100 Years of Battleship Potemkin | Fascinating Fascism In Films, A Century On

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the most accomplished propaganda films ever made. For generations, it has been held up as a foundational text in understanding how cinema persuades. 

That this century-old silent film was among the titles the central government attempted to prevent the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) from screening this year is proof of its enduring power. The centre’s attempt to ban the screening of Battleship Potemkin, along with 18 other films, inadvertently reaffirmed the relevance of the film—a text that can still teach one to think critically about consuming art. 

This move by the Centre uncannily recalls Joseph Goebbels’ 1936 ban on art criticism in Nazi Germany—paradoxically amplifying its significance, just as the regime accelerated the production of totalitarian art in service of the National Socialist Party’s dangerous dystopian morality.

Thankfully the Kerala government took a mostly defiant stance, ordering the State Chalachitra Academy to go ahead with the screenings as scheduled. After protests, the Union Ministry approved 13 of the 19 films, which included Battleship Potemkin—the film that would change the language of cinema in the years to come.

Eisenstein was an innovator of form, which is why his work has withstood the scrutiny and test of times. His influence can be traced across the last hundred years of filmmaking, including popular Hindi cinema. The kinetic montage of protest, rage and romance in films like Chandrashekhar Narvekar's Tezaab (1988) owes a debt to Eisenstein’s understanding that movement, repetition and escalation could be political.

With Russian intertitles and orchestral music interspersed between its dramatic images, Battleship Potemkin has been screened in film schools, dissected in theory classes, quoted, parodied, and plagiarised across continents and political systems. Eisenstein’s theory and practice of montage reshaped cinema forever. The Odessa Steps sequence, endlessly referenced, is memorable because of its rhythm. The pram with a young child tumbling down the steps, the marching boots of the soldiers, the screaming faces, the rapid alternation between power and vulnerability—this was cinema discovering that editing could be the most powerful weapon in its arsenal.

The story of Battleship Potemkin itself was deliberately uncomplicated. Painting the authority figures with broad brushstrokes of oppressive evil and the rebellious workers with that of rousing revolution, Eisenstein ensured there was no confusion among viewers on who deserved our loathing and who was owed our sympathy and support. The sailors and workers were framed as righteous and incandescent with revolutionary zeal and in doing so, Eisenstein left no room for ambiguity. These are the same narrative strokes that continue to structure propaganda cinema today, including in Bollywood, where dissent is regularly demonised and power is aestheticised into muscular righteousness. 

In her essay Fascinating Fascism (1975), Susan Sontag was critical of the aestheticisation of fascism and the way Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s work started accruing admiration despite its ideological decrepitude. Sontag critiqued Riefenstahl’s films (especially Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938)) and also argued that defenders who call them aesthetic masterpieces are being duplicitously foolish. This is a lesson we continue to resist learning.

From Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) to Dhurandhar (2025)—both Aditya Dhar directorials catering to the biases of the saffron government—highly stylised technicality has triumphed over its core divisive messaging. I once asked a colleague what he thought of Uri’s technical aspects. Like most viewers, he was not able to separate form from content, thus unable to grasp the crucial argument Sontag was making: good propaganda is always technically sound. Its polish is what allows it to seduce and bypass skepticism. Like Battleship Potemkin, these films deploy clarity over complexity, affect over nuance. Learning to tell the difference is often the only thing standing between us and propaganda.

Bad propaganda films exist too, but they rarely leave a mark. They fail because they are poorly made, unable to engage even the audience they are designed for. Recent examples like Hamare Baarah (2024), The Bengal Files (2025), or The Taj Story (2025) feel less like cinema and more like rabid WhatsApp forwards—messages you can imagine being typed or forwarded by a neighbourhood uncle frothing with diabolic hatred. They lack cinematic intelligence. And ultimately, no amount of ideological vitriol can compensate for incompetence.

Battleship Potemkin endures because it is the opposite of that. It is propaganda executed with such formal brilliance that it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that cinema’s power lies not just in what it says, but in how well it says it. A hundred years later, Eisenstein’s film reminds us that the most effective propaganda does not announce itself as such. And perhaps that is exactly why, even now, some would rather we didn’t watch it at all.