Cinema and war through time in Odessa

Odessa was an important seaport for the Greeks and served as a military detachment of the Turkish Empire. Since its incorporation into the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century, it was filled with European population — Italians, Greeks, French, Spanish, as well as Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks — and also became one of the most prosperous Jewish communities.

In its planned urban development in checkerboard, according to the rose of the winds, an engineer of Dutch origin, Franz de Volan played a very important role. He was following instructions from an Italian-Spanish soldier in the service of the Russian Navy, José de Ribas, who is considered the founder of the city.

Another of its first governors, in this case French, was the Duke of Richelieu, a distant relative of the famous cardinal, who after ruling Odessa would be prime minister in France of Bourbon restoration after Napoleon's definitive exile. Richelieu was also one of these adventurers in the service of Her Imperial Highness, the Tsarina of all Russia. Dressed in a Roman robe according to neoclassical fashion, he figures at the beginning of the spectacular Potemkin staircase.

Odessa suffered the fighting of the First World War, and was briefly taken over by the young Ukrainian People's Republic. The Soviets took over Odessa in 1920, but they could not prevent that, as was the case in Al Capone's America, that Jewish mafias continued to control the city.

In Tales of Odessa, Isaak Bábel, one of the most interesting Soviet Jewish writers born in Odessa, portrays very well this atmosphere of the happy and risky twenties of this Black Sea Chicago. The film Benya Krick (1926) is inspired by one of his short stories. Bábel was a friend of Eisenstein, and it could have greatly influenced that the most famous directors of Soviet propaganda chose the city to set some important films such as The Man with the Camera (Dziga Vértov) or several by Eisenstein himself, which made Odessa the mecca of Soviet cinema.

Odessa, city of cinema

On the occasion of the shooting of a documentary about its founder José de Ribas, I spent several months in the Ukrainian city.

I was also able to attend the most important film festival in Ukraine, which sought to attract the attention of producers and investors to restore film studios and remind the world of the importance of this city in the history of cinema.

Because it was here, in this cosmopolitan city, that the inventor Iosif Tymchenko created the first device for viewing moving images, two years before the Lumiere brothers did.

The first film studio of the Russian Empire was built in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century; and in the 1930s it was considered “Ukrainian Hollywood”. In fact, many of the founders of the big American Hollywood studios were Jews from Odessa.

In different urban areas of Odessa, some of the most famous silent films of Soviet cinema were also filmed; and it was in his film studios, the largest in the entire Soviet Union, that the great director Aleksandr Dovzhenko began his career.

But the film that brought Odessa worldwide fame was undoubtedly Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), with the famous staircase scene.

The Odessa Staircase

The battleship Potemkin is inspired by an event that took place twenty years before the shooting, the mutiny of the sailors of that Russian battleship in 1905. But the repression of the mutineers did not take place on the stairs but in the harbor.

We are not so interested now in the story of the mutiny as the fact that cinema turned this space of transition, which is constantly changing like the city of Odessa itself, into an emblematic place.

The so-called “Potemkin Staircase” had formerly been known as Richelieu, del Boulevard or simply “the grand staircase”, and covered the slope to the port with more than a hundred huge sandstone steps.

The dynamic assembly that Eisenstein did there is memorable, with the Tsar's army descending in a compact block and shooting at discretion at a mass of civilians who are chaotically fleeing and rolling down the rungs. The white uniforms of the Cossacks stand out against the dark tones of their victims, among which our attention is the mother who, when she dies, lets her baby's stroller roll downhill, who after several jumps rushes into chaos.

This scene was later honored in the cinema until exhaustion (The Untouchables, The Godfather or La Caja de Música are just a few examples).

In some of the frames of The Battleship Potemkin you can see at the end of the staircase a small Byzantine church, which was later destroyed by the Soviets, and was replaced by a nondescript building that, in 2009, served as a large area or shopping place.

Odessa at the crossroads

I thought then, and so I wrote it, that the changes in Odessa are so rapid (and so manifestly representative of the changes in Europe) that perhaps, in time, the staircase would cease to be called Potemkin and renamed “of the Autocenter”, because of the fever a consumerist that had been unleashed in that city, which was increasingly touristy and proud of its well-being.

A few meters above the staircase, in the now called Catherine Square, a sculpture of this tsarina, “the Great”, replaced since 2007 the monument to the heroes of Potemkin, which was transferred to the port.

The statue of Catherine, which integrated Odessa into the Russian empire, did not bother the Ukrainian Democrats, mostly Russian-speaking. This does not mean that they are supporters of Russia, but Ukrainian citizens who are proud of their history and also of belonging to a democracy that is approaching, or approaching, Europe.

When we presented José de Ribas's documentary in Odessa in 2012, the Ukrainian nationalist government had lost the elections in favor of the Yanokovich Party of Regions, and remembering the city's cosmopolitan and Russian history was very well seen in the city.

A senior city official told me with some cynicism that the last elections had been watched by non-functioning Russian cameras. That is, he presumed a rigged election. It was later that I wrote that perhaps a statue of Putin could end up replacing the tsarina. I couldn't imagine that a comic irony then could be so tragic today.

Today the famous staircase seems to reconvene in it bloody episodes such as those of Eisenstein, but this time with a real historical basis. We hope we can continue to enjoy such a symbolic location, whose film history is also the history of recent Europe, as well as the history of a country at a cultural crossroads, now at the center of world attention.

*Jorge Latorre Izquierdo is a tenured professor of Art History (visual culture, film, photography), Rey Juan Carlos University.

Originally published in The Conversation.

KEEP READING