Battleship Potemkin, The

Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925; 80m

One of the immortal classics of world cinema, The Battleship Potemkin was a perfect vehicle for the young, brilliant and restless Eisenstein to experiment with his theories about montage, the creation of new ideas and filmic realities through the creative juxtaposition of images. Based on the famous revolt by the crew of a Russian warship in Odessa in 1905, the film celebrates the courage of the rebels and those on land who supported them, and it also depicts, in the extraordinary and oft-quoted Odessa Steps sequence, the raw brutality of the Tsarist regime. Well-received in the USSR when first released, the film was among the first Soviet films shown in the Western Europe, where it created an enormous sensation" the most powerful evidence yet of a new, revolutionary art emerging from what claimed to be a new, revolutionary society.

by Richard Pena