The soviet silent cinema of the 1920s represented a great creative moment in the history of cinema, and Battleship Potemkin is often regarded as its supreme achievement. In rendering his account of the 1905 Black Sea mutiny and the sympathetic response it received from the people of Odessa, Eisenstein makes brilliant use of montage--the juxtaposition of individual shots—both to provide drama through subtle alterations of space and time and to create striking metaphoric relationships that bolster his political arguments. The film’s formal beauty is balanced by the stark power and humanity of its realist depiction of the suppression of an outraged populace.