"I am a civil engineer and a mathematician … I approach the making of a motion picture in much the same way as I would the equipment of a poultry farm or the installation of a water system." Eisenstein, like many of his Soviet contemporaries, professed an infatuation with mechanization, efficiency, and motion, and it's telling that his most celebrated film has no real human "characters" in a conventional dramatic sense. He depicts a 1905 mutiny aboard a warship in the Black Sea, but treats the people like cogs in a larger system. (Cogs deserving of dignity, mind you!) The film itself is often overshadowed by the long tail of its influence and the endless analysis of its electrifying montage technique, but to experience Battleship Potemkin today is to be struck by an idiosyncratic quality that hoists the movie out of the world of film textbooks. Here is a highly personal work made by an obsessive 27-year-old, rightly convinced he was altering the course of world cinema. The strange rhythms of the montage still jar, and the smashing together of disparate images can still perplex. Legend has it Eisenstein was frantically editing his masterpiece until minutes before the premiere, cutting out frames and affixing splices with his own saliva. The print we'll show is considerably more stable, but is no less a living, breathing fusillade of ideas and images that pulse with urgency, right down to the 108 frames of a fluttering flag colored by hand. - Text courtesy of the Chicago Film Society
 

35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection