SOURCE: Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949, pp. 115-20, 163-66.

In the following essay, Eisenstein discusses Battleship Potemkin.

To return anew to the question of purity of film form, I can easily counter the usual objection that the craft of film diction and film expressiveness is very young as yet, and has no models for a classic tradition. It is even said that I find too much fault with the models of film form at our disposal, and manage with literary analogies alone. Many even consider it dubious that this "half-art" (and you would be surprised to know how many, in and out of films, still refer to the cinema in this way) deserves such a broad frame of reference.

Forgive me. But this is the way things are.

And yet our film language, though lacking its classics, possessed...