Battleship Potemkin

I'm just gonna take over.

Um, I showed Battleship Potemkin in the Cary Theater for Silent Movie Day.

Oh, wow.

Dang.

He was probably 90 when we met him.

He did publicity for the black and white movie, The Battleship Potemkin.

[laughs]

Sergei Eisenstein.

Citizen Kane wouldn't be the same without Caligari.

But the movie that I chose is Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

And the reason is... fully a film school movie like if you go to film school you're gonna they're gonna make you watch this you're gonna watch the Potemkin steps sequence over and over and over again because it's so important but Eisenstein is both the director and the film theorist of who really establishes what the idea of the montage, that it isn't just that I'm showing you this, but I am showing you this in conjunction with this.

And those two images create together, create some magic, some power, some emotional resonance that didn't exist without that particular juxtaposition.

And that is the core of filmmaking.

And that is where the energy is coming from.

Yeah.

I remember watching Battleship Potemkin because I mean, you know, when you start to get into films, really get into films, you go and read like all these books about what are the greatest movies to watch.

My big thing that I was in a published journal I got on was Soviet montage theory and dialectics.

Stuff like October, Storm Over Asia, Man With A Movie Camera, obviously Battleship Potemkin.

There's things like The Death Ray, Kino Ai, you know, all that kind of stuff.

I did a big research project on, when we get into what got me in the film, I'm a huge Giallo fan, I did a whole research project on Dario Argento and Dario Nicolodi's collaborative and fraught filmography, basically tracking their relationship and collaboration from the start of their career together with Deep Red all the way through to Opera where they ended, and also Luigi Cosi's The Black Cat from 1989, which I think caps off what happened to them um i did loads of other things everything from german expressionism new african cinema japanese new wave obviously which i didn't talk uh czech new wave uh tyrianese new cinema um then like in film analysis methods we did like shot scale and screen space case studies and editing case studies, allegory and metaphor case studies, we did topics on things like VHS and video nasties, physical media, things like widescreen ratios, transition, I did a whole bunch of stuff on like world cinema as well, film as theory, gothic horror, film criticism, I did a Pedro Almeida study, post-colonial cinema,

cool.

The Russian movie is Battleship Potemkin.

Yeah.

Thanks.

I'm publishing this minisode on the 22nd of September, 2026, which means if you're listening to this on the day of release, we're just a week out from Silent Movie Day, which takes place every year on the 29th of September.

If you're a long-time listener, you'll already know that it was a film from the silent era, namely Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, that got me into movie podcasting in the first place.

I recorded that episode way back in 2016, which means that this year I'm celebrating my 10th anniversary as a podcaster.

You can find that episode elsewhere on the feed for this show.

Oh, Battleship Galactica.

Battleship Potemkin.

Starship Potemkin.

And then, of course, Robocop, right? Which is literally policing changes this man's body.