Battleship Potemkin

The leap in the cinemotography from Bauer's film, such as The Dying Swan, to Battleship Potemkin's seems revolutionary. What I noticed most about Battleship Potemkin was how the scenes were able to convey a more meaningful message through the use of multiple, shorter camera shots. Unlike previous films that needed to focus so much on lighting, setting, and the movement of the actors, Battleship Potemkin was able to play with angles, lighting, and the movement and variety of the shot, which made the film more intriguing and entertaining. It was quite the change to not be staring at the same scence for a couple of minutes. This type of filming is very interesting because it allowed the director to use an artistic scenes, such as the filming of the passing water or the sunset, and incorporate that into the message of the film. I think this device is well used because the scences of beauty and purity were almost always correlated with the sailors, who are representative of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, harsh and ugly images seems to be correlated with the admirals such as the rotting meat and the dead little boy. These two aspects make the film's underlying message of propaganda much more receiveable. I must admit that I even felt sympathetic for the mens situations.

Overall, this advance in the film industry made selling messges of propaganda much easier. This film was one of the earliest to fully take advantage of the montage aspect of film.