The cinema : 1952 (1952)

THE TWELVE APOSTLES 171 note . . this too perfectly epitomizes the Revolution of 1905 as a whole. We know what the subsequent fate of the historic armoured cruiser was. It was interned at Constantsa. And then returned to the Czarist government. Some of the sailors escaped. But Matiushenko, caught by the Czar's hangmen, was subsequently executed. Nevertheless, it is correct that the screen replica of the historic armoured cruiser should come to a victorious end. For that is exactly how the Revolution of 1905, though it was drowned in rivers of blood, has come down in the annals of the history of revolutions . . . above all as a phenomenon objectively and historically victorious ... as the great harbinger of the ultimate victory of the October Revolution. This victorious consummation of a defeat brings out in all their grandeur the events of 1905, among which the historic occurrences on the Potemkin are only one episode, but an episode of the kind through which the grandeur of the whole can be seen. And now, to return to the people who acted in the picture, known and unknown. Almost all of those who participated in the film are anonymous and unknown, excepting Antonov, who played Vakulinchuk ; director Grigory Alexandrov who took the part of Giliarovsky, the late director Barsky, who played Golikov, and the boatswain Levchenko, whose whistle was such a help to the work. What has happened to the hundreds of anonymous people who took such enthusiastic part in the picture, rushing with untiring energy up and down the stairs in the burning heat, marching in the endless mourning procession along the pier?