Summary
We see boats pass back and forth between the ship and the harbor, depicting a harmonious relationship between the crew and the townspeople. A number of people socialize on the giant Odessa staircase, waving at the boats as they go. The sailors welcome the boaters aboard cheerfully, receiving fresh food and other supplies. The people on the staircase cheer and we see the red flag again.
However, there is a commotion at the top of the staircase and the people begin to run down in fear. We see a group of Tsarist soldiers advancing with rifles, a statue of the Duke de Richelieu (Odessa’s first mayor) looming over. Citizens rush down in total panic and some are shot. A boy sits alone on a step, his father having apparently been killed. A few people hide behind the stones on either side of the staircase. A young boy is shot, but his mother does not realize at first and continues running. The boy cries out and the mother looks back, only to see the boy stepped on by others. She goes to him, but he is unconscious. She picks him up and begins walking up the stairs. She moves to confront the soldiers, while another group of women climb up, believing they can convince the soldiers to stop firing.
The soldiers continue marching in lockstep, occasionally stopping to fire. The woman holding her son reaches them, asking for medical attention for her son. The soldiers fire anyway, killing the two and marching on. At the bottom of the staircase, a squad of cavalry arrives to corral the crowd so that they can be more easily shot. Some of the women who were trying plead with the soldiers are also shot. A young woman with a baby in a carriage is shot, leaving the carriage teetering on the edge of one of the steps. After a few moments, the woman falls to the ground, her body pushing the carriage off the step. The carriage rolls, out of control, down the steps while more people are attacked by the cavalry. Several people watch the carriage in horror. Finally, the carriage flips, presumably throwing the baby onto the stone steps (though we do not see this) and an old woman who had tried to plead with the soldiers is slashed by a saber.
After a few moments of a dark screen, we see the Potemkin’s turret turning. Title cards inform us that the sailors are launching a counter-attack by bombarding the Tsarist headquarters at the Odessa theater. The ornate building is blasted. In consecutive shots, we see three statues of angels, one standing, one turning, and one shielding itself. Then we see consecutive shots of three statues of lions, one sleeping, one waking, and one fearful. The bombardment continues and we fade to black.
Analysis
Perhaps the most iconic and influential sequence in all of silent film, the Odessa steps massacre is one of the purest distillations of Eisenstein’s style and Soviet montage in general. The scene cuts between several different characters while still being organized around one line of action: the soldiers’ relentless march down the staircase. But at first, we see the Odessans as a crowd, similar to how we saw them when we first saw them march to the pier. The mass of panicked people scrambling down the stairs is awe-inspiring, but Eisenstein quickly humanizes them by focusing on individual characters. The Tsarist soldiers, on the other hand, remain a tightly formed block with no personality. The effect is that the focus on individual citizens provokes our sympathy while simultaneously implying that the citizens are far weaker as scattered individuals than they might be as a group. The soldiers appear strong in part because of their unity and efficiency. They move towards one objective with an exacting precision. This is a far more competent and focused force than the complacent officers of the Potemkin. These soldiers take the revolutionary threat seriously, and are responding with brutal force.
We don’t get a real sense of just how long the staircase is in this scene. All of its levels look the same and it’s never clear just how far anyone is from the bottom. It feels endless, and so the soldiers’ march feels continuous and relentless. The rising tension in the scene is instead driven by the editing. This is an example of what Eisenstein and other Soviet film theorists called “rhythmic montage” which is a type of editing where the length of shots is determined by the tenor of the action as opposed to the duration of the action. In this case, that means the shots get progressively shorter as the scene builds to its climax. This is a stark contrast to the normal “continuity editing” style in common use before this film wherein shots would typically last as long as was needed to show whatever action was occurring. As the shots get shorter, the lines of action (the baby carriage, the old woman, Cossack horsemen, etc.) also seem closer to each other even though they are occurring away from each other. This is set off when the baby carriage begins hurtling down the stairs, both physically connecting the disparate scenes by passing by them in space, and uniting them thematically by bringing the scene to its dramatic climax with the death of the child. In this moment, we very quickly cut between several acts of incredible violence, the culmination of the soldiers’ brutal attack.
The Potemkin’s counterattack also contains a few examples of Eisenstein’s creative editing: specifically, the cuts between statues. There are two cases of Eisenstein cutting between three versions in the same statue concept. In both cases, the cuts are meant to mimic physical movement in statue form. First, we see three statues of an angel cut in such a way that it looks like an angel turning to shield itself from the blast. We then see three lion statues mimicking the action of a sleeping lion being woken and startled by the bombardment. On some level, these are visual gags; Eisenstein manipulates physical reality with editing for an effect that is somewhat funny. But it is also a personification of the Tsarist regime. The angel represents a lofty figure suddenly under threat, and the lion a seemingly might creature suddenly consumed by fear.
