I'm not much given to feeling that images make words look poor - often they make them look rich and friendly - but that was certainly my response to two recent viewings of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), to be screened again at the BFI Southbank from 29 April. Of course the words that look poor here are quite particular: the weakly loaded phrases of the screenplay; the large abstractions of propaganda; the miniature conceptual monuments Eisenstein seems to want to create through visual sequences that become de facto propositions. We get the angry sea of the future revolution, the sleeping proletariat, a social sneer in the form of an officer's moustache, solidarity in the shape of an immense ribbon of landlocked supporters of a ship's mutiny stretching out along a jetty, stone lions waking into the promise of tomorrow, and so on. Allegory galore.

LRB 28 April 2011 | PDF Download