Soviet
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin,
released in 1925, revolutionized cinema, making its director and Russian
filmmaking famous around the world. A master metteur en scene, Eisenstein focused more
on the possibilities of film itself than on character development or plot. The
director is interested in mass movements, and uses individuals only as representations
of the many, fusing sound and images together to create a vast and startling
ever-moving painting of often fearsome beauty. The overriding principle in Potemkin, as well as many of the
Eisenstein’s other works, is that of kineticism—from the intense movement and
dynamism within the frame, to the visual clash of his juxtapositions— which set
up the rhythm of his movies and introduced a more sophisticated style of editing
than had ever been used before.
