Battleship Potemkin

If The Rules of the Game is an evening party in a château, this is breakfast on a warship — the same story of a small closed society collapsing in a matter of days, and the same history of suppression: banned in Britain until 1954, then X-rated there until 1987.

Frost's Descent is about freezing — moisture setting into frost overnight, everything slowing and fixing in place. Eisenstein is the exact opposite: meaning is produced when two shots collide. One film keeps everything inside the frame; the other cuts everything apart and rebuilds it.

Put together, they are the two poles of film grammar: to cut, and not to cut.

1905 年，波将金号装甲巡洋舰停靠在敖德萨。水兵们发现配给的肉上爬满了蛆。舰长说，洗一洗就能吃。

有人不肯吃。舰长下令：把带头的人抓起来，就地枪决。

行刑队举枪，命令下达——枪没有响。

全片五幕：人与蛆、甲板上的戏剧、死者要求公道、敖德萨阶梯、独自面对舰队。

At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, a poll of critics named this 1925 silent film the greatest film ever made.

In Sight & Sound it placed 4th in the first poll (1952), stayed in the top ten for the next five editions, fell to 11th in 2012 and 54th in 2022.

What it actually changed was the status of editing. For Eisenstein, meaning is not inside a shot but between two shots: a face cut against a bowl of soup produces anger; three stone lions cut in sequence produce awakening. The method became known as montage and supplies half of film grammar.

100% on Rotten Tomatoes (51 reviews), 97 on Metacritic.

It was never a neutral film. Goebbels wrote after seeing it that it was a marvellous film without equal in cinema, and that anyone without firm political convictions could become a Bolshevik after watching it — which is its own testimony to the film's power.