Battleship Potemkin (film)

What is the story?

June 1905, aboard the Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet. Sailors look at the meat hanging on deck and find it crawling with maggots. The ship's doctor, Smirnov, peers at it through his pince-nez and declares that these are insects that wash off. The men refuse the borscht and live on bread and water. A sailor washing dishes reads the words on a plate, "give us this day our daily bread", and smashes it.

The first officer Giliarovsky has the refusers kneel on the foredeck under a canvas sheet and calls up a firing squad. At the order to fire, Vakulinchuk pleads with the squad, the rifles drop and the mutiny breaks out. The officers go overboard and the doctor becomes "food for the worms". But Vakulinchuk, who led it, is killed.

The ship sails for Odessa. His body lies in a tent in the harbour with a sign on his chest, "For a spoonful of borscht", and the townspeople file past. A man who tries to turn their anger on the Jews is beaten by the crowd. Then comes the most famous scene in film history. On the steps where people have gathered to cheer the sailors, a line of dismounted Cossacks appears at the top and comes down in machine-like step, firing volleys and pressing on with fixed bayonets. A woman in pince-nez, a mother with her boy and a student in uniform fall, and a dying mother loses hold of a pram, which rolls down the steps among the fleeing crowd.

The sailors fire the ship's guns at the opera house where the military command is meeting. A squadron comes to crush them, and the Potemkin steams towards it flying the red flag and the signal "Join us". The other crews refuse to fire and cheer as she passes between their ships, and there the film ends. Its five parts are called "Men and Maggots", "Drama on the Deck", "A Dead Man Calls for Justice", "The Odessa Steps" and "One Against All".

How did the film come about?

For the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, a commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee ordered a big anniversary film. Nina Agadzhanova wrote the script and direction went to the 27-year-old Eisenstein. The script meant to cover all of 1905: the Russo-Japanese War, the Armenian massacres, the risings in St Petersburg and Moscow. But fog came down on the Leningrad shoot, and the film had to be finished by the end of the year although the script was approved only on 4 June. He rebuilt the whole film around one episode, the Potemkin mutiny, which took up a few pages (41 shots) of the script.

The real Potemkin was waiting to be scrapped, so another ship stood in. It is usually said to be the Dvenadsat Apostolov, though the footage has been said to match the Rostislav better. Interiors were shot on the cruiser Komintern. Eisenstein cast many non-professionals for their faces. Red looked black on the film stock of the day, so a white flag was filmed and then tinted red by hand in 108 frames of the print for the Bolshoi premiere. The film was first shown at the Bolshoi anniversary meeting in December 1925 and opened in Moscow on 18 January 1926.

Why is it a turning point in film?

Its characters are simple: this is propaganda, and the audience is told at once whom to feel for. But Eisenstein also used it as a testing ground for montage. Three shots of stone lions, one asleep, one waking and one rising, cut together so that a statue seems to get to its feet, are the best-known example. His aim was to organise the viewer's feelings by editing.

Eisenstein was disappointed that it failed to draw masses of viewers, but critics judged otherwise. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair poll it came first with 110 votes of 117, and it stood in the top ten of many Sight & Sound critics' polls (54th in 2022). The pram has been quoted and parodied by dozens of films, among them The Untouchables (1987) and Brazil (1985). The Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels praised it to film-makers in 1933, saying that anyone without firm convictions might become a Bolshevik after seeing it. Himmler barred the SS from attending.

How close is it to the real mutiny?

The start is true. On 14 (27) June 1905 the crew refused a borscht made from rotten meat and the doctor Smirnov passed it as fit to eat. When the first officer called for a canvas sheet, the men took it as the preparation for an execution and broke out the rifles. Vakulinchuk died of his wounds and his body was laid in a tent in Odessa harbour. The film heightened the moment before the volley, but the fear itself is on record.

The steps are different. The Russian Wikipedia article on the steps reports an Odessa researcher's view that the shooting there is an invention "from start to finish". Roger Ebert also wrote that there was in fact no tsarist massacre on the steps, and that the scene is so strong that it is cited as if it had happened. That does not mean Odessa escaped bloodshed. The Times and the British consul reported that troops fired on rioters in the unrest set off by the Potemkin's arrival. Soviet history inflated the dead to 1,260 or 1,500, the official count gave 123 killed and wounded, and the true toll is thought to have run into the hundreds. The film moved the city's catastrophe onto the steps and condensed it into one scene.

The ending is also changed. The "silent battle" in which the Potemkin passed through the squadron really happened, and the battleship Georgii Pobedonosets did join her. But that ship surrendered the same day, and after sailing from Constanța to Feodosia and back the Potemkin gave herself up to the Romanian authorities at Constanța on the eleventh day. The film stops at the moment of victory. Even the red flag at the masthead was, in fact, a signal flag for readiness to fire; it was read as the red banner of revolution only later.

Why was it cut and put back together?

The original negative was sold to the German firm Prometheus and re-edited by Phil Jutzi, and the version that went round the world moved the near-execution to the end. Britain banned the film until 1954. It was also cut at home. Trotsky's words in the epigraph were replaced in 1935 by a quotation from Lenin. The music varied too: pieces of Beethoven for the Soviet release, Edmund Meisel's violent score for Europe, Shostakovich for the 1976 version. A German-Russian restoration of 2005 brought back Eisenstein's structure and Meisel's score.