As anyone who follows my Twitter feed knows, I’m a politics junkie. And I’ve been getting a steady supply of the good s**t for about a month now, thanks to Canada’s federal election. It’s been a shocking one, and it ended yesterday. Among its many ups and downs, the lowest low was, as always, the mud—slung accurately, though not always effectively, in all directions.
The politics of grievance can backfire. Because the smear is too petty, perhaps; or the politician too loved; or, occasionally, because the smear is poorly delivered. This is the challenge of propaganda: an art that confounds even smart practitioners with the nuances of truth and tone it requires.
Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike is propaganda. So is The Battleship Potemkin, his masterpiece, filmed later the same year. Strike is good, but Potemkin is much, much better, and it took me a while to figure out why. They make the same points, in much the same ways. But Potemkin is the work of a man who had mastered the means to his end. With Strike, he tried harder and achieved less.
