Battleship Potemkin : World Cinema Series
This review was originally written by me as a part of the course Perspectives on World Cinema, by Prof. Mazhar Kamran of IDC, IITB. Battleship Potemkin (1925) (Sergei Eisenstein) Battleship Potemkin is a dramatised account of a mutiny on a warship and its aftermath, set in the tumultuous early twentieth-century revolutionary Russia. While set on the surface as a civil unrest drama, the film can easily be envisioned as a larger commentary on class divide and a product of the ideas prevalent in its time. For me, as a viewer, it was a pleasantly surprising experience to be so wholly engaged with a century-old, silent film, made by and for a totally different audience. The fact that I resonated with the film seems to indicate a sense of spatial and temporal universality of the appeal of the film. Eisenstein established himself, surely, as a pioneer of the dramatic genre of cinema with this endeavour. Well-structured, with the distinctly set five acts, and well-paced, which causes ...