The discipline on Imperial Navy ships was notoriously strict, and the ship's XO Ippolit Giliarovsky was well known as a Neidermeyer. Or "killed for a plate of soup", as the rallying cry later in the film put it. Disproportionate Retribution: Almost the entire crew was about to get executed for not liking the soup the ship served (or the meat being full of maggots).After they're all thrown overboard to drown a third of the way in, the Odessa police become the bigger threat. Disc-One Final Boss: At first the film focuses on the mutiny against the Potemkin's officers, lead by Captain Golikov.The XO is literally twirling his mustache as he orders the sailors put under the tarp for execution. Dastardly Whiplash: The officers of the Potemkin.Crapsack World: Odessa, and by extension all of Tsarist Russia, is depicted as a repressive state where the military are fed rotting meat, the regular people are starving, and anybody who complains is brutally murdered.There's another shot of the worm-ridden slab of beef, and then a title that says "Feed the worms at the bottom!" Call-Back: Smirnov the doctor, who pronounced the maggoty meat acceptable, is chucked overboard.Blatant Lies: Smirnov, the ship's doctor, who inspects a hunk of meat full of crawling maggots and proclaims the maggots "dead fly larvae.".Examples: A shot of an officer tapping the hilt of his sword is followed by a shot of a priest tapping his crucifix, to imply the connection between the Church and the oppressive tsarist government an officer is dumped overboard and a shot of the water churning after he falls is compared to an earlier close-up of the maggot-ridden meat that let to the revolt and the famous three successive shots of lion statues in progressive stages of standing up, symbolizing the people standing up against oppression. Blade-of-Grass Cut: The film makes constant use of what Eisenstein called Associational Montage.The ship's guardsmen also wear dark uniforms, but their sailors' caps symbolize their revolutionary potential, which they fulfill when they join the mutiny. In the Potemkin mutiny, the white uniforms of the sailors are contrasted against the very dark uniforms of the officers. Black-and-White Morality: Ordinary sailors and the rest of the oppressed masses are good officers, Cossacks, priests, and the rest of the ruling class are evil.Chalk it up to the hypnotic effect of this film. Interestingly, one of the sailors who was in that group saw the film and, in praising it, said "I was under that tarp!" (even though there never was one). The scene where some of the rebellious sailors are rounded up to be shot and a tarp is pulled over them did happen-but there was no tarp.In reality, the two shells they fired both missed. In the movie, when the Potemkin fired on Odessa, they destroy the Czarist headquarters.However, the Czarist troops did later prevent people from leaving the port after several buildings caught fire, indirectly leading to dozens of deaths. and hit a few people BEHIND the crowd in front of them. note The actual "massacre?" The Guards fired warning shots over the heads of the crowd in front of them. It was just made up so that the revolution would look more justified, though it still might have had some basis in facts - there were reports of demostrations being put down by troops on that day, so while the massacre as shown in the film most probably indeed never happened, this scene might be an exaggeration of some real event. (Not the Ur-Example, though, as a baby carriage is used for comedy in slapstick film The Curtain Pole in 1909.)
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