The French are beneath the truth.
THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1905) will not be shown to the French public. Yet all those who attended the private screening at the Ciné-Club thought it was the most beautiful film ever seen. For here, the light of history reigns. And we know that a Poincaré government cannot bear such light.
What the French need—those lovers of fine uniforms being prepared for the next war—are parades that disguise horrible realities as idyllic scenes. Ah, The Battleship Potemkin is nothing like the American and French war films, full of patriotic sentimentality and materialistic idiocy. We are far indeed from those cardboard trenches, those heroic deaths with a hand over the heart. The director—I hesitate to use that profaned word—did not shrink from anything. Imagine: you see real rotting meat on screen, crawling with real maggots, just like the food the Tsar fed his sailors. Imagine: in the scenes of the Odessa repression, you witness the massacres of women and children, with blood, crushed skulls, bullets in the eyes, bellies ripped open—in short, massacres bearing no resemblance to those our brave French have all read about in the pages of Holy History, when they went to catechism before becoming good, tolerant free-thinkers.
I imagine the censor at the Préfecture must have said to himself upon leaving: “The Russians know nothing of sentimental drivel—we’ll have to provide it for them, we French, specialists in the genre. We will not show such horrors to our subjects. They might get the idea that our agents will beat them the next time they strike. And besides—what is this? I could swear I saw officers thrown overboard? By their own sailors? That last part is intolerable.”
Still, my good fellow, I have to tell you—it’s true that in 1905 some sailors did chuck their officers overboard. That happened. No amount of censorship will change that. Nor will it change several other things. Past. Present. Still to come. But of course, we mustn’t tell the people, right? That’s reserved for those who offer, as a safeguard against revolutionary feeling, the solid guarantee of their bank deposits. Truth is reserved, like science, like philosophy, and even pornography. Very well, sir—just wait until, without a word, just like in the movies, several inconvenient figures are thrown overboard. You catch my drift. You’ve got what they call left-wing intelligence.
Battleship Potemkin is the most beautiful film ever made. Which is why you will not see it. It is absurd to keep calling it a film. Let’s leave that word to Mary Pickford. When, before anything begins, the screen announces that this film contains no star, that it is the work of Russian workers who seek no personal reward, I challenge any man with a sense of grandeur and a moral conscience not to feel that emotion—one that will not leave him for the entire duration of the film—an emotion that is all that remains of human dignity under an abject regime and the watchful eyes of informers.
L. A.