Eisenstein / Napoleon

Yesterday Battleship Potemkin opened the 7th edition of the (S8). Below, we reproduce a fragment of /The Twuelve Apostles, text written by Eisenstein in 1945 on how his famous film was made.

To return to anonymous actors. . . . With the exception of Antonov who played Vakulinchuk, Grigory Alexandrov—Gilyarovsky, the late director Barsky, who played Golikov, and the boatswain Levchenko whose whistle was very helpful to us, the players have remained unknown.
What has become of the hundreds of these anonymous people who brought to the film their unflagging enthusiasm, who ran up and down the steps under the scorching sun, who marched in the endless procession of mourners?
I would like most of all to meet the nameless child crying in his pram as it went rolling down the steps.
He must be twenty now. Where is he? What is he doing? Was he among the defenders of Odessa? Does he lie buried in the common grave at the estuary off Odessa? Or is he busy rebuilding his native city?
I remember the names of some of the participants in the mass scenes.
I have a good reason for this.
This is a “Napoleonic trick” widely used by directors.
Napoleon was in the habit of learning about the personal affairs of his soldiers from their friends and then astonishing them by asking: “How’s your sweetheart Loison?” “How are your parents—the kind Rosalie and the industrious Tibault—getting on? What about your little house on the outskirts of St. Tropaize?” “How is Aunt Justine’s gout?”
The crowd is rushing down the stairs, more than a thousand pairs of feet. The first time they do it fairly well. The second there is less energy. The third time they move positively slowly.
All of a sudden from an elevation, drowning out the stamping of boots and sandals, comes the director’s voice booming through the megaphone:
“Put more pep into it, Comrade Prokopenko!”
The crowd is dumbfounded: “Can he see every one of us from that damned platform? Does he know our names?”
The crowd feels a new upsurge of energy and rushes onwards, everyone quite certain that the director’s watchful eyes is on him.
And all he has done really is to shout the name of a man he knows.