ODESSA, UKRAINE: A MOST MEANINGFUL PLACE

      TV coverage showing the Russian invasion of Ukraine operates on many levels, including information about various Ukrainian cities. The viewers are learning that Kyiv is not the only city in this country. As the war continues, broadcasters go back time and time again to report on what's happening in many of the same urban centers. Frequently, large maps help the TV audience follow the action. We begin to become familiar with the towns involved in the fighting. We even unconsciously select one place particularly that we feel as if we "know," that we can identify with.

     Odessa, a southern port town on the Black Sea, is the place that this critic now "knows." First reason: because recent TV news showed residents covering its most famous monument  ( Duke de Richelieu )  with sandbags perhaps getting it ready for removal from the site. Second reason: the name, Odessa, recalls a real area in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach known as "Little Odessa by the Sea," a nearby Russian community where photographer Walter Weissman grew up. His pictures during the 1960s documenting life and sites in Little Odessa have become iconic, way before the current Ukrainian war. 

     And thirdly and most compelling is the place where the Richelieu  Monument ( commemorating Odessa's first mayor ) is situated: at the top of the Odessa Steps. How could any film student or scholar not be aware of this place's importance in Sergei Eisenstein's classic 1925 movie, "Battleship Potemkin?" Seeing the motion picture again gives it new relevance today considering that, despite its propaganda intent, sticks to actual events during 1905: civilian riots against the Imperial forces. Thus, the current crisis can certainly be compared to the film's depiction of the Russian government's brutal and unprovoked attack on the Odessa residents.

     A description of the Odessa Steps film sequence is a must at this point, considering that it represents the most significant example of montage in cinema history. Briefly put, montage is a series of shots ( not a single image ) which presents an idea or feeling. For clarity, today we would label it the process of editing, but Eisenstein meant much more. In the Odessa Steps montage, opposition is the key: ( for example, alternating between close-ups / long shots, bird's eye-views / ground's eye-views and orderly marching of soldiers down the steps / scrambling of the civilians.

     Montage is a salient aesthetic technique used to this day. Consider films like "High Noon" particularly when Sheriff Gary Cooper is waiting for the arriving noon train: parallel action

is at work here as close-ups of the townspeople, the sheriff,  and the "bad guys" are juxtaposed. Parallel action is also a factor in  Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" in the bank holdup scene where images of the robbers, railroad lawmen and the residents are juxtaposed. A non-violent example, Truffaut's " 400 Blows," owes it ending montage to camera movement through the countryside, as the movie's beginning references camera movement through Parisian streets, both montages expressing freedom.

     It's no wonder that the sight of Odessa on TV  brings so much meaning to this viewer.