Stairs are a favorite set-piece for film scenes. Theypresent different opportunities and allow for different camera angles. Theyallow the movement to leave the horizontal world and enhance the subliminal messages. Spiral Stair Cases and Curved Stair Casesare more often seen incomedies and musicals. The long stretch of straight vertical staircases is better for more serious work. rising up the stairs, the actor is often moving to a higher position of personal state. Descending often represents a personal decline, entering the dark path on ones journey, or taking a step down the social ladder. The Queen always walks down the steps to enter the ballroom with the common people; she always makes her entrance elegantly descending to the level of those below. Steps are a favorite device, that when used well, contribute to the depth of a movie. There are some renowned steps that have entered movie history.

The film Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 silent film, contains perhaps the most famous and most copied sequence ever created. Eisenstein, the films director, was one of the first to effectively use a montage sequence in films. It happenson the steps in Odessa. The sequence on the Odessa steps shows the Tsar’s army marching down firing into civilians. The film cuts are betweenbooted feet marching down, victims, firing rifles, and a baby carriage. The carriagebounces down the steps, plummeting by victims and heading down into the chaos. It is perhaps the most studied film sequence. It has been reproduced time and time again in various films, including Brian De Palma’s Untouchables, Francis Ford Coppola’s The God Father, and Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box. Even though the Odessa Steps were not the place of the massacre, they are immortalized on film and often mistaken for the site of the massacre.

The movie “Rocky”would be a different film without the music and the seventy-two steps leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The steps are a archetypal image. It is a classic film scene. The underdog, Rocky Balboa mounts the stairs trying to get ready for his fight. It is hard to watch. Again and again he is defeated by the climb. Then, in a great turn of events he surmounts the stairs with aplumb. The camera moves away to show him, arms raised, dancing with the city beneath him. We know he’s made it. Now he just has to win the fight. That scene has been replicated over and over again. The stairs have been used many more times, namely in Rocky II, III, and V. Those steps lead up to the well known building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but are now known as “The Rocky Steps.”

In the Laurel and Hardy film, The Music Box, a short comedy released in 1932, Laurel and Hardytry to deliver a piano. The antagonist of the film is a set of stairs that go on forever. In the film, Stan and Ollie hoist and push the piano up the steep flight only to run into difficulties that sends the music box plummeting down over and over again. One bit even includes a baby carriage as a tip of the hat to Battleship Potemkin. It is the well known fable of Sisyphus, the poor soul who spends eternity pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down.

Stairways haveplayed an integral part in so many movies. In the exorcist, theendless steps up represent the hard challenge in front of the priest. He diesfalling down the steps.Steps can become characters of their own, or symbols that linger long after the last flicker on the screen.