The Odessa Steps Massacre Never Happened, but Eisenstein Made It the Most-Imitated Scene in Cinema

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was made on a tight Soviet deadline. The script was approved on June 4, 1925; the film had to be ready by the end of the year. He cut the planned eight-episode revolutionary anniversary cycle down to a single self-contained story about a 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship and shot it in roughly two months on location in Odessa.

The sequence everyone remembers is invented. There was a real Tsarist crackdown in Odessa in 1905, with hundreds killed, but most of the killing happened at night in city streets — there was no massacre on the long stone staircase from the city to the harbor. Eisenstein staged it anyway: a line of soldiers descending in lockstep, civilians falling, a woman shot in the eye, a baby carriage rolling down. He intercut images at a tempo nobody had used in narrative film before, and the scene became so visually authoritative that even now writers casually describe "the Odessa Steps massacre" as if it had occurred. Roger Ebert later wrote that the historical inaccuracy "scarcely diminishes the power of the scene."

The early film stock could not register the color red, which was a problem for a Soviet film about a revolution. Eisenstein hand-tinted 108 individual frames at the moment the mutineers raise their flag at the premiere, and the audience reportedly applauded each one. Potemkin won the top prize at Brussels' 1958 World's Fair as the greatest film of all time, was banned in the United Kingdom until 1954, and survived in Nazi Germany — Goebbels admired it openly — even as Himmler banned SS members from watching, in case they were converted.