The cinema : 1952 (1952)

l68 THE CINEMA standing up above, near the monument to Duke Richelieu, is of course a myth, a very amusing one, but still a legend. The very 'flight5 of the stairs suggested the idea of the scene this 'flight' set the director's imagination soaring on a new c flight ' of its own. The panicky 'flight' of the crowd sweeping down the stairs is nothing more than the material embodiment of the first impressions ensuing from the encounter with the stairway itself. Perhaps, what also contributed was the memory, hidden deep in the recesses of the mind, of a picture seen in the journal Illustration for 1905 : a mounted rider flying down a stairway in a cloud of dust and hacking away at somebody with his sword. However that may be, the Odessa stairway became a decisive scene in the picture, forming the very backbone of its structure and development. The furnaceman, the fog, the stairway epitomize the fate of the picture as a whole : it too, after all, sprang from the rib of that endless and too rich in events scenario igo^. My horoscope says I was born under the sign of the sun. In spite of this, the sun does not call on me for a cup of tea, as it did for the late Vladimir Mayakovsky. None the less, it sometimes does me unexpected favours. In 1938, it was so kind as to stay in the sky for forty days running when we were shooting the Battle on the Ice on location for Mosfilm.* It was the sun that obliged us to pack up our film expedition in Leningrad, where, in the autumn of 1925, we had begun our belated work on the film 1905. It was the chase after its last rays that sent us to Sevastopol and Odessa, and made us choose among the ocean of epi * For the picture Alexander Nevsky.