By JOÃO LANARI BO*

the work of Sergei Eisenstein It crossed the 20th century as an indispensable reference for lovers of the seventh art – in fact, it was one of the decisive arguments for the characterization of cinema as a “seventh art”

Introduction

Talk about Battleship Potemkin is a risky undertaking – this is one of the most watched and talked about films in the history of cinema, without a doubt. The work of Sergei Eisenstein It spanned the 20th century as an indispensable reference for lovers of the seventh art – in fact, it was one of the decisive arguments for the characterization of cinema as a “seventh art”.

And now it celebrates its centenary in 2025, accumulating applause and admiration, but also censorship and bans, due to its blatantly political character. More than simply political, the film managed to express a political pathos, an expressive force in the face of a narrative that catapulted cinema to an unprecedented artistic level – and which continues to be powerful and effective in the digital contemporary world in which we live.

To enter this universe, nothing better than an eyewitness account of someone who witnessed the filming of the most famous scene in the movie, the massacre on the Odessa steps. Boris Schnaiderman, translator, essayist, writer, professor, literary critic, and one of the greatest, if not the greatest, experts on Russian literature in Brazil, was eight years old and lived with his family in Odessa.

In his words: “This (the filming) happened close to our arrival in Brazil. I was playing on the grand staircase in Odessa, near where we lived, and there was a completely unusual movement there that day. I saw some ladies in elegant early 20th century clothing and some gentlemen in ties and hats. That caught my attention. It was all very strange, and suddenly those gentlemen started throwing their hats in the air. A scene from The Battleship was then being filmed, something I only fully understood later. I believe I watched about three days of filming, very interested, but I don’t remember seeing Eisenstein. Later, already in Brazil, my parents took me to see the film at the cinema and I was amazed to recognize the scenes I saw on the staircase.”

Boris Schnaiderman was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution, in a small town in Ukraine, but soon after his family moved to Odessa, due to the period of great persecution of Jews in Ucrania. They were very assimilated into Russian culture, the language spoken at home was Russian.

The sequence at the heart of the film, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, took two weeks to film. According to Maxim Strauch, an actor and collaborator of Eisenstein, it was from a drawing of another filming on the steps, published in the French newspaper L'Illustration, that the filmmaker got the idea for the sequence – which was not a real event, and did not happen in 1905. It was a (brilliant) dramatization also constructed with the help of childhood memories of a similar incident in Riga, where Eisenstein was born.

These arrangements – iconographic reference, recovery of (almost) unconscious memories, recreation of the event – ​​are one of the trademarks of Eisenstan's aesthetic proposal. They often result in such efficient imagery constructions that they end up being confused with reality. For many spectators, the massacre, due to its symbolic charge, actually happened.

Sergei Eisenstein was 27 years old at the time of filming.

Order – celebration of the 1905 Revolution

“Battleship Potemkin,” like virtually all of Eisenstein’s films, was commissioned by the government. It was conceived as one episode in a series of films celebrating the anniversary of the revolutionary events of 1905, under the general title “The Year 1905.” On March 17, 1925—just over 100 years ago—a government commission was established to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 uprising, which was seen as a harbinger of the 1917 revolution.

The Commission was composed of prestigious figures: chaired by the People's Commissar for Education and Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a friend of Lenin and a renowned intellectual, it included Kazimir Malevich, the great Suprematist artist; Vsevolod Meyerhold, the innovative theater director whom Eisenstein later referred to as "my spiritual father"; Valerian Pletniov, representing the proletarian culture movement, Proletkult; Kirill Shutko, from the Party's Agitprop Department; Leonid Krasin, a member of the Party's Central Committee; and Vasili Mikhailov, First Secretary of the Party in Moscow.

Eisenstein had made his first feature film, The strike”, in 1924, within the framework of Proletkult – the artistic success of the film qualified him for the invitation. This does not mean that his talent was unanimously recognized. Lunacharsky expressed doubts about the film's unconventional narration, and Pletniov was on an explicit collision course with the filmmaker, leading him to leave Proletkult.

The issue was the authorship of the script The strike: the two disagreed over the attribution of authorship of the script to the Proletkult collective as a whole, and exchanged bitter correspondence on the subject. Pletniov was of the opinion that only a proletarian could give adequate expression to the proletarian mentality, rejecting more daring experiments as bourgeois residue.

The project was extremely ambitious – the commission soon concluded that only one episode would be finished in time for the anniversary celebrations, on December 20, 1925, of the Potemkin events. Permission to begin was granted only in June 1925. Eisenstein, Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (author of the initial draft) and Grigori Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s assistant and future renowned filmmaker, worked on the script during the spring and summer of 1925. For this purpose, they went to a dacha outside Moscow shared by Nina’s husband Kirill Shutko and Malevich. The writer Isaak Babel also joined them.

Eisenstein later argued that he “had my own principled demands for the script: no central heroic characters, emphasis on the mass, on collective action, and so on.” Eisenstein’s “actors” were chosen according to the principles of “typology,” categorized on the basis of their common characteristics, especially whether they looked the part. “Mass cinema” was his way of referring to this principle, a broad and popular explanation of what he saw as his original contribution to the art of film, free from complex references to psychology, physiology, and Marxism.

Obviously this explanation implied an elaborate intellectual construction.

For example, commenting on the staircase sequence in a later article, Eisenstein wrote: “Take, for example, the scene in Potemkin in which the Cossacks slowly and deliberately descend the steps of the Odessa harbor, firing into the masses. Through a deliberate composition of the elements of limbs, steps, blood, people, we create an impression, but of what kind? The viewer is not immediately transported to the Odessa docks of 1905; but as the soldiers’ boots relentlessly march up the steps, the viewer involuntarily steps back, to escape the firing range. And when the panicked mother’s stroller rolls down the steps, the viewer convulsively clings to the cinema seat, to avoid falling into the sea.”

1905

In that year of 1905, in fact, the historical broth boiled over. The dysfunctions of imperial Russia were on an absurdly large scale, a veritable minefield. In 1861, an agrarian reform emancipated the peasants from serfdom and launched a program of land acquisition from their former masters, which was only half completed and generated countless conflicts. In the cities, the liberal policy intensified at the end of the XNUMXth century, especially for the industrial sector, rapidly expanded production, but faced financial crises and had to deal with an unprecedented social phenomenon in the country, the rise of the politicized urban proletariat.

In the peripheral regions where the Empire had branches and borders – Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, East Asia – it was increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to manage the ethnic polyphony and the impulses for autonomy. The unexpected defeat by Japan in an exhausting two-year war that ended in 1905 added to the international humiliation and the loss of influence in Korea and Manchuria. Finally, the emergence, throughout the 1917th century, of a formidable array of intellectuals of the most diverse hues – writers, political and social activists, thinkers, scientists, artists, poets – irrevocably accelerated the engine of history and led to the collapse of the Empire in XNUMX.

The 1905 revolution was a mass movement spread across the vast Russian territory, with different events more or less interconnected, but not necessarily progressing towards a common goal. A spark of uprising spontaneously sparked in various places and situations, to the despair of Lenin, who preached revolutionary professionalism as an indispensable condition for the success of the coup (for him, spontaneous revolution was amateurism). Unrest in the countryside, urban strikes and military mutinies – among them the one that gave rise to “Battleship Potemkin” – followed one another in a disjointed manner and ended up landing in the inept and obtuse hands of Tsar Nicholas II.

One of the triggers for the revolt occurred on January 22, 1905, when thousands of demonstrators, led by the priest Georgy Gapon, were killed or wounded in front of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, completely unarmed, asking the Tsar for bread and work. The episode – known as “Bloody Sunday” – was one of the poignant emblems of the sovereign’s absolute divorce from his people. Gapon, who managed to escape to Europe and was received by Lenin and Jean Jaurès, ended up revealing himself to be a police informant and was hanged by militants of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

The riots that occurred during 1905 played a major role in persuading Nicholas II to publish his October Manifesto, the major political development of the year's events. The sailors at the Kronstadt naval base had long been a source of radical dissent. On 27 June 1905, sailors on the battleship Potemkin protested against the supply of maggot-infested rotten meat, vividly depicted in Eisenstein's film.

The October Manifesto is the document that served as a precursor to the first Constitution of the Russian Empire, which was adopted the following year, in 1906. The Manifesto promised civil rights and elections for a parliament, the Duma, without whose approval no law would be enacted in the future.

Maturation, origins

Eisenstein watched the July 1917 unrest from the window of his mother's apartment in Petrograd. He had recently left Riga, the capital of Latvia, where he was born and lived with his father, an authoritarian personality and talented architect, to study civil engineering (and go to the theater). His parents' separation left a deep trauma on the couple's only son.

The riots spread to Nevsky Prospect, when Kronstadt sailors joined workers and many were shot – the scene is in his most ambitious film, “October”, of 1927, but Eisenstein did not witness it. Nor did he witness the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. In early 1918, he was called up by the Army as an engineering assistant and, when he could, he engaged in theatrical activities, designing sets and costumes for trains agitprop. One of the successful initiatives of the period immediately following the October Revolution of 1917 was the creation of five “agitation trains”, with sixteen to eighteen carriages, which set off across the convulsed country in the first years of the Revolution for the purpose of political propaganda, carrying films to be shown, leaflets, theater troupes, speakers and books.

He then managed to get a place to study Japanese in Moscow, but his proximity to the capital's cultural scene (from March 1918, the communists took the government to Moscow) led him to the theater, as a set designer and then as a director, already at Proletkult.

He soon became familiar with Meyerhold's biomechanics and Kulechov's cinematic experiments. In his first set design, for the play “The Mexican,” he moved the boxing ring, where the final act took place, from the stage to the audience; as a director, in “Are You Listening, Moscow,” he had the protagonists (a Count and his lover) enter the proscenium on a camel. In 1923, encouraged by friends, he decided to direct a cinematic interlude to include in the first play he directed, “The Wise Man.” The film – “Glumov's diary”, just over five minutes long – was conceived as a parody of Pathé's current newsreels, with acrobatics, clowns and urban climbers.

For Eisenstein, “theater was a form of psychological violence – verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator.” It had nothing to do, therefore, with naturalistic representation.

That year, brought by his friend Esfir Chub, Eisenstein participated in the re-edition for the Soviet market of Fritz Lang's film, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. This practice was common in the Soviet Union. He wrote new (and ideologically correct) subtitles, transforming Mabuse into a capitalist demon. He was excited by the possibilities of film editing revealed by the talented hands of the editor. He returned to Proletkult and proposed an eight-part series about the Bolshevik seizure of power, entitled “Towards Dictatorship” (of the proletariat, of course).

A new partner, from a recently nationalized production house, joined the project – a sign of the new favorable economic situation – which made it possible to carry out at least one episode of the initial project, “The strike”, his first artistic success. Mixing the constructivist manual of visual composition with the eccentric typography of situations and characters – the script included indications such as “a bull's eye floating in a worker's soup dissolves into the eye of a capitalist looking at the camera” – allowed the inexperienced and cultured director to create an unprecedented dynamic, cinematic and tragic version of the communist revolution, as suggested by one of his best biographies, written by Oksana Bulgakowa.

The main novelty was the treatment of the tragic – developed from the dramatic exploration of the dialectical tension between workers and the ruling class, culminating in the proletariat becoming aware of its strength to go on strike and reverse the oppressive situation.

A proletarian opera, with collective heroes cruelly decimated at the end.

Script, crew, locations

The powerful Goskino – the abbreviated name for the USSR State Committee for Cinematography – had allotted 250 days for filming with a cast of 20 people. In an interview in July 1925, Eisenstein noted that “the production of ‘The Year 1905’ (working title) was to be on a grand scale, like the German film ‘The Nibelungs”, by Friz Lang”.

The filming was originally planned to take place throughout the country, starting in Moscow with interior shots and close-ups. The main scene, of course, was to be shot in some coastal city. In early August 1925, Eisenstein traveled to Leningrad, the former imperial capital, St. Petersburg, to film with 700 extras the scenes of the general strike that led to the Tsar's Manifesto of October 17, 1905. However, it rained incessantly, the natural light was too weak for filming, and the lighting technology of the time (which included the use of naval searchlights) consumed so much energy that the entire city had to be regularly plunged into darkness.

Goskino director Mikhail Kapchinsky advised Eisenstein not to jeopardize the entire project by insisting on Leningrad, but to shoot in Odessa, in the south of the country, where the sun was constant and filming could begin with the “Potemkin” mutiny. The crew arrived on the shores of the Black Sea on August 24, 1925. Eisenstein’s assistant and longtime friend Maxim Strauch suggested using the Black Sea Fleet, whose ships were similar to the original “Potemkin.” When they arrived in Odessa, according to Strauch, they went straight to the staircase, without stopping for breakfast. Doubts were dispelled: Odessa would be the main location; the cinematic potential of the staircase definitely convinced Eisenstein and his collaborators.

Having secured the presence of Eduard Tisse in the cinematography, which was crucial to the film’s future success, the director began to select the actors. Not all the roles in “Potemkin” were played by amateurs who merely resembled the “type”. Two of Eisenstein’s colleagues in the Proletkult played the main roles: his closest assistant, Grigori Alexandrov, played the villainous officer Giliarovsky, while Alexander Antonov, on the other hand, played the heroic sailor Vakulinchuk. But for the most part, the “type” prevailed. The following advertisement appeared in one of the Odessa newspapers:

For filming the anniversary film “The Year 1905” (director S. Eisenstein), we need models with the following characteristics:

1 – Woman of approximately 27 years old, Jewish, brunette, tall, thin, witty.

2 – Man, between 30 and 40 years old, tall, broad-shouldered, physically strong, good-humoured and frank Russian face, an “uncle” figure like the German actor Emil Jannings.

3 – Male, height and age unimportant, average drunkard type, insolent facial expression, blond hair, defect in the arrangement of the eyes desirable (slight strabismus, eyes too far apart, etc.)

The advertisement indicates the level of detail with which Eisenstein defined his “types.” External appearance and behavioral profile were the criteria by which roles were filled, whether professional or amateur actors.

After filming the Odessa Steps massacre, the crew set off for Sevastopol, where the Black Sea Fleet was stationed, to film the shipboard scenes. The original battleship Potemkin had been decommissioned in 1919 and dismantled, but her sister ship, The Twelve Apostles, was still anchored in the Crimea. Unfortunately, she was being used to store mines, which severely limited the crew's scope for maneuver. For these reasons, only the upper deck sequences were filmed on The Twelve Apostles, while below deck filming took place on another ship, the Comintern, to avoid the danger of a fatal explosion.

An interesting fact: at one point during the riot, an Orthodox priest appears at the top of the stairs and raises his ornate cross: “Lord, reveal yourself to the unruly.” The priest’s appearance at this critical moment in the drama on the quarterdeck highlights the complicity of Russian Christianity with the Tsarist autocracy, in which the Orthodox Church had been monitored since the time of Peter the Great by a state department called the Holy Synod. But the legend that the priest was played by Eisenstein himself is not true: the role was in fact played by an unknown man, chosen simply because he represented the archetype of an old Russian priest, another example of Eisenstein’s principle of “typing.” The version gained relevance because there is a photograph of the director dressed as the priest, to show the “type” playing the role he was supposed to play.

Comments, images and montage

Sergei Eisenstein has often been described as a Renaissance artist. We know from Oksana Bulgakowa’s biography how he was impacted by his first reading of Freud’s classic study of Leonardo da Vinci, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memoir of His Childhood.” His intellectual curiosity and the research he did for each project are unparalleled in the world of cinema. Many commentators suggest that this trait suggests that the filmmaker’s artistic side outweighs his political side: perhaps this is the reason why Eisenstein remained a film scholar – he never joined the Party, by the way.

Of course, this does not mean “depoliticizing” his work; on the contrary, each gesture or framing always has a political meaning, aesthetically speaking. In the 1920s in the Soviet Union, a formidable reference that emerged was Constructivism, an avant-garde movement that influenced various artistic fields, from Vladimir Tatlin to Bauhaus, from Mayakovsky to Eisenstein, from Malevich to Rodchenko. In short, Constructivism abolished the idea that art existed separately from the everyday world: at the dawn of the 1917th century, it should be inspired by new modern techniques and materials with a view to building a socialist world. The term “constructivist art” was first introduced by Malevich to describe Rodchenko’s work in XNUMX.

In his 1934 article, “On the Purity of Cinematic Language,” Eisenstein analyzes the sequence preceding the massacre on the Odessa Steps as follows: “

To demonstrate the compositional interdependence of the plastic aspect of the alternating scenes, I deliberately chose a random example rather than a climactic scene: fourteen consecutive fragments of the scene preceding the shooting on the Odessa Steps. The scene in which the “good people of Odessa” (as the “Potemkin” sailors addressed their appeal to the population of Odessa) send boats with provisions alongside the mutinous warship.

Sending greetings is built on a distinct intersection between two themes:

1 The boats advance towards the warship.

2 The people of Odessa wave.

In the end, the two themes merge.

The composition is basically made up of two planes: depth and foreground.

The themes dominate alternately, advancing to the foreground and pushing each other into the background. The composition is constructed:

(1) in the plastic interaction between both planes (inside the shot)

(2) in the change of line and shape in each shot, shot by shot (through editing)”.

In the second case, the compositional play is formed from the interaction of the plastic impression of the previous plane in collision or interaction with the following plane. (Here, the analysis is carried out by purely spatial and linear sign. The rhythmic temporal relationship will be examined elsewhere.)

The director then examines each shot and its respective interaction in detail in terms of visual composition, in a total of 14 blocks, including sketches for each main shot in each block.

And he concludes: “It must not be thought that both the filming and the editing of these sequences were done according to tables calculated a priori. Of course not. But the editing and interrelation of these fragments on the editing table were clearly dictated by the compositional requirements of the cinematographic form. These requirements dictated the selection of these fragments from among all those available. They established the regularity of the alternation between the shots. In fact, these fragments, if viewed solely from the point of view of the plot and the story, could be arranged in any combination. But the compositional movement through them would hardly prove, in that case, so regular in construction.

We should not complain about the complexity of this analysis. Compared to the analysis of literary and musical form, my analysis is still quite obvious and easy.”

This sequence serves as an idyllic interlude between the elegy of the mourning scenes for Vakulinchuk, a sailor killed in the Potemkin uprising, and the violence of the Odessa Steps sequence – it is the calm before the approaching storm. It also introduces us to some of the main characters who populate the Steps, such as the woman known as the “teacher” (thanks to Eisensteinian typology, she looks like one) and the disabled boy.

Dramatic structure

Eisenstein wrote in his diary on July 30, 1934:

“The Potemkin paradox lies in the fact that the successive stages in the epic development of events appear at the same time as elements in the correct sequence of actions, according to the classical model of tragedy: more precisely, in the fact that they were taken and heard from the events as they happened. It is a mistake to think that history is like this, or that 'history is inherently dramatic'. History is always dramatic, but in this case there is a huge change in our attitude towards history and it is only for this reason that the epic seemed simultaneously to be a 'classical tragedy'.”

Eisenstein used this classical structure to produce what became the classic example of revolutionary cinema.

The five parts of the epic are:

Part 1: Men and Maggots

Part 2: Drama on Deck

Part 3: A Call from the Dead

Part 4: The Odessa Steps

Part 5: Meeting the Squad.

Richard Taylor, one of the leading exegetes of Eisenstein's work, summarized the film's dramatic development as follows:

“Each part of the film moves from a passive to an active mood. In Part 1, the prevailing atmosphere of silent resistance moves into active resistance to the rotting flesh; in Part 2, the shift is from submission and acquiescence to the proposed execution of the mutiny; in Part 3, from mourning for the dead sailor to anger and mobilization; Part 4 evolves from peaceful demonstrations of solidarity among the townspeople and crew, through the massacre on the Odessa Steps to the battleship firing its cannons in anger at the military headquarters; the final part of the film moves from uncertainty and insecurity about the reaction of the approaching fleet to triumph and the flight to safety as the battleship sails through the fleet to the accompaniment of applause.

This structure ensures that each section of the film contains the tensions involved in the dialectical struggle between thesis and antithesis, which is resolved in a conclusive synthesis that advances the action to the next stage. Although the Odessa Steps sequence is the most famous section of Potemkin and constitutes its emotional and ideological core, it occurs towards the end, rather than at the temporal center of the film. But it does not occur at the end of the film: the emotional tragedy is followed by an apparent emotional triumph.”

The staircase sequence

The “Odessa Staircase” is a monumental staircase in the city of Odessa, Ukraine. It is considered the official entrance to the city for those coming from the Black Sea. It was here that Eisenstein filmed the sequence that became part of cinema history – and which forms the heart of his film, “Battleship Potemkin”.

The staircase was renamed Potemkin in 1955 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the film. With the independence of Ukraine in 1992, the original name of Primorsky Stairs was reinstated, which is also the name of many streets in Odessa.

The width of the steps is 12,5 meters at the top, the steps gradually get wider as they descend and at the bottom the step is 21,5 meters wide. It is 142 meters long and, seen from below, it appears to be even longer, due to an optical illusion. There are 192 steps with 10 intermediate landings. Its design is such that an observer at the top of the stairs sees only the landings, not the steps, while from below only the steps can be seen.

The physical description of the staircase is in itself an analysis of cinematic composition. All of these aspects, in particular the natural steepness of the staircase itself, were highlighted in Eisenstein’s editing in order to provoke in the viewer a “pathetic emotion” regarding the Tsar’s repressive violence. The citizens of Odessa gather on the Potemkin Steps to salute and show their support for the mutineers aboard the warship. Soon, a group of soldiers materialize at the top of the stairs and begin shooting innocent men, women, and children, descending the stairs in military formation as they massacre the fleeing crowd.

The scenes are articulated through constant changes of pace, from long, drawn-out sequences to quick takes, thus keeping viewers out of their perceptual comfort zone. The direction of the camera movement and the crowd also varies, emphasizing the conflict between the images, between close-ups and diagonal shots, between the stupor and despair of the population. The conflict also permeates each individual shot, such as the boy's body sprawled out, perpendicular to the shadows of the steps.

Such a montage strategy reinforces the disorientation and chaos of what is happening. Nevertheless, the gravity caused by the steepness of the staircase is still present, reinforcing a visual sense of the massacre taking place on the screen. Contrary movements – such as the desperate mother who moves away from her child's stroller and heads towards the repressive rifles – interrupt the flow, but are quickly overcome. And the stroller rolls down the steps, abandoned.

The sequence ends with the warship responding to the massacre by firing on the city. The rapid assembly of the three lion statues – in quick succession, as if they were alive and reacting to the conflict – concludes the block. The lion is sleeping, awake and roaring, in the same movement, now action and reaction, therefore the idea of ​​transformation.

“Battleship Potemkin” – and especially the staircase sequence – caused an unprecedented shock in the audience due to its scenes of graphic violence, which still have an impact today. For Eisenstein, it was about gaining the audience’s empathy and leading them to understand the context of the action through revolt. The shock provided by the manipulation of the editing would lift the veil of the ideological curtain that covers the reality from which the viewers are alienated.

In a recent article, Fernão Ramos examines the resource as follows:

“It is through pathetic emotion that we can penetrate social objectivity, led by the hand that constructs, as representation, the shock that intrinsically composes the structure of synthesis that crowns the Marxist dialectic of history. This must also move the particular in the revolutionary work of art. From the particular to the general, from the general to the particular, it is the conception of the same great dialectical movement that generates the cosmos and history.

The concept of ideology, as a veil of thought that prevents a full encounter with the external object covered in reification (a moment dear to Marxist reflection), occupies a central place here. A place that reveals its position when it is deconstructed by the can-opener of empathy in the dialectical leap of emotions raised by the clash between planes and, more than that, by the extreme pathos itself, constructed in the leaps of this clash. It is in the movement of the qualitative leap of the dialectic of emotions, up to the dimension of the outside-of-the-self, that the new enlightened consciousness of Eisenstein's pathetic constructivism germinates, if we can call it that. It is through the pathetic that the consciousness of dereified practical experience opens up, ready for engagement.”

Never-before-seen scenes of violence, reactions

The Odessa staircase sequence, with a dramatized violence never before seen in cinema, was assembled with contradictory flows of ascending and descending movements, dissonant rhythms of solutions for each of the shots and a spatial ordering that reinforces the authority and arbitrariness of the repressive authority. But Eisenstein's sophistication did not achieve the success with the public expected at the time of its release in Moscow.

The initial screening was scheduled for December 21, 1925, one day before the twentieth anniversary of the start of the 1905 Revolution, known as “Cursed Sunday.” The final phase of production, between Moscow and Odessa, was, as expected, a real whirlwind: restrictions of all kinds convinced everyone, the director and Goskino, that the film should focus on the mutiny on the battleship. Less than a month before its premiere, “The Year 1905,” the title of the original script, finally became “Battleship Potemkin.”

In the last three weeks before the premiere, Eisenstein transformed more than 4.500 meters of film into the final version, which was about 1.850 meters long. While Tisse was loading the first reels for the screening at the Bolshoi, Eisenstein was still gluing the last reels in the editing room, so Alexandrov had to transport them to the theater on his motorcycle. The director called the first performance a “miracle at the Bolshoi Theater.”

On January 18, 1926, Potemkin premiered in two theaters in central Moscow, the Metropolis and the Art Theater, the latter also known as the First Goskino Theater. Both theaters were decorated as warships, and the entire staff wore naval uniforms. From January 19, a dozen more theaters showed the film, hailed by Pravda as the pride of Soviet cinema. At the same time, the American film Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was released in Moscow.

According to historians, box office statistics are confusing, but on February 16, Potemkin was pulled from the theaters, while Robin Hood remained until the summer. This was a relatively common occurrence in the 1920s: canonical Soviet films from cinematheques were poorly received by audiences not only compared to imported films, but also compared to popular Soviet productions of the period. In the USSR, the biggest hit of the decade was The Wedding of the Bear, also from 1925, directed by actor Konstantin Eggert and veteran Gardin based on a play by Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education and Culture. The plot, with romantic overtones, features a young nobleman who is half-man and half-bear, in the vein of werewolves. Eisenstein and engaged critics abhorred the film, considering it a spurious reproduction of imported bourgeois cinema, in a word, reactionary.

“Battleship Potemkin” seems to have fared better in the workers’ theater circuit, where the facilities were simpler and the ticket prices were lower. But in commercial theaters, where people had to pay more for their tickets, it struggled. It ran for a shorter time than its predecessor, “The Strike.”

The reactions in the Soviet press were generally euphoric. But among friends and film people they were ambiguous. In March 1926, Dziga Vertov delivered a violent speech against Eisenstein at the ARK (Association of Revolutionary Cinematography) – he had already accused Eisenstein of copying the procedures of his Cine-Eye group. The response came quickly: “Instead of the cine-eye, we need the cine-fist,” wrote the director of Potemkin.

Lunacharsky, a supporter of linear narratives, found the film vague, “plotless”. In a debate at ARK, the constructivist activist Aleksei Gan judged that Eisenstein had not focused on the process, as would be expected of a true constructivist, producing an “eclectic result”. Kulechov saw no special merits in the editing, refusing to admit that Eisenstein had radically deepened his own notions of editing. Abram Room, a psychiatrist who was involved in Meyerhold’s group and later in filmmaking, denied artistic qualities to the film, for him, “incapable of dealing with the lives of human beings”.

In Berlin, things were different. Potemkin was first shown in the German capital on January 21, 1926, three days after its release in Moscow, at a ceremony dedicated to the memory of Lenin, who had died two years earlier. The event was organized by Willi Munzenberg, the leading German communist organizer and propagandist – and the repercussion was immediate. The audience was made up of workers and left-wing intellectuals. In March, it premiered in theaters and quickly received a huge response wherever it was shown, especially among artists and intellectuals.

“Battleship Potemkin” became a cultural landmark in the German capital, impressing figures such as Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Eisenstein and Tisse traveled to Germany to participate in debates and meetings. Munzenberg set up a company, Prometheus-Film, specifically to obtain German distribution rights for the film from the Soviet film authorities – from which he purchased the negative. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, by then not only the “sweetheart of America” but also of Soviet Russia, also saw the film and were thrilled with Potemkin.

The German Communist Party newspaper, “Die Rote Fahne,” reported:

“Fairbanks said that ‘Battleship Potemkin is the most powerful and profound experience of my life,’ while Mary Pickford made excuses because she was in no condition to say anything. The film had made such a strong impression that she was in tears.”

The film's international run was a succession of accolades. Chaplin called it "the greatest film in the world". Hollywood producer David O. Selznick described Potemkin as "unquestionably one of the greatest films ever made, its vivid and realistic reproduction of a piece of history far more interesting than any fictional film; and this is simply due to the genius of its production and direction".

Censorship and canonization

“Battleship Potemkin” came to light at a political crossroads. The initial version included two quotes from Leon Trotsky’s book “1905,” which read: “The spirit of revolt swept the land” and “A mysterious and tremendous process was taking place in countless hearts.”

By 1925, Trotsky was already at odds with Stalin. He was expelled from the Party in 1927 and sent into internal exile in 1928, which was soon transformed into external exile. In place of his assertion, an excerpt from Lenin was used: “Revolution is the only legitimate, egalitarian and effective war. It was in Russia that this war was declared and started.” In the images, a storm is brewing on the horizon; revolution is imminent.

Enthroned by cinematheques and film lovers in every country where it has been shown, “Battleship Potemkin” is the high point of the group of films that have gone down in history as “Soviet revolutionary cinema” – a package of brilliant films produced in the 1920s, canonized in a mythology that makes them almost timeless. Many of the images that we assume to be authentic of the Revolution in Petrograd (the name given to St. Petersburg at the beginning of the war in 1914) in October 1917 are artificial, idealized ten years later by astute eyes as those of Eisenstein and Pudóvkin.

If Potemkin excited many audiences, it also managed to provoke anxiety and fear, and ultimately censorship. In Germany, where its brilliant international career began, it was the subject of intense controversy, criticized by the military and right-wing politicians, leading to arbitrary cuts of the film before its release. In England, France and the United States, due to similar concerns about the potential for outrage, it spent seasons on the censors' shelves.

In Brazil, it was censored during the military dictatorship due to its political content, especially due to its potential to instigate revolt and rebellion among Brazilian soldiers and sailors. It was banned from showing for about 16 years, but was shown again in commercial circuits in 1980.

“Battleship Potemkin” was seen and appreciated by the “fuzinautas”, as the members of the Brazilian Association of Sailors and Marines (AMFNB) were known, who a few days later led the “Sailors’ Revolt” from March 25 to 27, 1964. They were besieged at the Metalworkers’ Union, and the crisis spread to the Navy Arsenal and Navy ships. The outcome, negotiated by João Goulart’s government, had an impact on the military who carried out the coup d’état a few days later.

Despite its setbacks, Potemkin prevailed – it has been featured on countless lists of the best films of all time, not to mention the critical essays it has written in countless languages. The revolutionary context of the Soviet Union, always a fertile field for study, contributed to this achievement, but above all the exuberant personality of Sergei Eisenstein, an exceptional artist, one of the greatest of the 20th century.

Eisenstein died in 1948. He had just turned 50 years old.

*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar) [https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]

References

The work of Sergei Eisenstein, and in particular “Battleship Potemkin,” continues to be an inexhaustible source of analysis and reflection. Starting with the director himself, whose first two collections of essays, edited under the tireless care of Jay Leyda, were published in Brazil, “The Shape of Film” and “The Sense of Film,” both by Zahar.

Also published by Brazilian publishers, more recently were “Immoral Memoirs; an autobiography”, by Companhia das Letras, written two years before the filmmaker's death, and “Sergei Eisenstein: Notes for a general history of cinema”, by Azougue, a compilation of pedagogical texts from the last years of his life.

Fernão Ramos' quote was taken from his thought-provoking essay, “The Odessa Steps”, published on 13/3/2022 on the website “A Terra é Redonda”.

The book I wrote, “Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets”, published by Bazar do Tempo, was also consulted.

It would be an impossible task to list the extensive bibliography on Eisenstein. For this article, two fundamental references were used above all:

• "The Battleship Potemkin: the film companion“, by Richard Taylor (IB Tauris, 2001, London) – Taylor is a profound connoisseur of Soviet cinema, and in this small volume he condenses an insightful analysis of the film with a detailed description of the context of its production and reception. The quotations from Eisenstein are taken from his meticulous research.
• "Serguei Eisenstein: A Biography“, by Oksana Bulgakowa (Potemkin Press, 2002, Berlin and San Francisco) – A detailed and dynamic biographical text that complements the rich bibliography on the director and engages with Eisenstein’s incredible and diverse intellectual production. A revelation, even for connoisseurs.

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