The Shifting Protocols of the Visible: The Becoming of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin

Abstract

This article aims to trace and articulate the extremely rich production and postproduction history of the early Soviet classic, Sergei Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin, 1925). By engaging Paolo Cherchi Usai's idea that early films exist as multiple objects, the paper explicates how Eisenstein's film was re-edited in three of its most important versions: the original 1925 cut; the first international cut, produced in 1926; and the 1950 cut. By elucidating the distinctive sociopolitical conditions that crucially informed all three cuts of the film, the article interprets and compares the visual transformation of Potemkin in accordance with editorial and re-editorial alterations, identifying a nexus of contributing factors that regulate the economy of the visible in Eisenstein's film. I argue that the junction at which authoritative social impulses are negotiated with Eisenstein's individual vision takes us to what might be one of the critical moments in Eisenstein's early career in which his early, avant-garde–informed approach to filmmaking is recalibrated with the rules of dramaturgy of film form.

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