Battleship Potemkin at 100: Eisenstein's montage masterpiece

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin premiered on December 21, 1925 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, marking its centenary. The film dramatizes the real 1905 mutiny aboard the imperial Russian battleship Potemkin, set against the 1905 Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War. Its Odessa Steps sequence, featuring a baby carriage tumbling down the stairs, remains one of cinema's most iconic scenes. Eisenstein's theory of rhythmic montage, developed with Lev Kuleshov, manipulated audience emotion through rapid juxtaposition of images. The film was distributed internationally thanks to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1958, a Brussels jury of critics named it the greatest film of all time. Roger Ebert in 1998 called it a landmark of cinema history. Its influence extends across film—from Bertolucci's Partner to Coppola's The Godfather, De Palma's The Untouchables, Lucas's Star Wars Episode III, and Villeneuve's Dune—and into contemporary art, where Francis Bacon cited Eisenstein's imagery as a profound influence, particularly the broken glasses and silent scream of the nurse.