A Film Canon

This is an even tighter film than Strike, and takes Eisenstein's distinctive use of movement to its logical conclusion. Instead of merely imbuing his compositions with the surface tension of water, Eisenstein centres the action on an object - the battleship - that embodies those compositions; or, alteratively, that is itself a mere extension of the surface of the water, no more than a particularly violent ripple. This decreases the necessity for Strike's compositional ingenuity, whose intended effect is encapsulated in the extent to which the rocking motion of the waves energises each object (particularly objects that, like the sailors' hammocks, are already slightly mobile), while its paradoxical disparity between net and gross movement finds expression in the fact that the first, foundational struggle occurs on a calm day, when the ship is at anchor. That said, Eisenstein makes a particular effort to use the ocean as a framing device - most spectacularly in a scene in which the crowd of townspeople are forced to cross the long, narrow harbour wall - while the greatest moment in the film (and his career) simultaneously departs from literal depictions of the ocean, and reifies its function as the dialectic between battleship and town, as the crowd are forced into a human waterfall, spilling down the Odessa staircase. Not only does this contain the most graphic, transgressive violence that I have seen to date, but it culminates Eisenstein's aperspectival aesthetic, fusing the two into a wholescale assault upon the eye-brain, in which depth perspective and dualism are identified as erroneous organisations of the world.