Battleship Potomkin Essay

The directors chosen camera technique, a simple two composition that progresses the scene a steady pace, forces the audience to feel a part of the awkward exchange; obviously, a quality of film that could not be as profoundly achieved through the narrative in the novel.

Maritime wars took a noteworthy change amid the common war. On March 8 1862 the Confederates revealed a ship that would change maritime fighting everlastingly, making wooden body ship outdated. The Confederates set two layers of steel plate over the structure of the "Merrimack", situated ten firearms along its side and included a smash her bow. This resilient ship in its first fight, in the harbor of Hampton Roads assaulted five Union boats. The "Merrimack" renamed the "Virginia" sank one Union boat, exploded another ship, and made a third run ashore. No shots could infiltrate her shield. The unexpected thing was the Merrimack was left to sink after the Union naval force cut gaps into it.

Within this essay I will look at how I as a director will approach directing Chekhov, commenting on how I went about choosing the sections of the script I wish to use, why I chose these sections and how. I will then reference Katie Mitchell’s twelve golden rules on working with actors to demonstrate how I will approach my rehearsals and working with the actors. I will then go on to mention how and where the piece will be performed, continuing on to how I will use there lighting, sound and setting finishing with costume.

Afterwards, Anderson goes back in time and reveals how the life of a genius, Shostakovich, was affected by a series of war conflicts including a revolution and World War I. Then, in October 1917, he also witnessed the birth of a Communist Russia after Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. For a brief period, this new government supported and encouraged artists to develop their talents. The city became a place where “new art, new music, and new drama had to be found for a new world where workers ruled” (p. 37).

‘There are…two kinds of film makers: one invents an imaginary reality; the other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, criticise it…and finally, translate it into film’

From a nag to being a phenomenal race horse. Seabiscuit is not well known these days, but Seabiscuit is legendary in the Great Depression. He was a symbolism of Hope. Seabiscuit was one of the greater things that happened at this time. He had a rough life along with the people growing up in the great depression, where he was bred at Wheatley Stables, didn't like how he moved so they took him away from his mother. Later on, Seabiscuit’s trainer Omaha told his jockey at the time to beat him on his left side for a quarter mile, and see if Seabiscuit will accelerate in his speed. Seabiscuit's things that helped him get this far in his career was Seabiscuit early life, His amazing training by Smith, Seabiscuit's early career, Middle years, then his Late Years.

The final film of this analysis of the war historical narrative and by extension the Soviet historical narrative falls into a similar category as The Cranes are Flying. Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959 film Ballad of a Soldier, released two years after the release of Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, the film also was a product of the Thaw and caries similar themes to those in Kalatozov’s film. While there are differences, the end result is the same, both films depict a historical narrative of the War that removes the hero worship of Stalinism and depict the War through a more humanistic lens. The film opens up with a mother looking down a road. The narrator explains that her son, Alyosha, went off to war and never returned. Even so, here she stands,

Soviet Montage is a movement driven by “Marxist [politics]” and an “economic philosophy” developed in Soviet Russia at the time of revolution. Lenin himself considered film, as an art form as the “most influential of all arts” as it not only entertained but could be used to “[mould] and reinforce values.”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) Sergei Eisenstein, himself a Marxist, is no exception to this and not only are his films are full of political propaganda, but he is also considered “the greatest master of montage.” .”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) His film October, called Ten Days That Shook The World in the Western world at the time and butchered due to its content, has always been considered problematic for audiences and critics alike and the standard critique of the film soon became “The Film as a whole is difficult and incoherent.” (Sperbur) Although if analysed properly, you can see that it has powerful political and social messages to convey and comprises of film form that Eisenstein himself called “intellectual film.”

Stanley Kubrick’s sexual parody, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, illustrates an unfathomed nuclear catastrophe. Released in the midst of the Cold War, this 1964 film satirizes the heightened tensions between America and Russia. Many sexual insinuations are implemented to ridicule the serious issue of a global nuclear holocaust, in an effort to countervail the terror that plagued America at that time. Organizing principles, such as Kubrick’s blunt political attitudes about the absurdity of war and the satirical genre, are echoed by the film style of his anti-war black comedy, Dr. Strangelove.

Eisenstein also discusses intellectual montage as being conflict within a shot, rather than just the juxtaposition of two shots side by side. In “Beyond the Shot”, Eisenstein describes two specific sorts of conflict within a shot: “the conflict between an object and its spatial nature and the conflict between an event and its temporal nature” (88). The first one is used widely throughout the film, as well as in the casino scene. However, the second type of conflict within a shot is not used in the casino scene. The first, described as being “achieved through optical distortion” (88), is exhibited in shot 52. The camera movement in this shot helps to achieve this sort of conflict, as the camera both zooms in and tracks out at the same time while

to dramatize the people’s massacre through the symbolized slaughter of the bull. The jump-cuts and non-diegetic inserts, the use of graphic patterns of lines and shadows, the contrasts between long shots of the enemy and close-ups of citizens, contrasts between shots from different perspective of the regular people and the Bolsheviks are some other of the non-traditional and signature characteristics of Eisenstein’s films. Presented from citizens point of view editing achieves sympathy and compassion at the audience accepting the Revolution as their own point of view of the historical event. The montage of unique rhythm and graphic elements creates a wholeness of the film structure and defines the specific style of of intellectual editing in Sergei Eisenstein’s works and his propaganda vision.

Through a synthesis of observational photography and cinematic montage, Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov created Man With A Movie Camera, a radical work that is fully divorced from the theatrical and literary tradition of the use of fiction to communicate deeper truths and themes of reality. The film captures a day of urban Soviet city life and through juxtaposition and abstraction, morphs into a rhythmic visual poem that conveys a utopian vision of an egalitarian socialist society. Rejecting the formalism of bourgeois melodrama and rigid objectivity of Soviet realism, the film also boldly celebrates the transcendent power of cinematic expression. The cinematographer, editor, and the camera itself become primary characters as, for the first time, documentary filmmaking pulls back the curtain on itself, revealing the constructivist nature of the medium as well as its ability to exceed the limitations of time, physical space and human observation. Vertov’s conception of “film-truth,” sought to unify the authentic and abstract into a cohesive work of film art, free from the restrictions of language, that would assist the proletarian masses around the world in developing a more profound and

Before the Thaw and Khruschev’s loosening of some artistic restrictions the government would have allowed neither the artistry found in the film nor the film’s message. Stylistically Kalatozov returns to the cinema of the 1920s. His use of angles resembles the photography of Rodchenko. His use of shadows mimics Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. And Kalatozov’s interest in faces resembles the cinematography found in Dovzhenko’s “Earth”.

On April 14,1912 a great ship called the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage. That night there were many warnings of icebergs from other ships. There seems to be a conflict on whether or not the warnings reached the bridge. We may never know the answer to this question. The greatest tragedy of all may be that there were not

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).