Short answers, pulled from the story.
Battleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein that dramatises the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin, when the crew rebelled against their officers over maggot-infested rations. The film follows the sailors' uprising, the mourning of their leader Vakulinchuk in Odessa, a massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps by Tsarist soldiers, and the eventual solidarity of a loyalist naval squadron with the mutineers.
Battleship Potemkin was named the greatest film of all time at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair and ranked in the top ten of Sight and Sound magazine's critics' poll for five consecutive decades. Critics and directors including Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and Paul Greengrass have listed it among their favourites. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% approval rating based on 52 reviews, with an average score of 9.2 out of 10.
The Odessa Steps sequence depicts Tsarist soldiers in white summer tunics marching down a long staircase firing volleys into an unarmed civilian crowd, while mounted Cossacks charge from below. The most iconic image is a baby carriage rolling down the steps after its mother is shot. Film critic Roger Ebert noted that no tsarist massacre actually occurred on those specific steps, yet the scene is so convincing that it is often described as if it genuinely happened.
Battleship Potemkin was directed by Sergei Eisenstein, who was 27 years old at the time. It was commissioned by the commemorative committee of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Russian revolution. The original script by Nina Agadzhanova covered multiple episodes from that year, but Eisenstein narrowed the focus to the single mutiny episode, drawing on just 41 frames of her script.
Battleship Potemkin was banned in the United Kingdom until 1954 and then rated X until 1987, making it the film held under ban longer than any other in British history. It was also banned in France, Japan, and for a time in the United States, and Heinrich Himmler issued a directive barring SS members from attending screenings in Nazi Germany. In the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky's written introduction was cut from prints after his political fall and replaced with a quote from Lenin.
Films directly influenced by the Odessa Steps sequence include Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), and Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021). Parodies include Woody Allen's Bananas (1971) and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker film Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). The painter Francis Bacon was also deeply influenced by the sequence, particularly the image of a nurse's broken glasses and open-mouthed scream.