Title: Analysis of both Francis Bacon’s Self portrait 1971 and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin
Name: Gemma M Marshall-Savage
Tutors Name: Bill
Word count: 549
Francis Bacon’s self portrait 1971 and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin still 1925 are both portraits of a person which look beyond the surface of aesthetics but into raw emotion.
I feel that Francis Bacon’s Self portrait is a dark, cold and harsh reflection of how he sees himself. He hasn’t made the self portrait realistic but expressive of his emotional state. It suggests to me a man that is so twisted in emotions, so distorted from the reality of himself that he has this twisted sad view of himself. When I look at this picture I do not see a man who is at the height of his career but a man who is torn apart by something in himself. Perhaps this was triggered by the death of his lover dyer (who died that year while in Paris together to attend the retrospect of Bacons work). The painting its self is oil on canvas, the brush strokes are very expressive. The colour choice is dark in intensity yet made harsher by the use of white, with a touch of blue to really enhance it atmospherically. The white with the icy blue gives it a cold ghostly edge while his eye’s are completely black just mirroring the cold. This makes him very detached from the viewer, putting them on edge. This artwork is like looking in to the soul of the artist, giving the artwork a sense of vulnerability because looking into the soul of someone is to be at a personal level with someone, it is an invasion of space but the subject matter can’t do anything about this intimacy. Some say “the blacks of the eyes are the windows to the soul”.
Just like with the above there is a feeling of seeing into the soul of the subject in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin still 1925. The eyes are really prominent, bulging with shock. Which are of such an intensity it makes the mind wonder what could have been the catalyst of such an emotion. Looking alone at the eyes there is so much fear it almost strikes fear in the viewer. The pupils of the eyes are dilated which only reflects this fear into reality further. The lighting is perfect in this still as it creates shadows around the eyes which enhance the mood of the image while the light is reflecting of the rest of her face almost bleaching it out. I feel this maximize the effect of the facial expression as the shadows around the eyes frame them while making her look tired and worn, the white light enhances the white of her skin making her look bleached out as if panic stricken with fear. The lighting comes from the direction she is looking in which suggests she been stopped in her tracks. This still image I feel captures the mood of this scene. This film reminds me of the events of bloody Sunday.
I feel they both refer to the darkest emotions one can find within them self, both show the subject are captured in vulnerability, fear and isolation. In Bacons self portrait 1971 it fear which is coming from within himself where as in Battleship Potemkin its fear that has been caused from the outside, however they both capture the elements which create the emotion.
