Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein made this in 1925 to prove that editing alone could be a language. Three separate lion statues at the Vorontsov Palace, one sleeping, one waking, one rising, are cut back to back so that stone appears to stand up. An entire uprising is expressed in three frames. The Odessa Steps sequence is among the most imitated passages in cinema, and no massacre happened there as shown. Riots did break out in the city after the battleship arrived and troops did fire on crowds, with The Times and British officials reporting hundreds dead. The line of soldiers descending the steps in daylight in methodical step was Eisenstein's invention. The bans say something about how dangerous it was considered. Britain kept it out longer than any film in the country's history, until 1954, and it carried an X certificate until 1987. Nazi Germany never formally banned it, but Himmler forbade SS members from attending. In the Soviet Union the Trotsky prologue was later swapped for quotations from Lenin. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair poll it was voted the greatest film ever made. Pet Shop Boys wrote a new score in 2004. Who it is for: anyone who wants to watch a film language being invented. Who it is not for: viewers who need individual characters. The protagonist here is a crowd.