Battleship Potemkin 1925

The story

The film runs in five episodes, each with its own title. In "Men and Maggots", sailors on the battleship Potemkin refuse borscht made from meat crawling with maggots, although the ship's surgeon has passed it as fit. In "Drama on the Deck", the officers order a firing squad, the men turn on them, and a sailor called Vakulinchuk is killed in the fight.

In "A Dead Man Calls for Justice", his body is laid out on the quay at Odessa and the townspeople file past, then rally to the ship with food and speeches. In "The Odessa Steps", soldiers march down the great staircase and fire on the crowd. In "Meeting the Squadron", the warship faces the loyal fleet, and the guns stay silent as the other crews cheer the mutineers.

The real mutiny, and the steps that were not

The mutiny happened. On 27 June 1905 the crew rose, and Vakulinchuk, one of its leaders, was mortally wounded by the executive officer. The ship reached Odessa that night. The city was already in turmoil, and after Vakulinchuk's funeral on 29 June the ship fired two shells into the city. Riots followed and much of the port burned. On 30 June the Potemkin met the loyal squadron, where one battleship's crew joined the mutineers. A week later the ship put into Constanța, in Romania, and the crew gave her up. By then the mutiny had failed, which the film does not mention.

The massacre on the steps is where the legend begins. Troops did fire on crowds in Odessa that June: The Times and the British consul reported it, and deaths are said to have been in the hundreds. But the scene as filmed, soldiers marching down a staircase by daylight and shooting a fleeing crowd, is by most accounts Eisenstein's invention, drawn from riots elsewhere in the city. He left out the fire. The film shows the event the way the revolution wanted it remembered, and many people do now remember it that way.

Making it

The Soviet authorities commissioned a film for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The first script, by Nina Agadzhanova, covered many episodes of that year, and Eisenstein cut it down to the one ship. The mutiny took only a short section of the original. Shooting began on 31 March 1925 in Odessa, with Eduard Tisse as cinematographer. The Potemkin herself was no longer afloat, so another ship stood in for her. Most sources say the old battleship Dvenadsat Apostolov; the footage, one source notes, looks more like the Rostislav. Interiors were shot on the cruiser Komintern.

Eisenstein cast mostly people with no stage experience, chosen for their faces and bearing, not for fame. His assistant Grigori Aleksandrov plays one of the officers.

Montage

The film is the standard example of Soviet montage: meaning built by the collision of shots, not by what is in any one of them. The steps are the textbook case. A mother falls and her baby carriage rolls down the stairs. A woman in pince-nez is shot, and the lens is broken. Faceless soldiers march in rows, filmed from below, while the crowd runs in the other direction. Three marble lions from the Vorontsov Palace, one sleeping, one waking, one rising, are cut together so that the stone seems to get up, a joke and a protest in one.

The red flag raised on the mast is another trick of the film's own: the stock of the day showed red as black, so the flag was coloured by hand on the print, by one count on 108 frames.

Release, bans and the restoration

The first showing was at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, on 21 December 1925, and the public release followed on 18 January 1926. Abroad it became famous, helped in Germany by a score by Edmund Meisel, which by one account he wrote in twelve days because the censors approved the film late. It was shown there in 1926.

The authorities were less pleased. Britain's censors refused it a certificate in 1926 on the ground that films should not take sides in political controversy; it was shown privately to film societies and workers' groups from 1929, and formally passed in 1954, the year after Stalin died. In Germany it went through eight censorship proceedings from 1926, was banned for "endangering public safety", was released cut, and was passed as a sound film in 1930. France, Japan and parts of the United States are also reported to have banned it, for dates that sources do not agree on. In the Nazi years, by one account, SS men were told not to see it, while Goebbels admired its craft.

At home the film was re-edited too. The Trotsky quotation that opened it was removed when he fell from power. The reconstruction of 2005, led by the historian Enno Patalas under the Deutsche Kinemathek, put together material from Moscow, Berlin and London and used a new recording of Meisel's score. The Kino release of 2007 describes dozens of restored shots and all 146 title cards as Eisenstein had them.

Why it matters

It made editing an argument. Critics still use the steps to teach how cutting can make meaning, and they still disagree about the lions.

It was voted the greatest film once. A poll at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair named it the best film of all time. In the Sight and Sound critics' poll it stood 11th in 2012 and 54th in 2022, so reputations move.

It is quoted constantly. The pram on the stairs turns up in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and in other films, from drama to parody.

It shows what a film can do to memory. People who have never seen it know the massacre on the steps, and many take it for history. That the staircase itself is real, with its 192 steps, only helps the confusion.