People crowd together in the sun. All smiles and waves. Joyous.

Pandemonium erupts. Panic hits like a shockwave as those assembled swivel and bolt, spilling down a seemingly infinite flight of steps.

Armed men appear at the crest, advancing with mechanical precision. We are pulled into the chaos, carried with the writhing mass as it surges downward. Images sear themselves on the retina. A child crushed underfoot. A mother cut down mid-stride.

An infant’s steel-framed pram rattling free, gathering speed as it hurtles downward. A woman’s glasses splinter, skewing across her bloodied face as her mouth stretches open in a soundless scream.

I’ve just described one of the most famous sequences in the history of film: the massacre of unarmed civilians on the steps of Odessa. Instantly recognisable and endlessly quoted, it is the centrepiece of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, which turns 100 this month.

Battleship Potemkin redrew the boundaries of cinema, both aesthetically and politically.

It is a dramatised retelling of a 1905 mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy – a key cresting point in the wave of profound social and political unrest that swept across the empire that year.

The first Russian revolution saw workers, peasants and soldiers rise up against their masters, driven by deep frustration with poverty, autocracy and........

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