In Radu Jude’s short film The Potemkinists (2022), the enfant terrible of the Romanian New Wave takes aim at a little known fact of his nation’s history: that following their successful mutiny, the Soviet heroes of the Potemkin were granted asylum in the nearby port of Constanța.

Rather than a straight retelling of this moment, however, Jude brings us into the present, and to a farcical exchange between a cultural bureaucrat and a sculptor concerning the potential rehabilitation of a derelict 1988 Ceaușescu-era monument in order to pay tribute to the revolutionaries. Just as the film offers a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, so does the sculptor propose the preposterous addition of the martyr Vakulinchuk atop this statue overlooking the Danube-Black Sea Canal, thereby making it the tallest statue in Europe. Even when set in stone (or steel), monuments are by no means immutable.

Taking The Potemkinists as its point of departure, this paper considers the tensions between stillness and motion in monuments and cognate objects within Eisenstein’s film, and in his filmography more broadly. From the roaring stone lions that appear to rouse the people of Odessa to action in Battleship Potemkin, to the montage of museal objets d’art of the Winter Palace and the toppled statue of the Tsar in October, Eisensteinian objects are given to dynamic movement, turned ‘plasmatic’ by cinema against the ossifications their materials suggest. While Jude’s film invites us to consider the function of real, existing monuments with respect to the Soviet filmmaker’s work, The Potemkinistsalso casts its Eisensteinian namesake as a monument in its own right. How does Battleship Potemkin stand as a cinematic statue today? How might its legacy remain in motion?