Battleship Potemkin · reception & legacy

How Battleship Potemkin has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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.

Named by the director

Influences Sergei Eisenstein has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• 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.'