Review of Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Stuart K — 29 Mar 2014

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), The General Line (1929) and Ivan The Terrible (1944-46)), this silent war film was based on true events that occured in 1905.

It is a hard film to watch, but you can see what films it went on to influence and why film critics swear by this film, but that's made it feel less special than it is. The film is told in 5 episodes, 'Men and Maggots', where the crew of the Battleship Potemkin live in squalid conditions and are given rancid food, 'Drama on Deck' shows the crew having lost patience with the conditions, and leading a mutiny against their leader Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov).

In 'A Dead Man Calls for Justice', the people of Odessa mourn over the death of Vakulinchuk, then in 'The Odessa Staircase', Tsarist soldiers turn on the people of Odessa, causing a bloody massacre.

Then in 'The Rendez-Vous with the Squadron', another battleship is sent to intercept the Potemkin, only for both ships to join together in mutiny. The film requires a knowledge of what was going on in Russia at the time, it looks good but it's heavy going and it's not one you can watch again in a hurry.

It was banned for nearly 30 years in the UK for "inflammatory subtitles and Bolshevist Propaganda, which just goes to show how paranoid people were against Communism back then.