Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin in 1925 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. Commissioned by the Soviet state and shot largely on location in Odessa, the film was completed when Eisenstein was twenty-seven. It was banned at various points in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Goebbels famously called it a marvellous film without equal and demanded a Nazi equivalent) and remained continuously influential despite its overt propagandistic intent.

The film unfolds in five acts: the sailors' revolt over rancid meat, the death of the mutiny's leader Vakulinchuk, the citizens of Odessa mourning at the harbour, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, and the squadron's confrontation with the Potemkin at sea. The Odessa Steps sequence (the runaway pram, the Cossacks descending in lockstep, the woman shot in the eye) became the most-quoted set piece in cinema history, referenced everywhere from The Untouchables to The Naked Gun.

Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage (that meaning is generated by the collision of shots, not within them) was developed and proven in the editing of this film. Potemkin remains in the upper reaches of the Sight & Sound poll a century after its release, regularly cited alongside Citizen Kane and Vertigo as a foundational work for the medium itself.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that taught cinema to think in its own grammar. Almost a century old, formally daring, politically uncomfortable, and still capable of affecting an audience that has never seen a silent film.