Stairs are a favorite set-piece for directors of films. Theypresent different opportunities and allow for different camera angles. Theycreate the motivation to leave the horizontal world and promote the subliminal messages. Spiral Stair Cases and Curved Stair Casestend to be used more incomedies and musicals. The long stretch of straight vertical staircases lends itself to dramas. rising up the stairs, the actor is often moving to a higher position of personal state. Descending symbolizes a personal decline, entering the dark path on ones journey, or taking a step down the social ladder. The Queen never walks up 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, add to the meaning of a movie. There are some famous steps that have entered movie history.

The film Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 silent film, has one of 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 occurson the steps in Odessa. The sequence on the Odessa steps has the Cossacks 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. This montage is perhaps the most studied film sequence. It has been reproduced time and time again in many 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 usually thought to be the place of the massacre.

The movie “Rocky”would be a different film without the music and the seventy-two steps rising up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is a archetypal image. It is a classic film portrayal. The underdog, Rocky Balboa mounts the stairs trying to get in shape. It is painful to witness. Again and again he is defeated by the stairs. 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. It’s clear he’s made it. All that is left is winning the bout. That scene has been repeated over and over again. Those steps 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 movie’s villain is a set of stairs that go on forever. In the film, Stan and Ollie carry the piano up the steep flight only to run into difficulties that sends the music box plummeting down over and over again. One sequence 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 destined to spend his life pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down.

Stairways havean important character in so many movies. long stairway up represent the hard challenge in front of the priest. His demise is metfalling down the steps}.Stairways transform into characters of their own, or symbols that can leave a lasting impression.

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