SOURCE: "Potemkin," in his Living Images: Film Comment and Criticism, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975, pp. 290-98.

Kauffmann is a noted American theater and film critic. In the following essay, he analyzes Eisenstein 's Potemkin as an expression of the director's political and artistic vision.

Sometimes one imagines that there is a small but constant supply of genius throughout the world and that a particular juncture of circumstances in any one place touches the local supply to life. Otherwise, how explain the sudden flowering of Athenian architecture or Elizabethan drama or Italian Renaissance painting? Can one believe that there had been no previous talent and that geniuses were born on cue? It almost seems that the right confluence of events brings dormant omnipresent genius awake; without those events, nothing. Possibly the man with the greatest potential genius for symphonic composition lived in New Guinea five hundred years ago, but there...