The idealized journey through Russia's past included iconic Soviet-era imagery and a nod to Eisenstein. No pogroms, no starving serfs, no Stalin, no purges, no show trials, no gulag, no Lenin and no Trotsky (still too soon, apparently, for his rehabilitation).
History as a spectacular circus act, sanitized and silly.
"Yet, as the performance built, there at least came moments of true insight into the nation's soul," The Christian Science Monitor's Mark Sappenfield observes, "when all the artistry was less about dropping jaws and more about conveying something real and poignant.
"And, tellingly, that was the Soviet portion of the program.
In the end, a journalist might say that the opening ceremony buried the lead."Read more.
"The spirit of mutiny swept the land. A tremendous, mysterious process was taking place in countless hearts: the individual personality became dissolved in the mass, and the mass itself became dissolved in the revolutionary élan."
-Leon Trotsky
Battleship “Potemkin”, Odessa Steps excerpt (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) from Soviet Film, Grinnell on Vimeo.
