People crowd together in the sun. All smiles and waves. Joyous.
Pandemonium erupts. Panic hits like a shockwave as those assembled swivel and bolt, spilling down a seemingly infinite flight of steps.
Armed men appear at the crest, advancing with mechanical precision. We are pulled into the chaos, carried with the writhing mass as it surges downward. Images sear themselves on the retina. A child crushed underfoot. A mother cut down mid-stride.
An infant’s steel-framed pram rattling free, gathering speed as it hurtles downward. A woman’s glasses splinter, skewing across her bloodied face as her mouth stretches open in a soundless scream.
I’ve just described one of the most famous sequences in the history of film: the massacre of unarmed civilians on the steps of Odessa. Instantly recognisable and endlessly quoted, it is the centrepiece of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, which turns 100 this month.
A new front for cinema
Battleship Potemkin redrew the boundaries of cinema, both aesthetically and politically.
It is a dramatised retelling of a 1905 mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy – a key cresting point in the wave of profound social and political unrest that swept across the empire that year.
The first Russian revolution saw workers, peasants and soldiers rise up against their masters, driven by deep frustration with poverty, autocracy and military defeat.
Although the tsar remained in power, the discord forced him to concede limited reforms that fell far short of what had demanded.
The impetus for the historical mutiny on the Potemkin was a protest over rotten food rations. Eisenstein emphasises this in his film, lingering on stomach-churning close-ups of maggots crawling over spoiled meat.
When the sailors refuse to eat the putrid rations, they are accused of insubordination and lined up before a firing squad. The men refuse to gun down their comrades and the crew rises up, raising the red flag of international solidarity as they symbolically nail their colours to the mast.
A sailor called Vakulinchuk, who helped lead the uprising, is killed in the struggle. Sailing to Odessa, the crew lays his body out for public mourning and the mood in the city becomes increasingly volatile. Support for the sailors swells, and the authorities respond with lethal force, sending in troops and prompting the slaughter on the Odessa Steps.
The Potemkin fires on the city’s opera house in retaliation, where military leaders have gathered. Soon after, a squadron of loyal warships approaches to crush the revolt. The mutineers brace for battle, but the sailors on the other boats choose not to fire. They cheer the rebels and allow the Potemkin to pass in an act of comradeship.
At this point Eisenstein departs from the historical record: in reality, the 1905 mutiny was thwarted and the revolution suppressed.
Political myth-making
Battleship Potemkin was commissioned by the Soviet State to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the revolution.