ABSTRACT
In fact this is a work of the most refined mastery and, more than that, it is a new kind of cinema art, a masterpiece of Soviet film style. As in his first picture, The Strike, Eisenstein seems to give new life to objects and people, showing them from quite unexpected and cleverly selected points of view. Potemkin is an amazing review of the men and the objects of the sea. The contrejour photographs of the port of Odessa are the height of marine lyricism but this is far from being the most important thing. The shots in this film are locked into sequences, into 'parts' elevated by a pathos that is both great and pure. The indignation, the mutiny, the heroic grief for the dead man, the monstrous tsarist revenge, the extreme tension of waiting (the approach of the government squadron), the boundless rejoicing: these are the six emotional blocks that make up this poem and each block divides into hundreds of crystal-like shots, criss-crossing details, human faces, machine fragments, that are pierced through and through with a single burst of will characteristic of a particular part as a whole, and driven by an ever increasing tempo. The montage of pure pathos is Eisenstein's basic method.
