Battleship Potemkin

A silent historical drama by Sergei Eisenstein, made for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. June of that year, the Black Sea: the crew of a battleship is served meat crawling with maggots, the men who protest are led out to be shot, and the crew rushes to save them. The officers go over the side, the mutiny wins, and the sailor Vakulinchuk who raised the crew dies in the fighting. Odessa comes out for his funeral and takes the ship's side; government troops shoot the townspeople on the staircase running down to the port. The Black Sea squadron sails to put the mutiny down, the sailors of the other ships refuse to fire on their own, and the Potemkin passes through the line. Eisenstein was twenty-seven, the screenplay covered the whole revolution and the shooting schedule was burning away, so the director took a single episode of a few pages out of it. The real battleship was being broken up, so another ship standing in Odessa harbour was filmed instead. The killing on the steps is built out of short shots cut together, and cinema has been repeating that method for a century. A red flag could not be photographed on black and white stock, so a hundred and eight frames were painted by hand for the premiere. The first screening came on 24 December 1925 at the Bolshoi Theatre, with the wide premiere in Moscow on 18 January 1926. Polls of critics and directors have named the film the greatest of all time dozens of times, while German censors cut it as dangerous.