In 1925, on the 20th anniversary of the sailors' rebellion against the tsarist officers of the battleship Potemkin in the Russo-Japanese War, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein directed one of the most important films in history.
The film recounted that uprising, then mythologized in the Soviet Union, which ended with the ship docking in the city of Odessa.
His most famous scene, the massacre on the stairs, took place there;
now it is one of the major Russian targets in the Ukraine war.
The Black Sea city, with the country's largest port, has been targeted by Putin's troops since the beginning of the conflict.
Western intelligence services have even raised the possibility that Russia might launch an amphibious operation to try to conquer it.
For weeks now the statue of the Duke of Richelieu, from where the Cossacks in the film start the slaughter on the stairs, has been covered with bags of earth to protect it from Russian shells.
A very influential scene
The possible combats in this context inevitably refer to Eisenstein's plans in 'The Battleship Potemkin'.
"It's a very vibrant time for world cinema," Gregorio Belinchón, a journalist for EL PAÍS specializing in cinema, explains in this video.
“Eisenstein comes up with the idea of starting to play with the swooping camera.
He is the one who discovers that with a tilted camera you give much more emotional tension to what you are seeing on the screen”, adds Belinchón;
"He also brings a sense of time, the longer it takes to get the cart down the stairs, the more feelings of terror and panic the viewers will have."
The influence of the scene can be seen in the many tributes that different directors have paid to it in their films, from Brian de Palma in 'Elliott Ness's The Untouchables' to Francis Ford Coppola in 'The Godfather.
Part III' or Peter Segal in 'Grab it as you can 33 and 1/3′.
The stairs have also appeared in two episodes of 'The Simpsons'.
In this video you can see:
-The scene of the stairs of 'The battleship Potemkin'
-Film tributes to Eisenstein's film
-The analysis of the journalist from EL PAÍS Gregorio Belinchón
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