Battleship Potemkin
Made: 1926
Banned: 1926-1954
Where?: UK
Sergei Eisenstein’s call to overthrow the ruling classes hit Europe at the one point in history when it looked like the workers might do just that.
Highlighting a brutally-repressed 1905 citywide revolt as the seed of the 1918 revolution, copies were burned by the French authorities. Elsewhere in Europe, prints were cut to end with Tsarist troops advancing on the peasants in the Odessa Steps massacre sequence, changing the message from revolution through solidarity to the futility of challenging authority. In America, it was banned because it gave “American sailors a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny.”
The film was particularly feared in Britain, which had ground to a halt during the General Strike a few months earlier. A ban prevented workers from seeing it but the middle classes were outraged when their viewings were also curtailed. Regular applications were made over the years, but even pleading from Eisenstein himself failed to convince the authorities.
Speaking of the director, he mocked the decrepitude of Britain’s censors in his autobiography: “One is blind and deals with silent films; another is deaf so gets the sound films; the third chose to die during the period that I was in London.”
At 28 years, battleship Potemkin’s ban remains the second longest in the history of British cinema.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.