of the NKVD, while visiting Berlin, Paris, and Hollywood. Sometimes he even indulged in humor about his ‘secret’: having been invited by the California studios to check out a new 70mm system, Grandeur, that enlarged the screen sideways, he complained to his British friend and fellow traveler Ivor Montagu that ‘a wide screen would deny access to all the aggressive male shapes like trees and factory chimneys.’* And Josef von Sternberg recalled, in his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry, that Eisenstein ‘always had pencil and paper in front of him…the sketches he made in my presence were probably destroyed, for they could have been shown only in a very understanding circle. Had he lived longer he might have given them to Professor Kinsey.’”

 

    Although several directorial projects were bandied about in Hollywood, as always most of them went nowhere, including what might have been a fascinating film based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Knowing Dreiser’s work, Eisenstein quickly developed a script for the film, but Paramount, already being attacked by the virulent anti-communist campaign waged by Major Pease, the president of the Hollywood Technical Director’s Institute, disliked what the Russian director had created. And by “mutual consent,” Paramount and Eisenstein voided their contract and treated the Eisenstein group with a return ticket to Moscow at Paramount’s expense.

     Eisenstein’s new “friend” Charlie Chaplin, however, suggested that the director contact the US socialist writer Upton Sinclair for help. Knowing Sinclair’s work in the USSR, Eisenstein met with the writer and the two quickly became friends, Sinclair securing an extension of Eisenstein’s travels, while suggesting that Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse visit Mexico, even creating a “Mexican Trust Fund,” supported mainly by Sinclair’s wife May, that would allow Eisenstein to make a film in Mexico. The project, consisting of several related films, titled ¡Que viva México!, was doomed almost before it started.

      In Mexico, the director met with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera among others. But as Almendros recounts, “he soon got into trouble.” Sinclair’s brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, whom the American author had sent to accompany Eisenstein to Mexico, wrote back that he was distressed over the fact that the Russian director was spending a great deal of time with young Mexican boys. Some of his amorous adventures in Mexico are fictionally portrayed in Peter Greenaway’s 2015 film Eisenstein in Guanajuato.

      But the real shock came when Kimbrough discovered a cache of Eisenstein’s drawings of the youths, all depicted with enormous penises.

      Receiving Kimbrough’s report, the prudish Sinclair closed down the Russian’s filmmaking project, confiscated and cut up the several films Eisenstein was shooting, and cabled the facts of what he had found to the Soviet authorities.

      Even more devastating for Eisenstein, was what happened afterwards, as he returned to the US for his voyage home. British arts critic Ronald Bergan summarizes:

 

“It was in the sketches that Eisenstein drew in Mexico in 1931 that his often regressive phallophilia reached its peak. During the shooting of the unfinished Que viva México!, Eisenstein found time to make many of his finest erotic drawings. The drawings as well as photos of nude males were found in the trunks and boxes Eisenstein sent to Hollywood from Mexico and were seized by US Customs agents, causing a scandal. It was also from Mexico that he sent his English friend Ivan Montague the well-known photograph of himself perched on a gigantic bulbous cactus plant, which seemingly protrudes from between his legs, with the words, ‘Speaks for itself and makes people jealous.’"

 

      Almendros’ essay suggests, however, that none of this confirmation of Eisenstein’s sexuality should come as a surprise if you simply view his movies. He begins his notable essay by relating the memorable incident when Eisenstein met the model Kiki in Paris:

 

“While Sergei Eisenstein was in Paris, the notorious artist’s-model Kiki de Montparnasse gave him a copy of a book of her memoirs with the dedication: ‘Moi aussi j’aime les gros bateaux et les matelots’ (‘I too love big ships and sailors.’) Kiki was no dummy, and might have owed her great popularity not only to her good looks but to her wit. That “clin d’oeil” to the Soviet film director proved that she had a better insight into Battleship Potemkin, otherwise considered an austere film, than most of her contemporary critics and scholars with their Marxist analysis.

 

      The cinematographer and many other critics who followed his lead have now reread Eisenstein’s 1925 film, decoding what was all along right before our eyes to observe. Almendros begins with the obvious, the lack of women except in maternal roles in nearly all of Eisenstein’s films:

 

“Potemkin (1925), the director’s most honored work, has been considered a revolutionary film not only because of its subject—a revolt on a ship—but for its treatment, for the fireworks of its editing technique, for the profound feeling of realism in cinematography and acting, and because, as often noted, it departed in its structure from conventional ‘bourgeois’ drama—the eternal love affair between a man and a woman. Great war movies of the times, such as King Vidor’s The Big Parade, and innovative Westerns, such as John Ford’s The Iron Horse, could not do without the sentimental love story. Its absence from Potemkin was attributed solely to Sergei Mihailovich Eisenstein’s pristine concentration on the social forces governing society according to Marx. Yet there is evidence to support another hypothesis: The absence of a conventional love affair in the film could well result from the fact that there was very little space for women in the world of the great master of Riga. Not only Potemkin but his other films—Strike, October, The General Line, even to a great extent his later sound films Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible—reflect this.

     Perhaps romance is truly out of place in certain genres. Truffaut used to tell me** that the love story was the weakest, often unnecessary part of Westerns. In such pedagogical films as Potemkin, the description of all the social forces in place, excluding all others, could result in a gain in intensity and clarity. Sexuality as an added theme would only cloud the main issues.

    The trouble in sustaining the theory that Potemkin as an asexual film is precisely that it is very sexual. Or should I say, homosexual.”

    

     He goes on to describe the all-male cast lying about in their hammocks, all shirtless:

 “Eisenstein’s camera lingers on the rough, splendidly built men, in a series of shots that anticipate the sensuality of Mapplethorpe,” the leader of the revolt, Vakulinchuk, also naked to the waist—a moment before he has been fully dressed—“flashing his broad torso while he demands the beginning of action.” He points out the important moment of the film when “the cannons are raised to fire, a sort of visual ballet of multiple slow and pulsating erections can be easily discerned.”

      Bergan, extending on comments about Almendros’ essay, recalls the momentary shot of a young man tearing open his shirt to reveal his bare chest and the glimpse of two sailors obviously kissing as the cannons rise.

 

       Looking back on my review from 2014 titles “The Distracted Gaze,” long before I had read the Almendros essay even I had realized that Eisenstein’s camera treated the sailors and their ship

somewhat as lovers, and that the ship and its keepers had, in fact, become one. The polishing of the ship’s parts were the same as rubbing up against their own bodies. As I wrote in my early essay on Battleship Potemkin:

 

“Everyone, of course, has spoken of Eisenstein’s montage, the rhythm of sequential cuts by which he constructs his films, and, particularly in this work, the great director is clearly determined to shift images every few seconds, creating a sense of reality very much like the real-life duration of experience, where second by second the eye is forced to encounter a new way of perceiving reality. Playing his camera over the various parts of the Battleship—almost as if it were a lover of the metal beast—alternating with sweeping views of the ocean, clouds, and, most importantly, the sailors and officers on board the ship, we soon recognize that the vessel and humans have almost become one: in his use of shadows and patterned projections, we see these individuals, particularly the ordinary sailors, not only as a force who control the ship, but as beings who have become one with their vessel, revealed particularly in the image of a Russian sailor whose body is completely overlaid by the shadow of a circularly grilled metal divider.”

      Certainly I recall how homoerotic the images were, and am surprised that I didn’t mention that fact, perhaps being too overwhelmed, like so many others, with the film’s political message that I didn’t dare to tread on more corporeal matters. But seeing it again I am also overwhelmed by the number of images during what the film subtitles the sailors’ “night of anxiety” when we see not only groups of sailors sleeping together—not something they even dared in the homoerotic first scene, separated out into their hammocks—and approaching one another in what appear to be hugs or preludes to a kiss, scenes not pointed to in Almendros’ and other critics’ more recent comments.

     Finally, throughout the film groups of sailors are poised in vertical friezes constantly alternating between the penile images of the ship’s cannons (one of which we vaguely see in the background above) and the rocket pellets, often snuggled against their chests as if they were babies within the sailors’ arms. Clearly Eisenstein knew what to do with a drunken or even anxiety-ridden sailor: just put him to bed and crawl in with him. And obviously the man was obsessed, in the manner of the later gay illustrator Tom of Finland, with outsized cocks.

    Eisenstein and his collaborators returned home as demanded, but as Almendros observes, obedience did not seem to have been sufficient. The director was “ostracized for five years, and not allowed to make another film...until he got married to his assistant and friend Pera Atacheva. (It seems they never lived together, despite the total devotion Pera always had for Eisenstein before and after his death).”

 

*As critic Ronald Bergan writes in The Guardian Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic obsessive. And in a lecture he delivered in 1930 to the very group which Major Pease headed, the Hollywood Technical Director’s Institute, Eisenstein himself declared, “It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the virile, active, vertical composition! I am not anxious to enter the dark phallic and sexual ancestry of the vertical shape as a symbol of growth, strength or power. It would be too easy and possibly too offensive for many a sensitive listener! But I do want to point out that the movement towards the vertical perception launched our hirsute ancestors on their way to a higher level."

 

**The Spanish-born, Cuban exiled cinematographer worked on several of Truffaut’s films, those of Éric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder, as well as filming Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. He died of AIDS- related complications in 1992.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

Sergei M. Eisenstein | Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925

the distracted gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nina Agadzhanova (screenplay), Sergei M. Eisenstein (director) Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925

 

It has been decades since I first saw Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned film Battleship Potemkin, and I now no longer even remember what my childhood impressions of film might have been. But watching it again yesterday, I was struck my certain elements of the film that, surely given the years of commentary on this 1925 work, has been described before; but since I have not read any such commentary, I thought I might at least proffer my own (perhaps unoriginal) perceptions.

      Everyone, of course, has spoken of Eisenstein’s montage, the rhythm of sequential cuts by which he constructs his films, and, particularly in this work, the great director is clearly determined to shift images every few seconds, creating a sense of reality very much like the real-life duration of experience, where second by second the eye is forced to encounter a new way of perceiving reality. Playing his camera over the various parts of the Battleship—almost as if it were a lover of the metal beast—alternating with sweeping views of the ocean, clouds, and, most importantly, the sailors and officers on board the ship, we soon recognize that the vessel and humans have almost become one: particularly in his use of shadows and patterned projections, we see these individuals, particularly the ordinary sailors, not only as a force who control the ship, but as beings who have become one with their vessel, revealed particularly in the image of a Russian sailor whose body is completely overlaid by the shadow of a circularly grilled metal divider.

      At the same time, however, we quickly get the sense that something else is occurring on board, a different force that has begun to separate the sailors from their allegiance to the battleship they sail. A Boslshevik supporter, Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) argues below deck that it is time he and his shipmates join the forces who have already rebelled against Czarist rule in Russia, challenging them to question the ship’s officers, who control their lives with an iron hand. When the soldiers perceive that the hanging carcasses of meat, filled with “worms,” are to be served up as food for their bellies, they complain. The ship’s doctor, decked out with an intense pair of spectacles, insists that what they describe as “worms” are merely “maggots” that can be boiled away, making the meat quite edible. 

    Skeptical of his prognosis, many of the sailors refuse to eat the soup served up for their dinner, relying instead on fish they have caught from the boat and canned rations bought from the ship’s commissary. Eisenstein brilliantly reveals the significance of this seemingly small act by centering his camera on the swaying tables, unattended by human presence, the fact of which infuriates the Chief Officer Giliaroysky (Grigori Aleksandrov). Soon after, the men are called to the top deck where the ship’s Commander Golikov (Vladimir Barsky) demands that those who did not enjoy 

the borscht to step forward. The few that had been chosen to represent the other sailors, do so, while the remaining sea men retreat to the fore-deck. Golikov orders a tarpaulin to be thrown over the offenders and orders his military guard to shoot. At the last moment, Vakulinchuk steps forward to demand of the gunmen, “Brothers! Who are you shooting at?”—a question which will be silently reiterated at film’s end, when the Battleship Potemkin, in a face- off with the Russian squadron, will win over their would-be enemies.

    Yet Vakulinchuk’s direct confrontation with his opponents and the last scene of the film are exceptions in Eisenstein’s work. The Bolshevik’s appeal for reason and empathy, for the brotherly-love represented by the revolutionary song “The Internationale,” stands against the actions of the much of the rest of the work. Soon after, the sailors mutiny, sending most of the ship’s officers overboard into the depths of the sea, and at the very moment they perceive that their actions have succeeded Vakulinchuk is killed by Giliaroysky.

      Already we sense, early in this film, that, despite this successful attempt at revolution, the men and women who would attempt to speak out vocally against the Czarist rulers will not be met with open reciprocity. Indeed, from some of the very first images of Battleship Potemkin we perceive that each of the sailors, whether presented alone or in small posed groups, cannot communicate with the others around them, particularly the officers to whom they complain.

      One might even describe Eisenstein’s central imaging device is to pose his figures in a way that they look toward what photographic critic Murat Nemet-Nejat has described as the “peripheral space” of photography. Whether he films his figures singularly, in twos, or in threes, they seem to be unable to engage in a communal sharing of language with either their perceived opponents or even with themselves, as they sometimes look off in different directions toward the edges of what Eisenstein presents as a frame. Even when they are presented as facing straight-forward they appear to be less responding to their interlocutors than to us, the hopefully sympathetic viewers (and would-be evaluators) of their actions. Despite the quick cross-cutting of officer and sailors in scenes representing their arguments about the quality of their meat or the far more important show-down between accusation and rejection on the deck of the ship, any real communication is clearly revealed, by the director’s isolated images of the distracted gaze of sailors, to be out of the realm of possibility. 

    With eyes shifting to the left, right, and down of the film’s frames, the sailors of Battleship Potemkin stare off into spaces that permit no human interrelationships.

      Nowhere in this film is this fact made more apparent that when the action shifts to the harbor of Odessa in Ukraine. With the dead Vakulinchuk laid out in a small tent like a Russian saint, the citizens of the city, who have all seemingly heard rumors of the ship’s mutiny, descend upon the harbor to pay their respects to the new hero. Eisenstein makes little attempt for these admirers to speak to one another. Through an occasional intertitle, we gather that some speak to the general group, but visually these pilgrims are once again represented in complete isolation, eyes looking into the burial tent with open wonderment, faces distracted, temporarily at least, from the world surrounding them. Once more, the director presents them as looking everywhere except into the faces of one another.

     Even more dramatically, the famed slaughter of innocents on the now revered Potemkin Steps (named for the film, despite the fact that in real life the murders of Oddessians occurred mostly on the surrounding side streets) is played out from several odd perspectives. First, we witness the crowds moving down the steps en masse, but each locked into their separate race with terror.

    Soon after a child is shot dead, however, a few of the fleeing citizens singularly arise and turn back to the Czarist troops in the hope—as Vakulinchuk was able to do with the ship’s military guard—that they might dissuade the troops in their mindless mission of mayhem. The mother of the child, picks up her son and turns back toward the proceeding soldiers, facing them head on, one of the few times that such a direct encounter is portrayed in Eisenstein’s movie.

     These individual acts of entreaty, however, have absolutely no effect, as one by one those who implore for the cessation of the soldier’s act are shot dead. The soldiers no longer represent human beings but some horrific machine that has no comprehension of its brutal acts. As Cassock troops suddenly appear at the very front of the steps to further beat and maim the fleeing masses, Eisenstein’s camera moves now behind the citizens, watching from their backs as a child, captured in its carriage, careens out of its dead mother’s arms down the blood-stained steps.

     We now observe the actions not from the viewpoint of the Odessa citizens but from the automaton-like troops marching behind them, returning us to the world of the distracted gaze of beings who refuse to face one another in open communication. The result of this inhuman situation is so horrifying that, when the ship reacts to the slaughter of innocents by shooting into the city’s grand opera house, even the sculpted lions surrounding its entrance appear to rise up in absolute outrage.

     Given what we have just witnessed, it is no wonder that the sailors of the Potemkin, now moving back to sea in order to face a “stand off” with the squadron of vessels under Czarist Russian control, are now portrayed again as looking off into space, independently standing on look-out, sleeping. It is only when the squadron is sighted that, as the ship’s figures move into position, we recognize that we are now moving toward the longed-for direct confrontation of the other. But it is presented by Eisenstein less in terms of the sailors in control than in the forward-facing cannons and by the direct confrontations of the ships themselves, as they have become, somehow, stand-ins for what has failed on the human level. The language these leviathans speak comes in the form of a waving flag: Join us!

     The refusal of the other ships to fire is greeted with cheers by the mutinous sailors, who have won the day if not the battle. The actual story is far more complex, and, alas, far more similar to events that happened in the central portions of this film. Ultimately, the Battleship Potemkin, after wandering for some period of time, was surrendered to the Romanians.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2014).