Battleship Potemkin and the Steps That Changed Cinema

I projected Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin for the first time in the spring of 1926, eight months after its Moscow premiere, in a town that had no particular sympathy for Soviet propaganda but a deep interest in what cinema could be made to do.

The audience did not understand the politics. They did not need to. By the time the famous Odessa Steps sequence began — six minutes of film that have been imitated, parodied, and homaged more than any single sequence in motion picture history — the room had stopped breathing. By the time the baby carriage began rolling down the stone steps, nobody in the cinema was thinking about the Tsar or the workers or the year 1905. They were thinking about that baby, and they did not want to know what happened next.

That was the point. That was always the point.

A Film Commissioned to Lie, That Told the Truth

Eisenstein made Potemkin under direct commission from the Soviet government. It was supposed to be a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the failed 1905 revolution — a piece of propaganda for the regime that had inherited the cause, finally successful in 1917.

The actual mutiny of the battleship Potemkin had happened in June of 1905. The sailors had refused to eat meat infested with maggots. The captain had ordered the dissenters covered with a tarpaulin and shot. One sailor — Grigory Vakulinchuk — had stood up and shouted Brothers, will you shoot your own? — and the firing squad had lowered their rifles. The mutiny took the ship. Vakulinchuk's body was carried to the Odessa harbour. The workers of Odessa came down to mourn him.

The Tsarist response — the response Eisenstein staged on the Odessa Steps — was massacre.

This much is historical. What Eisenstein did with it changed cinema forever.

The Montage That Built a Language

Eisenstein was a theorist before he was a filmmaker. He believed that meaning in cinema came not from individual shots but from the collision of shots — the way one image, placed against another, produced a third meaning that existed only in the audience's mind.

He called this dialectical montage. It was a method, a politics, and an aesthetic all at once. He used it in Potemkin with a precision no filmmaker had attempted before.

When the sailors rebel, Eisenstein cuts not to a sustained shot of the action, but to a series of fragments: a fist, an eye, a hand on a rifle, the sea, a boot. The audience assembles the rebellion in their own heads. The fragments are faster, sharper, more violent than any single sustained image could be.

By the time he reaches the Odessa Steps, this technique is at full power. The sequence is not really six minutes of action. It is six minutes of carefully assembled fragments — a mother holding her dying son, a Cossack rifle, a baby in a pram, a young woman with broken pince-nez, the slow descending boots of soldiers — that build a horror more vivid than any continuous shot could deliver.

Every action film, every horror sequence, every music video that uses rapid cutting to build emotional pressure traces a line back to this sequence. Brian De Palma rebuilt it directly in The Untouchables. Terry Gilliam used it in Brazil. The directors of Hong Kong action cinema studied it. The grammar of Potemkin is the grammar of cinema after Potemkin.

The Steps That Were Not Steps

Here is a detail I have always loved.

The massacre on the Odessa Steps did not happen. There was a massacre in Odessa in 1905 — the Tsarist troops did fire on the mourning crowds — but it did not happen on those specific steps. The steps themselves are a real location, the Potemkin Stairs, a monumental staircase descending from the city of Odessa down to the harbour. They are 192 steps long. They are still there today.

But the Tsarist soldiers did not march down them in lockstep, firing into a crowd. That sequence was constructed by Eisenstein as a kind of moral symbol — a way of compressing the scattered atrocities of 1905 into a single, unforgettable image of the state grinding down its own people.

It worked too well. For most of the twentieth century, audiences and even historians have remembered the Odessa Steps massacre as a historical event. It was not. It is a cinematic event, invented by a Soviet director in 1925, that has been written backward into the history it was supposed to commemorate.

That is one of the strangest things a film can do. Potemkin did it.

The Fleet That Refused to Fire

The film ends with the Potemkin sailing to confront the Imperial squadron sent to recapture it. The squadron is twelve ships strong. The Potemkin is one. The signal flashes across the water: Join us, brothers.

And the guns stay silent. The squadron lets the Potemkin pass.

Historically this did happen — the Imperial fleet refused to fire on their own — and the actual Potemkin did escape to neutral waters in Romania, where the crew surrendered. The mutiny did not start the revolution. The revolution did not happen for another twelve years.

But the gesture, projected on screen, was powerful enough that the Tsarist regime briefly suppressed the film. The Weimar Republic in Germany briefly banned it. Britain banned it for decades — it was not screened publicly there until the 1950s. The United States ran it in art houses but kept it out of the mainstream.

A film about a mutiny became, by the late 1920s, an act of mutiny in its own right. Every state that saw it understood what it was doing.

What I Saw at the Booth

The print I ran in 1926 was a German export print — a slightly truncated version that the Weimar distributor had circulated before the German ban came down. I do not know what happened to that specific reel. It is probably gone. The negative of the original Soviet cut has been lost and recovered and lost again — the stubborn, fragile history of cellulose nitrate ate most of the prints that survived the early decades.

But the sequence is still there. Every restoration that has come down through the decades — and there have been many, each working from the patchwork of surviving copies — has rebuilt the Odessa Steps. It is the heart of the picture. It is the thing audiences came for. It is the thing that has refused to die.

The Expressionists in Germany were building horror through architecture and shadow in the same years Eisenstein was building it through montage. They were both working out the visual grammar that twentieth-century cinema would inherit. They had nothing else in common — politically, aesthetically, temperamentally — but in their understanding of what cinema could be made to do, they were the same era's only equals.

A baby carriage starts down a set of stone steps. The audience understands everything. That is cinema, when cinema is doing what only cinema can do.

— The Projectionist