Montage in Battleship Potemkin

DEC 08 2019

A shot-by-shot analysis of the editing in Eisenstein's 1925 film, taking the Odessa Steps sequence as the standard demonstration of montage. Breaking the action into fragments and reassembling them out of real time produces an emotional certainty that a continuous shot could not, which is why the sequence has been imitated for a century. The film was made for the Soviet state, and its power is inseparable from that commission.