Battleship Potemkin

• 1. Introduction

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  Battleship Potemkin arrived in cinemas in 1925 and has spent the century since being voted one of the greatest films ever made. At the 1958 World Expo in Brussels, an international gathering of critics named it the single greatest film in the history of cinema. In the most recent Sight and Sound poll, in 2022, it still ranked fifty-fourth in the world. Billy Wilder called it his all-time favourite. Orson Welles, Michael Mann, and Paul Greengrass each placed it on their personal lists of best films.

  What is it about a Soviet silent film, made in just a few months to commemorate a revolution that had already happened, that has held that grip for a hundred years? The answer lies in a set of questions the film raises almost immediately. How does a director turn a propagandist commission into an experiment in pure cinema? How does a single scene on a flight of stone steps in Odessa become the most imitated sequence in film history? And what happens when a film designed to inspire Bolshevik loyalty is privately admired by a Nazi propaganda minister?

  Those questions lead into a story about editing as a weapon, about censorship across multiple continents, about a poet who stepped in to save the film from obscurity, and about a flag that had to be hand-painted red, frame by frame, because the camera could not see the colour.

• 2. A Commission Under Pressure

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  On the 20th anniversary of the first Russian revolution, the commemorative commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to stage performances dedicated to the events of 1905. Nina Agadzhanova was asked to write a script that would cover a sweep of that year: the Russo-Japanese War, the Armenian-Tatar massacres, revolutionary events in St. Petersburg, and the Moscow uprising. Direction was assigned to Sergei Eisenstein, then 27 years old.

  Shooting began on the 31st of March 1925 in Leningrad. Eisenstein filmed a railway strike episode and night scenes on Sadovaya Street before deteriorating weather shut him down. Fog set in. The script, meanwhile, had not even been officially approved until the 4th of June. The film needed to be finished by the end of the year, and the original eight-episode structure was simply impossible to deliver on time.

  Eisenstein made a radical decision. He abandoned Agadzhanova's broad panorama and focused on a single episode covering just 41 frames of her original script: the uprising aboard the battleship Potemkin. He and Grigori Aleksandrov expanded and rewrote those pages almost entirely. Some scenes, including the storm sequence that opens the finished film, had not existed in any prior version of the script at all. The film that emerged was far removed from what Agadzhanova had written.

  The first screening took place on the 21st of December 1925 at a ceremonial meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre, tied to the anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The public premiere followed on the 18th of January 1926 at the 1st Goskinoteatre in Moscow, the building now known as the Khudozhestvenny.

• 3. Montage as Argument

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  Eisenstein wrote Battleship Potemkin as revolutionary propaganda but used it simultaneously to test his theories of film editing. The Soviet filmmakers of the Kuleshov school were exploring how the sequence of images could shape a viewer's emotional response, and Eisenstein aimed to edit in a way that would produce the greatest possible sympathy for the rebellious sailors and the sharpest possible hatred for their commanders. Characterisation was kept simple so that audiences would have no doubt about where their loyalties should lie.

  One of the most precise demonstrations of the technique involves three stone lion statues at the Vorontsov Palace in Crimea. The statues, a sleeping lion, a waking lion, and one rising to its feet, were cut together in rapid succession to create the illusion of a single lion standing up. The statues had been modelled after the Medici Lions of Renaissance Italy. Eisenstein used this detail from classical art to give visual form to the idea of a people rousing themselves from sleep.

  The results were not exactly what Eisenstein had hoped. He was disappointed when Potemkin failed to attract large audiences in the Soviet Union. Outside the country, however, audiences responded positively, though often more to the film's graphic violence than to its political argument. The film's power to reshape political thought through pure emotional response did not go unnoticed. Joseph Goebbels called Potemkin "a marvelous film without equal in the cinema" and said that anyone without a firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing it. He wanted Germans to produce a similar film. Eisenstein wrote Goebbels an indignant letter in response, arguing that National Socialistic realism had neither truth nor realism.

• 4. The Odessa Steps

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  Roger Ebert wrote of the Odessa Steps sequence: "That there was, in fact, no tsarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene." He added that Eisenstein did it so well that the bloodshed on the steps is often referred to today as if it really happened.

  In the sequence, soldiers in white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of stairs in a rhythmic, machine-like formation, firing volleys into an unarmed crowd. A separate detachment of mounted Cossacks charges the crowd at the bottom. Among the victims are an older woman in pince-nez, a young boy with his mother, a student in uniform, and a teenage schoolgirl. A mother pushing a baby carriage falls dying and the carriage rolls down the steps through the fleeing crowd.

  The historical basis was real, though different. Both The Times and the resident British consul reported that troops fired on rioters when the Potemkin arrived in Odessa harbour, with deaths reportedly in the hundreds. Eisenstein concentrated and reframed that violence into a scene on a specific set of steps.

  The ripple effect on subsequent cinema has been enormous. Films paying direct homage to the sequence include Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and Denis Villeneuve's Dune. The Irish-born painter Francis Bacon was profoundly influenced by Eisenstein's images, particularly the shot of a nurse's broken glasses and open-mouthed scream. That open mouth appeared first in Bacon's Abstraction from the Human Form and then again in Fragment of a Crucifixion and his famous Head series. Photographer Alexey Titarenko paid tribute to the sequence in his series City of Shadows, shot near a subway station in Saint Petersburg between 1991 and 1993.

• 5. Censorship and Survival

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  After its first screening, Battleship Potemkin was not distributed in the Soviet Union, and there was a real danger it would disappear among other productions. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky intervened. His motivation was partly personal: his good friend, the poet Nikolai Aseev, had worked on the film's intertitles. Mayakovsky's opponent was Konstantin Shvedchikov, president of Sovkino and a politician who had once hidden Lenin in his home before the Revolution.

  Mayakovsky made a hard demand that the film be distributed abroad and reportedly warned Shvedchikov about the verdict of history books. His closing line was: "Shvedchikovs come and go, but art remains. Remember that!" After sustained pressure from Mayakovsky and others, Shvedchikov sent the film to Berlin, where it became a major success and was subsequently rescreened in Moscow.

  When Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford visited Moscow in July 1926, they praised the film at length. Fairbanks helped arrange its distribution in the United States, and even asked Eisenstein to come to Hollywood. The American premiere took place on the 5th of December 1926 at the Biltmore Theatre in New York.

  Censorship followed the film across national borders. In the United Kingdom it was banned until 1954, then classified X-rated until 1987, making it the film held under ban longer than any other in British history. Heinrich Himmler issued a directive barring SS members from attending screenings. A written introduction by Leon Trotsky was cut from Soviet prints after Trotsky fell out with Stalin, and his words in the prologue were replaced with a quote from Lenin. Abroad, the version distributed in Germany had already been reedited by director Phil Jutzi, moving the attempted execution of sailors from the beginning of the film to the end.

  A comprehensive restoration was completed in 2005 under the guidance of the Foundation Deutsche Kinemathek, restoring the author's version of the film along with Edmund Meisel's original score. The film's centenary in 2025 was marked by a new cinema release of a restored version, also with the Meisel score, and the BFI issued it on Blu-ray.

• 6. Scores and the Red Flag

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  Eisenstein hoped the film's score would be rewritten every 20 years, so that each new generation would encounter it as a living work. Edmund Meisel composed the original score and wrote it in just twelve days because of late approval from film censors. Time was so short that Meisel repeated sections. A salon orchestra performed the Berlin premiere in 1926, using flute and piccolo, trumpet, trombone, harmonium, percussion, and strings without viola.

  Nikolai Kryukov composed a new score in 1950 for the film's 25th anniversary. Dmitri Shostakovich's music was attached to a 1976 reissue, and three of his symphonies, with the Fifth the most prominent, came to define the sound of the film in commercial DVD editions. In 2004, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys composed a score with the Dresden Symphonic Orchestra, which premiered in September 2004 at an open-air concert in Trafalgar Square in London. Four further live performances followed in Germany in September 2005, and one at the Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2006. Michael Nyman composed a new score in 2011, regularly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. The Berklee Silent Film Orchestra also composed a new score in 2011 and performed it live at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

  One production detail from the original shoot captures the practical ingenuity required throughout the project. The rebels raise a red flag over the battleship in one of the film's climactic moments. The orthochromatic black-and-white film stock of the period rendered the colour red as black, making the flag invisible as a symbol. Eisenstein hand-tinted it red across 108 individual frames for the premiere at the Grand Theatre. The audience's response was thunderous applause. Those hand-painted frames, created one by one for a single screening in 1925, represent something the automated cinema of any later era could not replicate.