Lessons With Eisenstein – Battleship Potemkin 1925

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Why this might not seem so easy

He may only have a relatively lean filmography, but Sergei M. Eisenstein is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of early cinema, a filmmaker and theorist whose legacy can still be felt today.

The world of silent Soviet cinema may be daunting enough without the added weight of Eisenstein’s exalted reputation as the ‘father of montage’. 

His ideas about how film editing techniques could be used to convey far more than narrative helped to shape the future of the medium. 

One of his most famous essays revolved around the five ‘methods of montage’, which described the different ways that shots could be compiled to achieve various outcomes (‘metric’, ‘rhythmic’, ‘tonal’, ‘overtonal’, ‘intellectual’). The effect of these ideas can be seen in the rapid cutting of modern action sequences, or the rhythmic edits of music videos.

The period in which Eisenstein was operating can be another potential barrier, both in terms of getting to grips with early cinema, and with regards to the overtly propagandist nature of his work, given that he was, despite international acclaim, producing films within the Soviet state system.

The best place to start – Battleship Potemkin

Three shots in Battleship Potemkin showing a lion appearing to awake

It may be the obvious choice, but it is the obvious choice for a reason. It’s one of the most renowned films in the history of the medium. 

It featured in the top 10 of Sight & Sound’s best films poll each decade until 2012, when it came in at number 11. It contains one of the most widely recognised and painstakingly analysed sequences of all time. The best – or perhaps, the only – place to start with Sergei Eisenstein is 1925’s Battleship Potemkin.

Originally banned in the UK due to the perceived power of its message, Eisenstein’s second feature film is a revolutionary epic in more ways than one. 

Following a theatrical five-act dramatic structure, its story follows the mutiny of the sailors of the eponymous vessel in 1905 and the subsequent, brutal response by Tsarist soldiers. 

That sequence, the massacre of civilians on the steps of Odessa, is the film’s landmark achievement, combining many of the director’s innovative editing techniques to craft a kinetic, tense, violent and deeply allegorical set piece.

For Eisenstein, and many of his contemporaries, the power of the edit allowed shots to be cut together to create brand new meaning that was not present in the original shots. Among the most famous examples of this are three successive shots of lion statues in different states of repose that appear to suggest the lion waking from its slumber – and, symbolically, the waking of the Soviet people to their oppression.

Unlike in Hollywood films, then and now, Eisenstein avoids focusing on a single, central protagonist in favour of creating a sense of a wider, cohesive populace. 

The use of new tools and ideas, still in their infancy, make Battleship Potemkin exciting to engage with as a historical text, particularly as it allows for just the kind of close analysis that Eisenstein himself was conducting on western cinema of the period.

However, it is not purely the mechanics of the method that make it such a wonderful film to revisit, but also their effect. 

Both the filmmaker, and the political actors behind the funding of his work, were hoping to inspire a visceral and emotional reaction in their audience, and as a result Battleship Potemkin remains as rousing and febrile now as it was almost 100 years ago.


Serge' Eisenstein was one of the world's greatest film directors, with such masterpieces to his credit as The Battleship Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible—a body of achievement unparalled in film history. 

Eisenstein was also an artist—teacher who considerthi teaching as important as film or stage directing. 

He developed the Moscow State Cinema institute's first complete and coherent program for teaching film direction, and influenced some of the finest Soviet and foreign directors, 

A class with Eisenstein was an extraordinary experience, a joint voyage of discovery of truths which became stamped forever in his pupils' minds. 

Vladimir Nizhny was one such pupil, and it is his careful and copious notes, together with the complete short-hand records of Eisenstein's classes, that form the basis for this book. 

Reproduced in their entirety are four important lessons—one directional solution, mise-en-scene break-up into shots, and mise-en-shots as well as nearly eighty of the blackboard drawings that accompanied the class-room discussions, and Eisenstein's "Programme for Teaching." 

In Lessons With Eisenstein, Nizhny, immeasurably aided by the translator-editors Ivor Montagu and Jay Leyda, successfully conveys the great excitement and adven-ture of those unique explorations with the master.