Blogpost #9: Battleship Potemkin
Griffith is a bourgeois (and a racist bourgeois at that). He revolutionizes cinema by conceiving montage as a duel between antagonistic forces, man vs. woman, rich vs. poor, good vs. bad, and by creating a rhythmic progression that leads to a conclusion — or not. With us, or against us. In Deleuze’s reading, this way of thinking about montage is bourgeois because it takes the opposite poles as given, as natural, as independent of context, whereas one was not born a man or a woman, rich or poor, but one becomes it. Social qualities are dialectical, not absolute. They depend on power relations and not on birth: being a bourgeois is, by definition, being racist (and vice-versa). Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, did not only please the U.S. (white) middle class; it also led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.
Eisenstein, while inheriting from Griffith, is also criticizing him: Eisenstein is a cinematographer of context and dialectic, exploitation and revolution (whereas Griffith is a eulogist of eugenics and white supremacy, false consciousness and the manifest destiny). Deleuze sees in Eisenstein’s reliance on the golden ratio a visual and temporal manifestation of his revolutionary cinema. I’ll take one example from Battleship Potemkin to illustrate the dialectical nature of Eisenstein’s visual compositions.
The first scene of the film shows the deck of the Potemkin. Two sailors are discussing the 1905 revolution and wish their crew would join the workers. They are overshadowed by massive chimneys; the battle that runs through the film is made evident: it is going to be man against machine, freedom against industrial capitalism, life against death. Man occupies the smaller part of the spiral; machine dominates.
Golden ratio still in the execution scene — but places have moved. Machine is clearly winning; man is losing. It is only through a resurgence of consciousness — visible in the close ups of the aggrieved sailor of the first scene, who gains an understanding of the situation and of the sailors’ own collective strength — that the subjugation of man is overcome, and that the masses gain an upper hand on the world of machines: the sailors take over the battleship.
While the Potemkin sails toward Odessa, the population of the city rises and descends upon the shore. Golden ratio still, but the wheel has turned again; infrastructure, the world of technique, is now a conduct for revolutionary practice. The very machinery of capitalism, by connecting the masses and their grievances, dialectically leads to the demise of capitalism. Rosa Luxembourg, witnessing the 1905 revolution, started believing in the power of infrastructure to unify workers and bring them together as a formidable political force, a force which “flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams.”
Bridges and stairs, railways and pipelines, piers and steamships bring about the proletarian revolution by funneling the billows and streams of human consciousness. Deleuze writes that “the spiral progresses by growing through oppositions or contradictions”; but what comes out of it is the new power of matter, the ability of steel to decide of human destiny. This epiphany of the Potemkin, which closes the film — golden ratio, again and finally — is left unquestioned by Eisenstein, whose epics of freedom might — perhaps — also be qualified of “bourgeois.”
References:
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986, chapter 3.
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2011, chapter 1.