Montage in Battleship Potemkin and The Untouchables
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	Narrator: Suddenly, followed by two quick jerks of a head, announces the turning point in one of the most famous editing achievements in the history of film: the Odessa steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein's theories of montage are here displayed in full force, as a quiet afternoon in Odessa turns into a bloody massacre at the hands of Czarist forces. The crowds
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	have gathered in support of the sailors onboard the Potemkin, who have mutinied against the injustices of the ship's command. The wide stone steps, appearing as diagonal stripes of black and white, provide a naturally dynamic space for this conflict between the regimentation of the Czar’s relentlessly marching troops and the haphazardness of the fleeing crowds.
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	Narrator: The movement in the images is matched by the impression of movement generated by conflicts between shots—all different in scale, in composition, and in duration. The spatial conflicts between figures crashing into each other, as well as the graphic conflicts in composition, underscore the conflict between power and powerlessness.
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	Narrator: An extreme long shot, in whose foreground a mother runs, clutching her child's hand, is followed by one in medium long shot of the troops guns firing on the fleeing crowds. We see in a shot of a similar distance, the child fall.
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	Narrator: This sets up an excruciating alternation between the tighter shots of the mother's look, as she finally turns back to see her child's answering cries and trampled limbs, and longer shots of the fleeing crowds.
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	Narrator: The mother gathers up her son, and cries out to the citizens of Odessa for help.
	Narrator: In the midst of the fleeing crowd, a grandmother hears her call and urges the crowds to approach the oncoming soldiers and convince them to stop shooting.
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	Narrator: The soldiers, firing their guns, continue to advance on the people. The mother, carrying her child, continues to walk towards the soldiers.
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	Narrator: The shot patterns take on ideological rhythms as the people, led by the women and peasants begin to form a mass, pleading with the troops to stop.
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	Narrator: The mother is shot by the anonymous squad and falls at their feet. This tragic outcome is heartbreaking, and the soldiers' ruthlessness spurs our outrage. The crowds disperse in terror, and the Cossacks arrive, setting up the second, even more famous endangered child sequence. The crowds flee the relentless onslaught of the marching troops and the mounted Cossacks at the foot of the stairs.
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	Narrator: We see a young mother pushing a baby carriage who's jostled by the crowd.
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	Narrator: And in her attempt to shield her child from the relentless gunfire, she is shot.
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	Narrator: We see the agony on her face, as she slumps against the baby carriage. Eisenstein intersperses wide shots of the chaos and devastation with suspenseful close-ups of the dying mother, the carriage teetering at the top of the steps, and the footsteps of the soldiers. Modern audiences understand these rhythms of anticipation and delay, because of decades of use of editing techniques inspired by Eisenstein's montage. Eisenstein is aware of the
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	effect that these images of heroic mothers and innocent children have on the audience, and he doesn't hesitate to use them to capture our empathy for the people of Odessa.
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	Narrator: The carriage finally tips, and it hurtles down the steps. We see that the baby is crying.
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	Narrator: We feel helpless in our inability to stop the plunging baby carriage, a sense that is vividly mirrored in the frequent inserts of horrified onlookers' faces.
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	Narrator: We see the Cossack's terrifying face as he strikes seemingly right at us, and the final image of a woman's bloodied eye.
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	Narrator: Parodies of the Odessa steps sequence, however, are much more wide-ranging in their intended emotional effects. One of the most famous and most cynical is in Brian De Palma's 1987 film, The Untouchables. Kevin Costner plays Eliot Ness, a government agent in single-minded pursuit of gangster Al Capone. As the scene begins, Ness is posted at Chicago's Union Station, on a tip that Capone's
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	accountant Payne is catching a 12:05 train out of town. Ness and his partner take up their posts in the station and, surveying the scene, Ness spies a young mother struggling at the bottom of the station's long staircase with her crying baby and a couple of suitcases. An almost unbearably long point-of-view sequence ensues in which Ness alternates between combing his surroundings for Payne and Capone's goons, and checking on the mother and baby's progress. The
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	montage is effective, but we also feel manipulated by inserts of the big station clock as it measures both the time until the train departs and the duration of the scene, and by the nursery music that overtakes the soundtrack at the mob's entrance. Passengers stream down the stairs, hardly possessing the same threat of Eisenstein's Czarist soldiers, but still the atmosphere is thick with tension. Finally, exactly at noon, four-and-a-half-minutes into the sequence, Ness
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	helps the mother with the carriage and each bump of the carriage up the stairs rings out as Ness looks warily around. He spots Capone's men. Then he sees Payne, accompanied by another thug.
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	Narrator: He feels a gaze at his back. Still holding the carriage, he turns and raises his gun and a firefight begins. Inevitably, the carriage is released, and shots of its descent punctuate the carnage.
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	Narrator: Finally and improbably, at the last possible second, the carriage is stopped by Ness's partner, played by Andy Garcia. A sharpshooter, he takes out a thug while still propping up the carriage. As if mocking the sentiment evoked by innocent babies tumbling down staircases, the scene ends with the steps as littered with bodies as in Eisenstein's magisterial original.