Charlie Chaplin's favorite movie

Rating: 8/10 (21 April 2009)

An unique achievement in cinema that continues to amaze even after all these years.
Eisenstein didn't reinvent the reel with his film, but combined existing film-making techniques that had been used individually by other silent film directors – such as montage, tracking shots and extreme close-ups – for maximum effect in telling the story of a mutiny at sea and subsequent mayhem on land.
In 1905, the armored cruiser Potemkin is returning to Odessa on the Black Sea from defeat in the Russian-Japanese war. The conditions on board are abysmal and the sailors rebel, eventually taking over the ship. The sympathetic people of Odessa help them by bringing them food, only to face a bloody reprisal from Tsarist troops in a famous but fictional sequence on the steps of the city leading down to the beach. Well, they do occasionally say that life's a beach.
Eisenstein's artful editing, which in addition to illustrating his dialectical editing theory of point, counterpoint, fusion, elecits tremendous empathy for the sailors and citizens of Odessa, sparking the viewer's sense of moral outrage. This power to galvanize audiences led to the film being banned by several governments, even (shudder to think!) the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Reportedly, this was Charlie Chaplin's favorite movie.