Battleship potemkin celebrities its 100th anniversary at VTIFF

Vintage Battleship Potemkin poster. 1925. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the film Battleship Potemkin, and as a result, VTIFF will be holding a special screening of the film on October 19th, 2025. The groundbreaking silent epic was used by its director, Sergei Eisenstein, to innovate and perfect one of cinema’s most foundational aspects, the montage. 

Originally commissioned 20 years after the 1905 Russian Revolution to honor the momentous occasion, Potemkin quickly transcended its propaganda roots. Seeing film not just as an outlet for storytelling but as a dialectic machine, Sergei, along with his Soviet contemporaries, created this cinematic revolution. Their theory that through the juxtaposition of two contrasting images next to each other doesn’t just tell a story but creates an entirely new meaning has become the bedrock of film as a language: the montage.  

The massacre on the Odessa Steps is the film’s most iconic moment, demonstrating its technique with such a visceral impact. Remaining one of the most influential sequences in the history of film, its kinetic chaos, rhythmic editing, and disturbing imagery all continue to strike the viewer with the same emotional force it did to those watching the film a century ago. Artists from all over the world and across different media have borrowed from the Eisenstein playbook, making it impossible to overstate the influence this film has had. Although a massive achievement at the time of its release, it laid out the groundwork for the future of filmmaking, regularly being ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. 

A century later, Eisenstein’s masterpiece still speaks through its images, having something new to say to this date, and that is why this screening is so important to VTIFF and its commitment to educating its community through film.