Battleship Potemkin 'Odessa Steps Sequence' Analysis: Chaos vs Order
1925’s Battleship Potemkin is most famous today for its revolutionary use of montage, effectively used to align order and organization with evil and disorder and chaos with good. This alignment is evident throughout the film, but it is most conspicuous in the famed Odessa Steps Sequence. All 2 minutes of footage is packed with symbolism and visual metaphor, revealing the incessant brutality of the Cossacks against Odessa’s suppressed workers.
Director Sergei Eisenstein starts it with a bang: when a mother is begging for her child’s life, multiple Cossacks shoot the pair from point blank range. The Cossacks’ backs are in the shot when their guns go off, but Eisenstein changes …show more content…
Before it starts to roll, though, Eisenstein slows time – he focuses the carriage and the baby’s mother center screen, who appears paralyzed while the Cossacks march down towards her. A close-up of her face highlights her fear and internal chaos, underscored further by a subsequent close-up of her baby crying in the carriage. She throws herself over the infant while people tear past her and the Cossacks rumble closer. Abrupt switches between images of marching boots, guns, and the mother’s agony add to the suspense of the carriage’s wheels teetering on the stair’s edge. Even when the mother is shot and sinks to her knees, the crowd cascades around her. Her final action is to lean against her baby’s carriage for support, thereby pushing it down the stairs. The carriage’s own chaotic plunge underscores the peoples’ chaos – the very same people avoiding it. In fact, the only two who seem to notice the carriage’s descent are held to passively and helplessly watch it fall. They are trapped at the bottom of the stairs by the chaos of the crowd coming towards them, including the deadly structured tail of
1925’s Battleship Potemkin is most famous today for its revolutionary use of montage, effectively used to align order and organization with evil and disorder and chaos with good. This alignment is evident throughout the film, but it is most conspicuous in the famed Odessa Steps Sequence. All 2 minutes of footage is packed with symbolism and visual metaphor, revealing the incessant brutality of the Cossacks against Odessa’s suppressed workers.
Director Sergei Eisenstein starts it with a bang: when a mother is begging for her child’s life, multiple Cossacks shoot the pair from point blank range. The Cossacks’ backs are in the shot when their guns go off, but Eisenstein changes …show more content…
Before it starts to roll, though, Eisenstein slows time – he focuses the carriage and the baby’s mother center screen, who appears paralyzed while the Cossacks march down towards her. A close-up of her face highlights her fear and internal chaos, underscored further by a subsequent close-up of her baby crying in the carriage. She throws herself over the infant while people tear past her and the Cossacks rumble closer. Abrupt switches between images of marching boots, guns, and the mother’s agony add to the suspense of the carriage’s wheels teetering on the stair’s edge. Even when the mother is shot and sinks to her knees, the crowd cascades around her. Her final action is to lean against her baby’s carriage for support, thereby pushing it down the stairs. The carriage’s own chaotic plunge underscores the peoples’ chaos – the very same people avoiding it. In fact, the only two who seem to notice the carriage’s descent are held to passively and helplessly watch it fall. They are trapped at the bottom of the stairs by the chaos of the crowd coming towards them, including the deadly structured tail of