The Red Flag is red (hand-tinted by Kenneth Anger) in this stunning print of Potemkin. Instructed to make a film to commemorate the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein chose to base his script on the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet and the ensuing involvement of the people of Odessa. The sailors' revolt against being served maggoty meat is both premise and metaphor for a tale told virtually entirely through images and their rhythmic juxtaposition and repetition, the purest cinema imaginable. Eisenstein's direction and Edouard Tisse's photography exude a sculptor's iron control, yet even today we are caught off guard by a certain warmth in Potemkin, and perhaps that is its real triumph-as historian Georges Sadoul wrote, "not only the perfection of its form, but the humanitarianism and enthusiasm that impregnated its revolutionary subject."