Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin (1925) is Sergei Eisenstein's silent drama, free to watch online on iFILM. It reenacts what happened aboard a Russian warship in the summer of 1905, when a crew pushed past its breaking point over rotten food and brutal officers and seized the ship.

The film moves in five chapters, like acts of a play. Sailors refuse a maggot-ridden ration, the crackdown turns into open revolt, and the body of the dead ringleader is laid out on the Odessa harbor for the city to mourn. Then comes the sequence everyone knows: rifles advancing down a long flight of stone steps, the crowd scattering, a baby carriage rolling loose down the stairs. Filmmakers have been borrowing that scene for a hundred years.

Eisenstein made the picture for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 uprising and turned it into a working manual on editing, cutting images against each other to build rhythm where there are no words. It premiered in Moscow in December 1925 with a live Edmund Meisel score and has topped greatest-films-ever polls more than once. Start here if you want to see where modern film grammar came from. Stream Battleship Potemkin (1925) online on iFILM.