On the occasion of filming a documentary about the founder of the city, José de Ribas, I spent several months in Odessa.
I also managed to visit the largest Ukrainian film festival, the purpose of which was to draw the attention of production companies and investors to the restoration of film studios and remind the world of the importance of the city in the history of cinema.
After all, it was here, in this cosmopolitan city, two years before the Lumiere brothers, inventor Iosif Timchenko created the first device for viewing moving images.
The first film studio in the country, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still the Russian Empire, opened in Odessa.as well as century, and in the 1930s was considered “Ukrainian Hollywood”. Many of the founders of major American studios in Hollywood were Jews from Odessa.
Some of the most famous silent films of Soviet cinema were also filmed in various urban areas of Odessa, and it was at its film studios, the largest in the entire Soviet Union, that the great director Alexander Dovzhenko began his career.
But the film that glorified Odessa to the whole world, no doubt, Battleship Potemkin (1925) Eisenstein with the famous scene on the stairs.
Odessa stairs
Battleship Potemkin inspired by an event that took place twenty years before the execution, the mutiny of the sailors of this Russian battleship in 1905. In fact, the repression of the rebels did not take place on the ladder, but in the port.
Cinema has made this transitional space, constantly changing, like Odessa itself, a symbolic place.
Now this place is called the “Potemkin Stairs”, before the film this place was known as the Richelieu, the boulevard or simply the “grand staircase”, with its hundreds of huge sandstone steps.
Eisenstein’s dynamic montage is memorable: the tsarist army descends in a tight block and fires indiscriminately at a mass of civilians chaotically running away and rolling down the stairs. The white uniforms of the Cossacks stand out against the dark tones of their victims, among which our attention is drawn to the dying mother, who pushes her baby’s pram down the slope, which, after a few jumps, plunges into chaos.
This scene has since been taken to the cinema to the point of exhaustion (The Incorruptibles, The Godfather Where music Box these are just a few examples).
On some images Potemkinat the top of the stairs you can see a small Byzantine church, which was later destroyed by the Soviets and replaced with an innocuous building that housed a department store or mall.
Odessa at the crossroads
The city has changed so much (and thus represents change in Europe) over time, and in such a consumer and tourist direction, that I thought the stairs would end up being renamed after the shops around.
A few meters higher, on what is now called Ekaterininskaya Square, a sculpture of Catherine the Great replaced the monument to the Potemkin heroes, which was moved to the port in 2007.
This statue, erected when Odessa was part of the Russian Empire, is no problem for Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking democrats. Not being particularly Russophile, they are proud of their history and their belonging to a democracy that is approaching or approaching Europe.
When we screened a documentary about José de Ribas in Odessa in 2012, the Ukrainian nationalist government lost the election to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and the city’s history of cosmopolitanism was reminiscent of the city’s history.
A high-ranking official from the mayor’s office then, not without cynicism, admitted to me that Russian cameras monitored the last elections, which did not work. In short, he boasted of rigged elections. Then I wrote in my blog that the statue of Putin could replace the Queen. I never imagined that irony, which seemed comical to me then, could be so tragic today.
Today, the famous staircase once again evokes bloody episodes similar to those of Eisenstein, but this time with a real historical basis. Let’s hope that we can continue to enjoy such an emblematic place, whose cinematic history is both the history of recent Europe and the history of a country located at the cultural crossroads, now in the center of attention of the whole world.
The original version of this article was published on The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to exchanging ideas between academic experts and the general public.
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