About Battleship Potemkin (1925)
The story behind the film
Battleship Potemkin was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and its young director, Sergei Eisenstein, then still in his twenties, chose one episode from that year to stand for the whole: the mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet. The film is divided into five acts. Sailors, served rotten, maggot-infested meat, refuse to eat; officers order the protesters shot; the firing squad refuses; the crew rises up. The ship sails into Odessa, where the people of the city rally in support — until soldiers march down the great harbour steps and open fire on the crowd. Finally the Potemkin heads out to face the rest of the fleet.
Eisenstein was one of the great theorists of film editing. He believed meaning came from the collision of shots — "montage" — rather than from any single image, and Potemkin was designed to prove it, with fast cutting, contrasting rhythms and carefully composed close-ups building to powerful emotional effects.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Sergei Eisenstein; co-written with Nina Agadzhanova
- Cinematography by Eduard Tisse
- Aleksandr Antonov as Grigory Vakulinchuk, the sailor who leads the protest
- Vladimir Barsky as Commander Golikov
- Grigori Aleksandrov as Chief Officer Giliarovsky
- Largely non-professional performers and real crowds of Odessa residents
Why it's worth watching
The "Odessa Steps" sequence is one of the most influential pieces of editing ever made. Its imagery — the marching boots, the mother carrying her wounded child back up toward the soldiers, the woman with shattered glasses, the baby carriage bouncing down the steps — has been studied in film schools for a century and copied in films such as The Untouchables. Watching it, you can see how editing alone can make a few minutes of screen time feel endless and terrifying.
Beyond its technique, Potemkin is a gripping, propulsive drama that never lets up across its roughly 70 minutes. It is propaganda, made to celebrate the revolutionary cause, and it's worth watching with that in mind — but it's also undeniably powerful filmmaking.
Fun facts
- The massacre on the Odessa Steps is dramatised. There was violence in Odessa in 1905 after the Potemkin's arrival, but not a daylight massacre on the steps as the film shows it.
- At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, an international poll of film historians voted Battleship Potemkin the greatest film ever made.
- The film was banned for periods in several countries, including Britain, because of fears it would encourage mutiny or revolution.
- In Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll, it was still ranked among the 60 greatest films of all time.
Public-domain status
Battleship Potemkin was published in 1925 and its US copyright has expired; it is in the public domain in the United States. Many copies circulate with later added soundtracks, which can be separately protected — see "Rights & source" below for the copy and music we broadcast.