Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin – sliding through representations

In Potemkin‘s most famous scene, police stampede a panicked crowd down public steps, creating a diagonal killing ground. It lasts less than two minutes but extends its imaginative reach over time and circumstance. Whenever the forces of authority unleash themselves on a crowd, Sergi Einstein’s Sergei Eisenstein’s movie comes to mind.

The recent death of Neda Agha-Soltani in Iran (caught on video) echoes an earlier one in the film – a fatally wounded young women who falls against her baby’s carriage and sends it rolling out of control through the carnage. Under the stage makeup, the actress could be Agha-Soltani’s sister.

But if there is one figure who represents Eisenstein’s moment, it’s a middle-aged intellectual, his glasses shattered. In reacting to his sudden trip to hell, he serves as the audience’s stand-in.

Jeremy Geddes took out the blood but left the scream, instantly recognizable. (Nothing, detail, oil on board, 2005)

Celebrities occupy a similar niche. Richard Nixon owns the victory sign, which, since his use of it, has become ironical. He owns the word crook. It was passing from use but rebounded as part of his dubious negative.

There is only one Michael Jackson, and yet the shadow of his parade-float smile, the haunted look in his prematurely elderly eyes and his definitive use of white-face will will continue to slide through unrelated representations.

Geddes reminds us that Jackson would have made a hell of a joker. (Doomed, oil on board, 2005) Take that, Batman.