Sightlines · reception
How Battleship Potemkin was received
1925 · Sergei Eisenstein · Battleship Potemkin on Sightlines
The arc
Hailed abroad almost instantly as proof cinema was an art form — while being banned for decades in Britain, France, and elsewhere as dangerous propaganda (the UK didn't fully clear it until the 1950s). It's spent most of the century since parked at or near the top of greatest-films-ever lists, including being voted the best film of all time at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.
What’s debated
The eternal cinephile fight: is it a thrilling masterpiece or eat-your-vegetables film-school homework — and can 'the greatest film ever made' also be state propaganda?
Its footprint
The Odessa Steps sequence — soldiers, screaming crowds, and a baby carriage bouncing down the stairs — may be the most parodied and homaged scene in cinema, restaged everywhere from De Palma's The Untouchables to Brazil to The Naked Gun 33⅓. Even people who've never seen the film have seen the pram.
Where it stands
The definitive 'you must have seen this' film — a fixture of every syllabus and all-time list for a hundred years, less a cult object than the canon's foundation stone.
Did you know? Joseph Goebbels admired the film so much he publicly urged German filmmakers to make a Nazi 'Potemkin' — praising it as proof that conviction-filled cinema could convert audiences. A furious Eisenstein responded with an open letter telling him, in effect, to keep his hands off it.
Named by the director
- D.W. Griffith — Eisenstein repeatedly and publicly credited Griffith as the wellspring of the montage technique — most famously in his essay 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.'