The movie Battleship Potemkin is said to be one of the best montage sequence movies ever made and when the movie was finished (1925) it got a lot of government attention and was banned by the bored of censorship. But when it was shown to the public in 1954 it was voted as one of the best movies in the history of cinema. But exactly, what made it such a controversial movie that at the time it had to be banned, and how did people react to the movie when they saw it?
Firstly to fully appreciate the movie, we need to travel back in history to understand how the government was run and how people lived. In the early 1900's Russian held a strong empire, the Bolshevik (majority), the everyday workers, combined with the soviets of the major cities of Russia fought against the Provisional Government. The revolution was followed by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, where the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was established and the Soviet Government was created.
English: Film poster for The Battleship Potemkin (...
The 142-metre-long (155 yards) Potemkin Stairs in ...
English: Monument to the crew of the Battleship Po...Many people were tired of the way things were run and they caused a huge revolution. Battleship Potemkin which was filmed in 1925 showed the part of what happened during the October revolution. Knowing about the revolution helps viewers now understand why this movie was so controversial. According to the book "Eisenstein: Three Films", "In spite of the Germans censors - or perhaps because their intense concern with this unclassifiable film - Berlin workers and intellectuals so filled the small cinema where it was shown that the Soviet film office withdrew the film, to remove the "objectionable" scenes." (J.Leyda 45). The movie completely took the side of the working class and showed the negative side of the government. The movie was banned from all public viewing and...