Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is unmistakably a propaganda film. Central to its messaging is a contrast between the solidarity among class-conscious workers and the oppressive tsarists who cling to power through division and atrocities. What struck me about the film was how it sold this message through violent imagery. Lines of Cossack soldiers massacre civilians, leaving multiple children on-screen orphaned or dead, in a clear display of contempt for human life. A gunshot wound leaves a woman’s swan brooch drenched in blood, a clear sign of the assailants’ contempt for love and purity. Before the Cossack detachment arrives in Odessa, a man attempts to sublimate the revolutionary fervor through a pogrom, conspiring to murder the city’s Jewish residents. These disturbing plot developments accompany an undercurrent of violent images such as shots facing down the barrels of turrets, a metal cross penetrating the lower deck of the eponymous ship like a knife, the first act concluding with soldiers shattering a plate because of its hypocritical message, and the final shot being a sharp ship bow passing over the camera at water level. Clearly, the violent and menacing presentation work to humanize the revolutionaries and other victims of the tsar’s regime while vilifying the propagandistic targets. What perplexes me is how physical violence within Battleship Potemkin is pervasive in the film than in the contemporary poems we have studied (In both concept and execution).

In a sense, I am more reminded of much older works such as “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.” Perhaps the fact that both works emerged during periods of conflict might reflect an audience desensitized to armed struggle. I see an alternative hypothesis as more likely; Eisenstein understands that violence in film can shock the naive viewer on a more visceral level than other media, especially one living around the dawn of cinema. It is thanks to this media literacy that such a menacing presentation emerges.