The twentieth anniversary of the first Russian Revolution was meant to be the occasion for a grand cinematic epic — from the barricades of St. Petersburg to the waves of the Black Sea. Instead, it became a film about maggots in meat, a tarpaulin thrown over the condemned, and a baby carriage rolling down the steps. The path from one conception to the other is a story of how constraint proved more precise than any grand scale.
Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko is a figure whom film mythology habitually pushes into the background. And yet it was she who, by 1925, had prepared a screenplay outline under the working title “The Year 1905”: a multi-episode structure conceived as a screen chronicle of the entire revolution. St. Petersburg and Bloody Sunday, factory strikes, rural unrest, naval mutinies, armed clashes — all of it was meant to fit into a single film, working as a mosaic: dozens of storylines, dozens of locations, dozens of destinies. Agadzhanova-Shutko was not some incidental “supplier of plot,” but a professional screenwriter and an old Bolshevik whose party record and personal experience of revolutionary work gave her the right to speak of 1905 in the first person. Her idea grew out of a specific political commission — the anniversary committee under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee wanted a large-scale cinematic canvas for the date — but the screenplay outline possessed its own architecture, its own logic for interweaving episodes.
Early Soviet cinema generally worked differently from the Hollywood model of “one director — one film.” The screenplay was approved by official bodies, the director was brought into an existing project, the cinematographer had enormous independence in visual decisions, and production answered to the studio and its plans. Agadzhanova-Shutko remained in the film’s credits as the screenwriter — and that was neither a formality nor a courtesy. Her text determined the starting point, the thematic field, the very idea of telling the story of 1905 through the montage of many episodes. The fact that Eisenstein radically reworked this material does not erase the fact that without her blueprint, there would have been no foundation on which Battleship Potemkin could rise.
After the success of Strike (1925), Eisenstein was the obvious candidate for the anniversary project — young, ambitious, already proven capable of handling crowd scenes and montage rhythm. Agadzhanova-Shutko’s screenplay was approved on June 4, 1925, and this is where the part of the story usually retold in a single sentence begins: “there wasn’t enough time.” But the mechanics of that compression deserve a slower examination.
The crew began work in Leningrad. They filmed strike episodes, rehearsed scenes on Sadovaya Street. Then the weather intervened — Leningrad fogs, unpredictable light, the short daylight hours of late autumn. For mid-twenties cinema, wholly dependent on natural light, this was no minor inconvenience but a production disaster. Film stock was expensive, deadlines were burning, and the anniversary date would not move. Eisenstein and his crew faced a choice: keep heroically filming a panorama of the entire year, risking the chance of finishing nothing at all — or focus on one episode that could be brought to the screen in time.
The choice fell on the Potemkin mutiny. Why that one? Partly for practical reasons: Odessa promised better weather and locations. Partly for dramatic ones: an uprising aboard a ship possessed an internal completeness that needed no artificial construction. A ship is already a ready-made unity of place. A rebellion over rotten meat is an intelligible, corporeal, physically palpable inciting incident. The shot at the Odessa Theater is a striking climax. The passage through the squadron is a finale with both tension and symbolism. Of all the episodes in Agadzhanova-Shutko’s screenplay, this one was the most cinematic in its compactness, and Eisenstein sensed it.
One technical fact personally fascinates me: by the time of filming, the battleship Knyaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky was already being scrapped. Filming it was impossible. In its place, the camera worked with the battleship Twelve Apostles — a vessel with a different history, different lines, a different fate. The interior scenes — the berths, the galley, the deck spaces — were shot aboard the cruiser Komintern. A film about one specific historical ship was assembled from fragments of other ships, like a collage.
This is montage thinking in the most literal sense. Eisenstein built his theory of montage by analogy with Japanese hieroglyphs: two simple signs joined together produce a third meaning, one contained in neither of them separately. The deck of the Twelve Apostles plus the berths of the Komintern — and the viewer sees the Potemkin, which never existed before the camera in reality. This principle runs through the entire film: every shot is an element in an equation, and the result arises in the viewer’s mind, not on the screen.
Eduard Tisse, the film’s cinematographer, was solving problems for which no standard tools existed in 1925. Mirrored reflectors to redirect light on location — a first for Soviet cinema. Sets of lenses for long shots and close-ups. And perhaps the most famous solution: to film the staircase sequence, Tisse built a mobile trolley-cart on wooden rails. The camera rode down the steps parallel with the crowd — a technique that, decades later, would be called a “dolly shot” and treated as part of cinema’s basic alphabet, but at the time it was a homemade contraption of planks and wheels.
There are almost no professional actors in the film. Eisenstein worked with the principle of the “type”: he did not need acting skill, but a face, a texture, a silhouette. The ship’s doctor, who inspects the maggot-ridden meat and declares it fit for consumption, was played by a man found among the stokers. The priest was portrayed by a gardener — apparently chosen for his beard and bearing. The sailors were played by ordinary people selected for their appearance, for how they held themselves within a group, for how their faces read in close-up.
This was a deliberate rejection of individual character psychology. Eisenstein was not telling the story of a single hero — he was constructing a composition of masses. The crowd on the steps, the line of sailors beneath the tarpaulin, the ranks of soldiers with rifles — each group functions as a single organism, and montage controls that organism’s rhythm. Eisenstein’s theoretical basis was eclectic and audacious: he drew simultaneously on Pavlovian reflexology (the montage shock as the viewer’s conditioned reflex) and Freudian psychoanalysis (symbolic images working on the subconscious level). The stone lions that “rise” through the montage of three statues — one lying down, one lifting itself, one standing — are pure Pavlovian reflex: the viewer “sees” movement that is not there because the brain completes the sequence.
It seems important to me that this method was not a director’s whim but a consequence of the production conditions of early Soviet cinema. There were few professional film actors, while the theater school produced acting that was too broad, too “projected to the gallery.” The type was at once an ideological choice (the people play themselves) and a practical solution (filming had to be fast, there was no time for rehearsals, faces were needed that worked without preparation).
The Potemkin Steps in Odessa — 192 steps, built in 1837–1841 to the design of Francesco Boffo — exist. The shootings of civilians in Odessa in June 1905 existed: clashes, casualties, pogroms are documented. But the mass shooting on the steps as a single, unified episode — ranks of soldiers methodically descending the stairs and firing at the fleeing crowd — is not documented. That does not mean Eisenstein “invented” the violence. He condensed scattered acts of repression into a single visual image of such force that the image supplanted historical reality.
A baby carriage rolling down the steps amid the bodies. A woman in pince-nez, one lens shattered. A boy trampled by the crowd. Each of these images is not a document but a symbolic detail, constructed with the precision of an engineering blueprint. Eisenstein edited the staircase scene so that time stretches within it: a descent that would physically take two or three minutes lasts incomparably longer on screen. Montage breaks chronology, forcing the viewer to live through the horror longer than it could physically last. It is a device that would be quoted for decades afterward — from Brian De Palma in The Untouchables to countless parodies — but in 1925 it was an invention made on wooden rails with a hand-cranked camera.
The division between fact and fiction is crucial here. The film does not lie about 1905 — the violence was real, the victims were real. But it creates a cinematic legend that lives by its own laws, and those laws are the laws of montage, rhythm, and close-up, not of historical chronicle. The name “Potemkin Steps” only became attached to the staircase in 1955 — for the fiftieth anniversary of the mutiny, largely thanks to the film’s fame — and today tourists take photographs there, recalling a scene that never occurred in the form Eisenstein showed it.
January 18, 1926, Moscow’s Khudozhestvenny Cinema. The film that was meant to become a panorama of an entire year reached the screen as the story of several days on one ship and in one city. Five parts, five acts: “Men and Maggots,” “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” “The Dead Man Calls Out,” “The Odessa Steps,” “Meeting the Squadron.” The structure is, essentially, a classical tragedy — with exposition, escalation, reversal, catastrophe, and resolution.
The anniversary committee received nothing like the film it had commissioned. Instead of a chronicle — a concentrate. Instead of geographic scope — one point on the map. Instead of dozens of storylines — a nameless mass and a nameless ship (the viewer remembers not a single character by name, and that is a deliberate choice). Agadzhanova-Shutko remained in the credits, while her screenplay The Year 1905 was never realized in full — its fate was that of a blueprint from which another building was constructed.
The central question for which this text was written: was the narrowing of scale a forced compromise or a creative breakthrough? The answer is probably that one does not exclude the other. Leningrad fog, compressed deadlines, lack of resources — all were real constraints that made it impossible to shoot The Year 1905. But Eisenstein did not merely “cut down” the material — he discovered that unity of place and action works more powerfully than panorama. The enclosed space of the ship, the vertical of the staircase, the horizontal of the sea — three coordinates within which montage could unfold at maximum density. The grand chronicle might have become a worthy anniversary film, shown at ceremonial meetings and forgotten. But Battleship Potemkin — a film assembled from other ships, acted by stokers and gardeners, filmed from a trolley made of planks — was already being called the greatest film of all time in 1958 — at the Brussels World’s Fair, where 117 experts from 26 countries put it in first place.
Agadzhanova-Shutko’s screenplay outline gave Eisenstein the territory in which he found his episode. Tisse gave him a camera capable of moving as cameras had never moved before. The Odessa Steps gave him a vertical he filled with people and horror. The fog in Leningrad gave him a constraint that became form. None of these elements would work without the others — and, bluntly, that is the nature of early Soviet cinema: collective production from which, at times, something emerges that is later attributed to a single name. The full screenplay of The Year 1905 remained an unrealized project, and no one will ever know what kind of film it might have become.