YOU’RE IN a town square in Croatia with the greatest film of all time in your luggage. The arditi are coming and if your rescuer takes a few more minutes, you’ll have to hightail it out of Istria on foot. You check your pocket watch; it’s an hour before noon. Your right hand is in your greatcoat, gripping the firm, comforting wooden handle of your revolver.
You do not want a shootout. Surely you do not, you tell yourself. You muse that you are a strange pacifist. You’ve seen men die, first during the chaos of Red Week in Naples in 1914, just a few months before the war. Five years later you were in Berlin with Luxembourg and Liebknecht. The Junkers shelled the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party office you were occupying, and three bullets nearly ended you, ruining your shapka and overcoat. When it was all over, you ended up in prison for ten months.
So no, you do not want a shootout, but you may end up doing so today. You promise yourself then and there to never fire a bullet outside of the class struggle.
A group of D’Annunzio’s irregulars, with their iconic jackboots and their pseudo-military dress, rounds the corner into the square and your ill-timed reverie ends.
“The deserter! He’s over there!,” cries one of them, a round-faced lout.
The squadristi open fire in a crowded square. The scene explodes into screaming and gunfire.
You dash towards the road on the western side of the plaza and almost collide with Margherita Bluch’s car zooming around a corner.
“Get in,” she shrieks, and you do so.
The car, not without the groan of the engine, not without the onomatopoeias of guns being fired and the unsettling sound of bullets zipping by, darts onto the dirt road out of town.
“Good heavens, Comrade Misiano!”, she exclaims after the arditi were out of range. “If the Americans only knew how exciting Italia is, they’d cease making films about cowboys and do a picture about here!”
You ride in nervous silence. You clasp your luggage tightly, with the film securely nestled among your trousers and shirts.
Margharite checks into the little hotel while you fiddle with your bags nervously. When you get into the room you gently lay them on the bed and open them with shaking hands. A bullet from the arditi had pierced the bag...
...but hit only air. The reels are safe. The film is safe. For once Margharite has nothing witty to say. She just places a hand on your shoulder and you lean into her hip, shaking.
“Just like Berlin in ‘19,” she says, gently.
“Just like it,” you reply.
That night you sleep with the bag curdled up next to your stomach. They won’t get it. They won’t get it.
Cut.
1905. A cold night wind blows off the shore of Tendra onto the ship and Matyushenko shivers in his hammock. The hated Sergeant Agapov is inspecting the quarters when he trips over Vasily, who has fallen asleep on the floor rather than in his hammock. “Watch where you sleep, nimrod!”, says Agapov. He bashes Vasily in the eye with his scabbard and the sailor screams in pain. Matyushenko wakes Vakulinchuk, the artillery quartermaster, in the next bunk, he’ll know what to do.
“Wait,” whispers Vakulinchuk. “Wait ‘til the sergeant is gone.”
Half the floor is awake now, rubbing the rheum from their eyes.
“Comrades,” says Vakulinchuk in a stage whisper, in a low shout. “On shore they’ve already cast off the dead weight of tsarism. When will we do the same?”
“What are they fighting for over in Petersburg, anyway?,” says an ignoramus of a sailor.
“Why, democracy, of course,” replies Vakulinchuk. “The right to choose your boss. To choose your commander. Imagine if Agapov could be voted away!”
“And who in his place, comrade?,” says Matyushenko. “You?”
“Who gives a damn, as long as it isn’t Agapov!” Laughter in the nets.
The morning dispenses with any pretense of levity. At morning call the men arrive above deck to witness a horrid sight. Dr. Smirnov and the officers await, hands clasped behind their backs. Next to them, in a big metal tin, upon a spit, is a dead cow, shot through with white veins of fat. Matyushenko realizes, his gut sinking, that the white is moving. Not fat; maggots! Disgusting, wriggling maggots, eating their way through their host like partisans converging on a hapless encamped army. Shouts of dismay, shouts of disbelief. Everyone begins to speak at once.
“Fresh from Tendra, boys! You’ll love it,” says the senior officer, Gilyarovsky, unconvincingly.
“You cannot be serious, Doctor,” says Matyushenko.
“Sailor Matyushenko, you speak out of turn!,” an officer cries.
“Even Russian POWs in Japan eat better than this!”, cries Vakulinchuk.
“They’re merely maggots, they can be washed off,” says Smirnov mildly.
The corpse, like a tiny abattoir unto itself, is carried into the mess, followed by the sailors, shouting at Gilyarovsky the whole way. It is brought before the cook. “Borscht, good cook!,” roars Gilyarovsky. “Right away!”
“You’re certain, boss? I think—”
“His Imperial Majesty does not employ you to think! Do your duty. The rest of you—disperse! To your functions.”
Several hours later Matyushenko is washing dishes. He takes in hand a plate inscribed, “Give us this day our daily bread.” He smashes it with one blow.
Cut.
The first time you tried to travel to Russia was just after the war. Italy, along with a dozen other countries, invaded the new Soviet state in an attempt to crush Lenin’s experiment in worker’s governance.
The idea was to join up with the Italian intervention corps on the Murmansk front. Later in life, when you’re living in Russia, you tell Sergei Eisenstein this and he laughs in your face.
“I appreciate the thought, Comrade Misiano,” he says, gesticulating as he speaks, as is his custom, “but that was a madman’s idea.”
“Come now, Sergei,” you say. “Surely it wasn’t that ridiculous.”
“You wanted to join up with Colonel Sifola’s corps on the Murmansk front. How many were there?”
“Less than two thousand, certainly. Italy was exhausted from the war.”
“So…what were you to do from there?”
“Conduct propaganda, of course.”
“’Conduct propaganda’, he says! So, you were just going to try to convince them that they were fighting for the wrong side?”
“In so many words, yes.”
“And you weren’t afraid the brass would find out that you were a secret Bolshevik? Or that you might be forced to fight us?”
“Sergei, you wound me. I was doing my best for the revolution.”
He laughs his vivacious laugh. “Well, I never doubt your sincerity. Not once, comrade. I’m only glad you never made it to Russia. Someone would have put a bullet in you.”
Eisenstein was right. You didn’t make it to Russia. During your stopover in Germany, you found that you needn’t travel any further east; the revolution was well underway there and then. You mostly just walked with strikers and demonstrators, didn’t get in many shootouts. You were never much of a soldier. Back in ‘16 you’d been drafted into Italy’s army but refused to fight. Back then, you’d fled to Switzerland and started a newspaper instead.
So, when Rosa Luxembourg in ‘19 was executed along with most of the communists, you bore witness. You saw the lengths the Junkers were willing to go to to stop a new soviet state from forming, and the depths the Social Democrats were willing to stoop to to avoid revolution. The psychotic freikorps blamed the communists for losing the war. Many of them blamed the Jews, too; many of them didn’t see a distinction between the two.
You ended up in jail for ten months. Not the worst that could have happened.
Cut.
It’s 1920 now, and the coming two years will be brutally violent to you. You return from Germany to find, to your great amusement and deep gratitude, that you’ve been elected to Parliament. But with this comes one of the most difficult periods of your life. Many times, you are beaten by the fascists and the monarchists. In June of ‘21 the reactionaries physically eject you from the legislative chamber. You’re forced out into the streets where the squadristi spit on you, beat you, rip your clothes, kick you until you collapse into a quivering pile of rags.
Cut.
The Orthodox priest waves his censor back and forth menacingly, making eye contact with each of the condemned as his sonorous voice booms out Last Rites. “Lord,” he intones. “Let these sinners understand.”
Matyusheno forms the starboard-most point in a line of condemned men. The line kneels. The firing squad faces them, composed of comrades with whom Matyushenko ate dinner with the previous night. When the priest is finished, he will be the first one to die.
Matyushenko’s memory jump-cuts through his life, from the childhood in Moscow to the visit to his uncle’s, a provisional official in Alma Ata to joining the Navy to—
“Men,” growls the First Officer. “You stand accused of insubordination against His Imperial Majesty’s Government—”
“We didn’t want to eat maggoty meat!,” retorts Matyushenko.
“I would gag you,” responds the First Officer, “but soon there will be no need. MEN! RIFLES UP! You there! Toss a tarpaulin over them!”
The vast white cloth descends over them. They struggle awkwardly under it. Matyushenko has a brief fantasy of hanging from the steel masts, him and his comrades, ghosts all.
From somewhere, Vakulinchuk’s voice booms: “BROTHERS! WHO ARE YOU SHOOTING AT?”
Confused shouting.
Gilyarovsky’s face is wine-red with rage. “SHOOT, YOU VILLAINS!”
Suddenly the tarpaulin is lifted. “Grab the rifles, comrades!,” Matyushenko barks.
Thirty seconds later Gilyarovsky is encircled, pointing his rifle at a group of angry sailors. “Smash the dragons! Smash them all!,” Vakulinchuk cries. No one is quite sure what he means, but simultaneously everyone knows exactly what he means.
Shots of the sailors raiding the armory. Rifles handed out. The revolution in miniature.
Gilyarovsky has fought free. Bloodlusty, he pursues Vakulinchuk. Matyushenko sees but cannot assist; he grapples with a loyal officer.
Cut.
Vakulinchuk on a yard-arm, Gilyarovsky firing his rifle at him repeatedly.
Cut.
The back of Vakulinchuk’s head, pierced by a bullet.
Cut.
He falls into the indifferent sea.
Title card: AND HE WHO WAS THE FIRST TO TAKE UP THE CRY OF REBELLION WAS THE FIRST TO FALL AT THE HAND OF THE EXECUTIONER.
Cut.
Now you’re at a lecture in the early ‘30s. In a Moscow hall of culture Sergei Eisenstein is holding forth on his theory of montage.
He’s at the height of his influence. For the first time you, as a Mezhrabpomfilm employee, find yourself as a public intellectual. But your fame is dwarfed by that of Eisenstein. No matter: we all do our part for the world revolution.
“Film,” says Sergei, pacing the stage excitedly. “has a rhythm, a momentum to it. Quick cuts can make a film interesting; too much of it and the narrative is excessively avant-garde. No one likes that.” Chuckles from the audience. During the question-and-answer session, a nervous young woman raises her hand timidly.
“Comrade Eisenstein,” she says softly. Several people urge her to speak louder. “Comrade Eisenstein,” she tries again, “Can you summarize in one sentence your theory of montage?”
“Would you like me to do so on one foot as well?”
More laughter from the onlookers. “Naturally. The juxtaposition of shots can produce thematic resonance. That’s the short version. And that’s what I was going for, fundamentally, with Strike and Battleship Potemkin. The quick cuts I used—In Strike, for instance, between the repression of the workers and the slaughter of the animals—was to produce a connection. That the bourgeois reduce the international proletariat to cattle. To say it out loud sounds silly, of course, but I still believe that the sentiment holds merit almost a decade later.”
Cut.
You’re back at that roadside motel with Margherita Bluth, but your consciousness has slipped free of reality’s bonds.
In the dream-world you wake up in Fiume, in 1920. You wander down the cobblestone streets of this city in perpetual rapture, held in the sway of the mad fascist poet, D’Annunzio. People take pinches of cocaine from the little gold boxes they hide in their fanciful uniforms. Orgies are common. Women are fucked against walls.
Not long after this Mussolini will begin to pattern his career after D’Annunzio’s.
You’re there to agitate. It’s perhaps the most revolutionary city in the world, with the syndicalists and fascists and socialists all propagandizing and intermingling. This was before fascism became what it is today. When the National Fascist Party was founded in 1919, its platform was more a vague generalized feeling of national rejuvenation; by 1922 the trap had been sprung. It was a reactionary’s dream.
You ascend the stairs in a cream-colored house built in Mediterranean style to a balcony overlooking all of Fiume. The poet has just finished addressing the masses. He claps you on the shoulder, and bids you watch the shrieks and undulations of the crowd. “So you see,” D’Annunzio says, “They are happier this way. Happier with me. Isn’t that what the film is about? The actions of the masses? The cult of action?”
“To what end?,” you retort. “What is your goal? Surely it is not to raise the masses. Sure you, the corporatist, the bastardized syndicalist, are superfluous. The masses don’t need you to act. They don’t need a Duce. They are the Duce. May the people be sovereign.” This is not how you talk in the waking world. The dream-world melts away but you and the poet remain in pure whiteness. This is pure ideology here, the realm of ideas and ideas alone.
“No one,” the poet intones, “and I mean no one, has had as much fun as we have had these past few months. I suspect you’ve never attended an orgy, Misiano. Have you ever seen women pleasing one another at your behest? Have you ever taken cocaine? Not just a pinch but lines of it. All of Fiume is red-eyed with it. Lovely stuff. What do you offer them? War, poverty, famine, just for a chance to own their factories? Bah!”
“For worker›s democracy,” you say, “I will suffer it all. I am prepared to die for the social-democratic revolution.”
Cut.
Matyushenko carries his dead friend down to the port. There, not far from the shore, not far either from the Odessa Steps, they build a pedestal to place Vakulinchuk on.
“What shall we write on the display?,” asks Vassily. “I say “Down with tsarism.”
No one answers. Matyushenko is the one who, wordlessly, takes some black paint on a wooden sign about Vakulinchuk’s neck and writes: “For a spoonful of borscht”
The crowd arrives slowly. Some of them examine the plaque and say nothing. Perhaps they don’t connect the message with the revolution even now enveloping Russia in this year of 1905.
But they do come. Women on their way to market, old pensioners, the disabled and poor and aimless. They see, they discuss, they build. A soviet republic is built in those discussions, that riot.
Cut.
Boats travel out to the Potemkin. The citizens of Odessa bring food, water, other supplies. Hands are grasped in thanks as the handoffs occur. Solidarity in action.
Cut.
Now the crowd is all fury and motion. Now there are thousands. Peasants and workers, artisans and petit-bourgeois. A cross-section of the Empire’s lower classes.
A swaggering man in a formal hat and coat makes his way to the docks. Pushing and shoving past the citizens in the gathered crowd, uttering hurried excuses to get as close to the martyr’s body as possible.
He hops onto the makeshift monument.
“Friends, this man has been murdered by the Jews. Even now they walk among us, polluting our wells, polluting the minds of the decadent intellectuals of Moscow and Petrograd—”
“LIAR,” roars Matyushenko. “He was killed by his officers! The reactionary tsarists!
“The Jews, they—”
“A police-spy!”, cries Vassily, pointing at the man.
The crowd sweeps him away. This government spy will not distract the people from their revolutionary task.
Cut.
Here’s how things end up for you:
From the heights of the revolutionary teens and twenties you descend into the final doldrums of your life. Stalin rises to power. To linger on his rise and triumph too long would doom this narrative to melancholia. Eisenstein survives the purges, living until 1948. Most people in your scene do not. Mezhrabpomfilm is disbanded in 1936, the year you die. Vast swathes of its personnel are arrested and disappear into Siberia, which may as well be Aelita’s Mars.
In 1935 you see the noose tightening on the Soviet experiment. You are stripped of your position and subsequently fall out of favor with Stalin’s ruling clique. Flailing for a way out, you prepare to go to Ethiopia, to conduct propaganda against your own nation’s occupation of that proud African state. The trip never materializes.
If you hadn’t died in 1936, it’s almost a certainty you would have been arrested and sent east. We know this because you were mentioned in a show trial in 1937. Your friend Emilio Guarnaschelli, who had already been arrested and who was fated to die two years later, spoke well of you from captivity.
So that’s it. That’s how you die, in a Crimean sanatorium in 1936. In a socialist experiment gone so awry as to be unrecognizable to your values.
But that’s not the end.
Cut.
The hour of reckoning has come. It would be foolish to believe that the people could rally, riot, destroy government property, demand their freedom, without some sort of response on the part of the Tsar. Why, thousands of miles away at the Swiss patent office but in this selfsame year of 1905, Einstein is formulating his theory of relativity. Does his field of study not say that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?
The crowd reaches its zenith when the Cossacks appear. Of course, they are the first on the scene; of course the death-riders of tsarism arrive first. They swing their billy-clubs, their sabres, the butts of their long rifles, cracking the skulls of peasants and workers and dissident intellectuals.
They’ve planned for this, clearly. Why, if not by practice, does the cavalry gather at the bottom of the Odessa Steps, near the port, while the infantry marches down the Steps themselves towards the suffering crowd?
They who are oppressed scurry away:
The man without legs hurtles forward on stubs swathed in rags, away from the men in white uniforms who march down the steps, firing indiscriminately.
Cut.
A woman with glasses lays down beside a fallen comrade and shrieks into the camera.
Cut.
Now a bullet has pierced her spectacles, leaving her eye a mass of darkness that black-and-white film can only depict as an inky abyss on her horrified face.
She was with her child.
Cut.
The baby carriage teeters on the edge of a flight of steps. The soldiers keep firing. People keep dying.
Was it wind? Dispersed force from the rifle shots? Simple physics? The carriage is pushed over the edge and tumbles down the steps.
Sixty-odd years later, in The Untouchables, the scene will be imitated as a crack shot policeman guns down several of Al Capone’s thugs as a baby carriage tumbles down the steps of Chicago’s Union Station; in the Brian de Palma film the child is saved by the quickness of the lawmen.
But that is Hollywood. In Battleship Potemkin there is no countervailing force to save the child.
Here at this moment on the Odessa steps the Russian Empire loses its last shred of innocence. No longer can the people call the Tsar the national father. No longer can they blame the decadent nobility for this horror. The order to disperse, to shoot, to kill, that order came from Nicholas Romanov, Emperor and Autocrat Of All The Russias. Later, as the 1905 Revolution collapses into bloody and reactionary savagery, the public-spirited priest Father Georgi Gapon will cry, “We no longer have a tsar!”
Cut.
They meet in solemn deliberation and decide on a target. Where to strike? Matyushenko’s faction, which argues for attacking some military base, is shouted down. Another more obvious target is chosen. Calculations are made. The guns raise to forty, fifty, sixty, seventy degrees…
Outside shot of the Potemkin.
Cut.
The guns fire.
Cut.
The Odessa Opera House’s crowning dome shatters. With it, bourgeois propriety. The crew of the Potemkin cannot bring the dead back to life, nor even prevent their deaths, but they can smash this edifice to the system that killed them.
Cut.
You die, but the film continues its journey across the planet.
Art has power, even if its limited. This piece of art had power that transcended its time and place, transcended socialism itself. It becomes a passion play of the interrelation between oppressor and oppressed, the potential of revolt, the brutality of authority, the ultimate triumph of the subaltern.
Even in 1958, when Stalin is dead and his crimes more widely known, the USSR discredited to many, the film is named the greatest of all time at the Brussel’s World Fair.
In the early years of the new millennium, Roger Ebert includes the film in his “Great Movies” collection. In seeing it, he didn’t identify with its Marxist themes. “It’s not that anybody stood up and sang ``The Internationale’, he writes. But he also describes a screening of the film in Three Oaks, Michigan as having a certain power about it: “The folding chairs for this classic exercise in Soviet propaganda were on loan from the local Catholic church. Some audience members no doubt drove over to Oink’s in New Buffalo afterward for ice cream cones. But the film did have headlong momentum, thrilling juxtapositions and genuine power to move--most especially during the Odessa Steps sequence, which had some viewers gasping out loud… Battleship Potemkin’ is no longer considered the greatest film ever made, but it is obligatory for anyone interested in film history, and the other night in that small-town parking lot I got a sense, a stirring, of the buried power it still contains, awaiting a call.”
In 2008 I ask my dad -- with whom I’ve been watching through Ebert’s “Great Movies” -- if we can watch the film for my birthday. It’s revelatory for me. Every cinephile I meet, I ask if they’ve seen it. I become annoying about it. I tell people about its history, about how before Citizen Kane came along everybody basically agreed it was the greatest film ever. I didn’t know about you, Comrade Misiano, until much later.
By 2012, twenty years after the Soviet experiment collapsed in failure, the film still holds power: the British Film Institute named it the twelfth greatest film of all time.
In January of 2021, Giuliano Vivaldi writes of your life story in Jacobin magazine. It’s the first time I’ve heard of you. You seem like a brave man, a creative man. I intuit a story waiting to be told.
Surely there are others like you, the hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers who toil to produce a motion picture. Those cameramen, those extras, the Kraft service people; the shooting of a movie is not so different from the erection of the socialist republic. Vivaldi concludes his piece by quoting film scholar Alexander Schwarz, who extolled you as “a forerunner of the spirit of international solidarity and of creative collaboration beyond all borders.”
I must confess that I lied, Comrade Misiano, to make things a little snappier: You did not deliver Battleship Potemkin to the West ahead of a vicious army of arditi. This was a conflation of two different trips: In 1920, you were chased out of Fiume by D’Annunzio’s thugs. In 1926 you delivered Battleship Potemkin from the Soviet Union to Berlin.
It makes a compelling story, though, doesn’t it? And without the conflation of the two events, we’d have to conclude delivery of the film westward was not the only opportunity to get it to Western audiences. Battleship Potemkin would have been published had you never existed.
Then we’d have to conclude that your actions did not have the semiotic value I originally imparted to them. Rather, we’d have to say that you were an extraordinary man for more ordinary reasons: You were an anti-war voice at a time when the whole world was screaming for war. You were helping to make political films at a time when doing so got so many sent to the gulag. You were so dedicated to anti-imperialism that you planned, before your death, to agitate against your own nation in Ethiopia.
I think that’s a story worth telling with lessons worth learning. And so, I salute you, Comrade Misiano.
Cut.
There are endless preparations to be made as the steel leviathan readies itself for combat. Men skitter around the decks like parasites in the leviathan’s stomach.
Matyushenko embraces his comrades; but here Matyushenko has faded into the background. I use him here only as a stand-in, because the film has no single protagonist. Vakulinchuk dies in the second act of five. The common sailors, the citizens of Odessa who sail their little boats out to deliver food to the Potemkin, the protesters on the dock — these are the protagonists.
The people, as John Adams will write a half-century later in Nixon in China, are the heroes now. Eisenstein has created here a kind of populist cinema, largely devoid of individual figures but deeply poignant and moving just the same.
The sailors—the characters, not the actors, for we return to the confines of the narrative—load shells, crank the guns up to high angles, and prepare for battle. For in order to escape to Romania, the sailors must pass through the fearsome Black Fleet.
Even though the bulk of the Navy is engaged in a globe-spanning pincer move that will end in its destruction at the hands of Imperial Japan, the Black Fleet remains ready and active. The final act title appears: One Against All. The Potemkin is the pride of the Navy, but it will not survive a confrontation with the entirety of the fleet. Unless…
Unless the soldiers climb the rigging, unless they brandish a red flag and send a signal across the Black Sea to their counterparts on the opposite side. Unless the signal is received.
JOIN US, the signal says.
The score crescendos (when thinking of the movie I always associate this scene with the stirring ending of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony) and bursts into joyous apex as men pour onto the decks of the Black Fleet ships. Men wave to their comrades on the Potemkin.
“Hurrah!,” they cry. “Hurrah! Hurrah for the Battleship Potemkin!”
Against this multitude the czar and his minions stand no chance.
The ship, in the final shot, sails over the camera itself, until the field of view is covered in blackness and credits roll. Trampling all hierarchies and all arrogances.
Cut.
Fin.
Image from the Born Again Labor Museum.
