I just finished watching The Battleship Potemkin while Kaija slept in the sling. This DVD thing rocks.
Some quick observations:
I didn't expect it to be silent; although I know some facts about the history of film, I don't have them at the top of my mind.
The film is just as impressive as I expected it to be. Not surprising, but still pleasant to find out.
The plot is less simple than I expected it to be, but it does still boil down to: workers and sailors good, bosses and officers bad. There were a couple of surprises for me: at the beginning, with the firing squad; and at the end, with the confrontation. I don't want to give spoilers so I won't say more.
One thing which I noticed was that when the people of Odessa turned out in support of the sailors, there were working-class women, working-class men, middle-class women, upper-class women ... but no middle or upper-class men. I don't know if Eisenstein just liked women in tsarist-era finery or if there was a deeper political point here.
Another thing: I had heard that Gone With the Wind was the film with the record for the most extras in one scene (the wounded in the streets of Atlanta). But I can't square that with some of the huge crowd scenes in Potemkin. Just as one example, the scene where the people of Odessa are walking along the breakwater, and the camera pans up and there's at least a quarter-mile-long line of people ten across walking.
Perhaps Gone With the Wind has the record for the most paid extras in a single scene.