The history of cinema sometimes catches us in the curves of time, leading us to ask whether the memory of a film ends in the way we see and interpret it in our present, at a more or less considerable distance from its appearance. Now we have one of these examples, transparent and exciting, further questioning our understanding of the relationship between cinema and politics – or rather, between political power and cinematographic production. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), this film is called The Battleship Potemkine. Surprisingly or not, the calendar assures us that its premiere took place 100 years ago – it was at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on December 21, 1925, in a session that also served to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution.
The association of the film with such an event was obviously not accidental. From the outset because Eisenstein left us a spectacular dramatization of the revolt of the crew of the warship Potemkine against their officers, precisely a central episode of the revolutionary actions of 1905. This episode ended up becoming a symbolic reference of the growing resistance to the power of the tsars, at the same time lending a legendary dimension to the port of Odessa, the nuclear scene of the rebellious movement.
Politics and cinema
With the triumph of the Soviet Revolution, in 1917, and the development of the communist project initially led by Lenin, cinema had been quickly recognized, organized and promoted as a fundamental political and ideological instrument – and it is not necessary to remember that all of this happened in a scenario in which, along with the press, cinema was a privileged means of communication (global, as they now say).
In fact, if we can summarize the state logic of such a strategy, perhaps we can characterize it using three emblematic titles. The first, A Grevealso from 1925, was Eisenstein’s first feature film, celebrating a factory strike as a particular chapter in the assertion of communist ideals in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Battleship Potemkine occupies second place in this possible trilogy that will end in 1929, with The Man with the Film Cameraby Dziga Vertov, a film that, moreover, over the decades, has always emerged in a prominent place in practical and theoretical discussions about the border (or its absence) between the immediacy of the documentary look and the artifice of cinematic fiction.
So much was enough for, in the most diverse contexts, The Battleship Potemkinesupported or not by communist rhetoric, appeared regularly (and justifiably) as a revolutionary symbol. Without forgetting that, sometimes, the label is used automatically and superficially, if only because The idea that Eisenstein was a mere “executor” of the directives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lacks any historical accuracy. To remain clear, let us remember that the final phase of his work (and his life) was subject to many restrictions by the Stalinist machine, to the point that its final achievement, Ivan the Terrible (1944-46), to have been left as a film in two parts when, in fact, it had been conceived as a triptych.
Interestingly, the revolutionary symbolism of Eisenstein’s classic found a very particular expression in the Portuguese context. Soon after the 25th of April, The Battleship Potemkine emerged, in fact, as the first public testimony of the end of the Estado Novo censorship system (which continued after the death of António de Oliveira Salazar, with Marcello Caetano as prime minister, during the so-called “Marcelista spring” in which some previously prohibited titles could be distributed in rooms).