Battleship Potemkin: Eisenstein, 1925
1925 · movie
Battleship Potemkin was commissioned to mark twenty years since the Russian revolution of 1905 and was released at the end of 1925. Its director, Sergei Eisenstein, was twenty seven. He took a real event, the mutiny of the crew of an armoured cruiser in the harbour of Odessa, and built from it a film that treats a crowd rather than an individual as its main character, and that has been studied in film schools ever since.
The most famous sequence takes place on a long flight of steps leading down to the port, where soldiers advance on civilians and a pram rolls loose down the stairs. It did not happen. Eisenstein invented the scene, and it has been so widely copied and quoted that many people believe it to be a documentary record. That confusion is itself part of the film's history and a reminder of how quickly a made image becomes a memory.
Eisenstein's method was montage. He argued that meaning in cinema is produced by the collision of shots rather than by what happens inside any one of them, and he cut the film with a rhythm that alternates faces, boots, guns and stone. The technique changed editing everywhere, including in the Hollywood he was competing with.
The film was also propaganda, made for a state that wanted it, and it was banned or cut in several countries for years because governments feared its effect. Both things are true at once, which is why it remains a difficult and useful object. It is regularly voted among the most important films ever made, and almost every director who has staged a crowd under fire since 1925 has been answering it.