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1. Crowds and Power in Two Silent Films: Eisenstein’s: The Battleship Potemkin and Griffith’s Intolerance
- Wayne State University Press
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23 Moving pictures have an affinity for crowds, both in their imagery and in their distribution and consumption. That affinity made itself evident early in the history of the cinema and was well understood in the practice of many filmmakers by the middle of the silent era. Vachel Lindsey wrote, “While the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of men.”1 In this chapter we look at two enormously influential silent films, Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. The first of these films illustrates with remarkable aptness the four qualities of crowds that Canetti identified as fundamental: their drives toward growth, equality, and density, and their clearly defined “direction” or goal. The second both illustrates the same fundamental crowd attributes and embodies a more complex imagining and anatomizing of crowds. Many of the crowds of both Potemkin and Intolerance fit Canetti’s description of principal types—double crowds, “Festmassen” (translated by Stewart as “Feast Crowds” but more generally understood in Crowds and Power as festival crowds, crowds in a holiday mood), Prohibition Crowds, Baiting Crowds, and so on. Griffith’s sprawling movie also quite strikingly illuminates the often antagonistic relations between crowds and power. Potemkin A consequence of the affinity between film and crowds, again early perceived and acted upon, is the suitability of motion pictures for the creation of propaganda—or, more generally, politically tenden1 Crowds and Power in Two Silent Films: Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and Griffith’s Intolerance CHAPTER 1 24 tious stories and spectacles. Eisenstein was one of many Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s who conceived their films as celebrations, advertisements , and justifications of the Russian revolution. Potemkin clearly fits into that category. It has long been most famous for its remarkable editing and design; the action on the Odessa Steps, indeed , may be the best known and most imitated single sequence in motion picture history. The rhetoric and architecture of Potemkin as a whole, however, can be seen with greater clarity through an inspection of it both as a tour de force of montage and as an honoring of the Russian Revolution conceived as the development of crowds and their transformations . The valorization of the masses in Eisenstein’s film was noticed by most reviewers worldwide during its first showings. Of the dozens of reviews collected in Herbert Marshall’s The Battleship Potemkin: The Greatest Film Ever Made, the majority point out that Eisenstein’s heroes are not individuals but crowds.2 Typical are “He knows that the Revolution is not a personality but the masses” and “In Potemkin there is no individual hero. . . . The mass acts.”3 Twenty-five years later, looking back at Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Pudovkin wrote, “The masses of the people in this film ceased to be a gray, general background for the actions of a small number of special heroes. They pushed forward and became themselves the hero of the film.”4 Similarly, Parker Tyler: “Potemkin was at once revolutionary Russia’s notice to the world of its ‘populist’ philosophy— that collective man, not merely an individual may be projected as a hero.”5 Although everyone acknowledges Potemkin to be a film of the masses, only David Bordwell has followed that perception further , relating it to Eisenstein’s creation of types as constituents of his “mass protagonist.”6 If we invoke Canetti’s analysis of crowds, however, we will be able to discover in considerably more detail how the film organizes its structure and figures forth its meanings through its progressively transforming masses. The five parts of The Battleship Potemkin are divided according to their representation of crowds coming into being and metamorphosing into other forms. Part 1 portrays the development of a “Prohibition Crowd,” which in part 2 becomes a “Reversal Crowd.” Part 3 witnesses in Odessa the growth of an enormous throng, which arises in response to rumors of rebellion on the battleship Potemkin and then becomes a “Lamenting Crowd” when it encounters the body of the seaman Vakulinchuk. Part 4 stages two crowds, a “Feast Crowd” that carries food to the Potemkin and that cele- [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:53 GMT) Crowd symbol and crowd in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin CHAPTER 1 26 brates the liberation of its recruits, and the “Flight Crowd” into which it abruptly changes when the Cossacks begin their massacre. In part 5, the group of liberated sailors who...