Comment on Battleship Potemkin – review

A revolutionary film in form, in political purpose and in subject matter, Eisenstein's 1925 Soviet classic focuses on a naval mutiny in the Black Sea during the abortive 1905 revolution. This great 20th-century icon is up there with Guernica, the work of another communist maverick who put his art at the service of the revolution, though unlike Eisenstein Picasso was never disciplined by anyone resembling Stalin and his philistine cultural commissars.The film's 75 minute duration is composed of 1,400 takes and is the precise model of its innovatory director's theory of montage.