Sergei Eisenstein – 100 Years of "Potemkin"

December 11, 2025 to January 5, 2026

On December 21, 1925, Sergei Eisenstein's trailblazing work Battleship Potemkin premiered as the official film commemorating the 1905 Russian Revolution. The famous scene on the port steps of Odessa became an especially emblematic and oft-quoted image. It is also representative of Eisenstein's ideas about film, it is however barely the tip of the iceberg in the work of a polymath who sought to combine in cinema influences from all the arts as well as religion, anthropology, and psychology, and in doing so creating a decisive basis for the medium's further development.
 
Eisenstein has also remained a central figure for the Film Museum. As early as 1969, we dedicated a retrospective to him and last showed his complete works in 2006. We have collected nearly all of his work and will again put our holdings on display for the 100th anniversary of Battleship Potemkin: We will present all of Eisenstein's features as well as rare short films, incomplete works, and other rarities. (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt)

Piano accompaniment by Elaine Brennan and Gerhard Gruber