In 1925, a Soviet propaganda film became so psychologically potent that Joseph Goebbels praised it as a blueprint while Heinrich Himmler banned SS members from seeing it, and Britain kept it illegal until 1954. The irony is that its most famous scene, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, never happened as depicted. This episode explores how 27-year-old Sergei Eisenstein, handed an eight-part epic about the 1905 Revolution, was forced by Leningrad fog and an impossible deadline to abandon nearly everything and expand a single fragment about a naval mutiny into Battleship Potemkin.

The conversation walks through the production nightmares, including a title ship already being scrapped and a scuttled battleship used for exterior shots, then digs into the mechanics of Soviet montage theory. It covers the Kuleshov effect, the roaring stone lions, th ...