Produced to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the film introduced the world to the talent of the twenty-seven-year-old Sergei Eisenstein. He gifted cinema an iconic work and revolutionized the seventh art, thanks largely to its singular and insistent use of montage, undoubtedly influenced by Russian Constructivism and Formalism.

The film's score was composed by Edmund Meisel in 1950, specifically for its German premiere.

"Potemkin" recounts the mutiny on the battleship anchored in the port of Odessa and the repression by Cossacks, who fired upon the crowd gathered on the harbor steps in solidarity with the sailors.

The scene on the steps, with the baby carriage tumbling down step by step, is perhaps one of the most studied and referenced in all of film history—for example, in Brian De Palma's famed "The Untouchables" and in "We All Loved Each Other So Much," where it is imitated by the Marxist film critic played by Satta Flores. It also stands as a prime example of the montage technique that contributed to the Russian director's fame.

"Battleship Potemkin" is also the story of mutilation, having been one of the most notorious cases of censorship in the 1920s and, in Europe, even beyond. The staircase sequence was restored to its original version because censorship had affected it as well.