Battleship Potemkin (1925) Analysis

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.

Les Misérables (2012)

 
Based on the musical written by Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (with English-language lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer), Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables opens up the teeming fresco of squalor and upheaval beyond the limitations of the theater. This story of oppression, liberation, and redemption produces a swooping, splashy cinematic panorama of an unjust, compassionless, unfeeling world, in which the innocent and the idealistic pay for crimes they have not committed, and plants a seed of barely flickering hope.

A work of audacious ambition, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s 19th century 1,400-page historical novel of rebellion and romance ran the emotional gamut, and the film, as well, sweeps viewers on a stirring, swelling wave of feeling that will leave few eyes dry. Mixing gritty, grimy realism with the artifice of stage production, Hooper brings Hugo’s characters to celluloid life with gusto and grace.