So this is apparently a super famous movie that I had never heard of before this project. But after watching it, I can say that it’s deservedly apparently-famous.

So this is a silent movie from 1925, made by a Soviet filmmaker as explicit propaganda; it’s about an actual historical mutiny on a Russian battleship (in 1905) by sailors who overthrew their Tsarist oppressors, and what follows after that — being met with cheers by the townsfolk of Odessa; a bloody massacre of those townsfolk by Tsarist troops, in a sequence that is apparently super-famous and iconic and much-imitated; and meeting up with the squadron sent to kill them in a tense showdown where it’s not clear if the squadron will join them in rebellion or if it will come to combat.

It’s all really well done in a way that feels like a big ol’ action movie — the characters are thin, the conflicts broad, the staging epic and laden with hundreds of extras, and it uses this then-novel “theory of montage” which postulates that if you cut between different images you can heighten the evocative power of a scene. This is what we today call “um, totally normal movie-making, seriously you think this is a theory haha wow,” but obviously 90 years ago they were just figuring this stuff out.

This is easily the most low-brow enjoyable of the silent films I’ve seen so far, and that it’s also a seminal classic of film with enormous influence means that it has more highbrow cred than e.g. Top Gun or something. (Seriously, as militaristic propaganda goes, it’s a way better movie than Top Gun even if you don’t control for their ages.)

Good stuff, highly recommended. Also, if you watch it, the version you apparently want is the 2011 Kino restoration (which undid some later Soviet censorship in the titles — they replaced some Trotsky sentiment with Lenin quotes after Trotsky fell out of favor), which is on Amazon Prime.