WORD & IMAGE
‘Language is much closer to film than painting is.’
Sergei Eisenstein, A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO FILM FORM
We are watching a subtitled crime series
taking place in Central European Time,
and set in the three Slavic, post-Soviet
cities of Odessa, Prague and Warsaw –
though when the three protagonist detectives
meet they must speak in English, entertainment’s
international lingua franca.
It is the usual tale of murders
and mobiles, of kidnapping and corruption,
where we may find, in the last reel, that we had
already spotted the villain in episode three
– that sinister photographer with sunken eyes,
and a Germanic surname, perhaps?
It is a series using stock shots like Warsaw’s
Palace of Culture & Science and Prague’s
Charles Bridge, and action taking place in cut-price
locations – except for this current scene
taking place on the Potemkin Stairs:
two hundred steps cut from grey-green sandstone
bordered with granite, forty feet at the top,
seventy at the foot, built in the reign of Tzar
Nicholas I, giving the Odessa
elite gracious access to the harbour,
and its cosmopolitan cargoes;
famous for the collage in BATTLESHIP
POTEMKIN of the baby carriage bouncing
down the steps through the carnage wrought by the Tzar’s
soldiers in their white caps and tunics;
a paragraph of silent terrors and distress,
each sentence an icon of horror.
In the scene we are now watching a witness
is being interviewed half way down the steps
by a Ukrainian detective.
Behind and above is a group of what
appear to be co-educational
sea cadets posing for selfies. Judging
from the manner of their movements they have been
recruited from a school of physical theatre.
The director presumably thought this
scene shot from at least two camera angles
a suitable homage to his predecessor,
the master, the maestro of montage,
one of its Soviet begetters.
The crime series was made, of course, before Russia
invaded Ukraine. However, and
nevertheless, by chance or design, the stairs –
with their iconic place in Russia’s public
memory – have remained untouched by war.