The Battleship Potemkin // Odessa Steps

Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin presents a dramatized version of the naval mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905, and still stands as a fundamental film in the exploration of Soviet montage and political influence. It is perhaps most well known for it's 'Odessa Steps' sequence in which a bunch of innocent civillians are massacred by a heavily armoured tirade of Tsarist soldiers. The whole scene takes about 7 minutes, and through various cuts and layered action,tension and emotion build as the scene decends an seemingly endless set of steps....

While this particular scene is fictional and never actually happened by any account of the Potemkin mutiny, it IS representative of attacks which did happen, and it has been said that Eisenstein's intention was to provoke response and emotion by condensing events into one dramatised incident. Baring in mind that this type of scene was unfamiliar and quite shocking for the time, the juxtaposition of violence against innocence, predator against prey effectively does this.
It's here that I see some potential in exploring this further. The manipulating of real-time events in order to create heightened emotion fascinates me, in the same way many constructed narrative photographs have done.

Also, the way the scene is constructed through many different quick cuts, building and embedding individual battles within the overall attack, it gives the impression that the actual timespan last much longer. Time is not completely linear anymore and it really does appear drawn out, as I mentioned before, it takes FOREVER for them to descend the steps.
So I have a couple of ideas, but we will see how these pan out...

Lyndon Wade

Room 107 Twelve stories on the ground level.
This is where people come and leave; leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, leave half-full beers on the nightstand, leave the bed unmade, leave hair on the toilet seat, stains on the ceiling, glitter on the carpet, holes in the wall, leave their wives, their lives, a mess for the morning maid. And after an hour, a day, a month, they all leave that they have left.

And you check in.

'Cinematic'???

After the seminar last thursday on Cinematic Undertones and Overtones, all I wanted to do was go have a nice big glass of wine and forget all about it. The thing is, I was completely overwhelmed by everything, trying to make sense of the not only the relationship between cinema and photography, but what each of these actually are.
Up until then, I think my understanding of what 'cinematic' meant was being tied to what is narrative. And while I believe that there can be a strong connection between the cinematic and narrative, I don't think they're strictly synonymous with one another.
In her lecture, Rachel loosely described

photography=documentary

while cinema=narrative

then still photos that are narrative in style

are viewed and understood as cinematic

Ive just been having a massive discussion with someone about whether or not this statement is true, and after much debate we decided it was. my previous understanding was that cinema did not need to be narrative; it could be structural, non-sensical and abstract... but then I realized maybe I was thinking of all moving image as cinema.. some of which is not narrative. But perhaps what makes a moving image 'cinematic' is narrativity (even if it non-conventional and non-linear, it just has to engage with the concept of narrative time).
Viewing it in that way essentially means that other works (photographs, music etc) could be more cinematic than some moving image.
Then there's cinematic aesthetic qualities such as lighting which can also allude to the idea of cinematic.. so something which lacks narrativity but has some aesthetically cinematic values could in essense also be cinematic...? maybe.
Blah, so confused, but i think my mind is slowly sorting itself out. Here's some of my mind's scribbles on paper...