Description of Incident: Both "Strike" and "Battleship Potemkin" received critical praise in the Soviet Union, but faced censorship abroad. The arrival of "Battleship Potemkin" in Britain coincided with the General Strike of 1926 and was widely seen as being seditious. It was banned there by the home secretary. French authorities burned every copy of the film upon arrival and film censors in Pennsylvania banned it as well. In Russia, the censorship of Eisenstein's films began with "October" (1927) which was commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The film was only allowed a limited public screening and a campaign against it was launched because the film did not glorify Stalin and contained repeated mentions of Stalin's rival Trotsky. After this, objection to Eisentein's cinematic methods by Stalin (who believed movies were good only if they were "intelligible to the masses") prevented Eisenstein from being able to complete a film for a while. "The Old and the New" and "Bezhin Meadow" were two movies Eisenstein could not complete because of these objections. In the 1930s after growing frustrated with these problems Eisenstein went to Europe and the United States to study the use of sound in the film industry there. While in Britain he tried to get the ban on "The Battleship Potemkin" lifted but could not. In the United States the director got a contract with Paramount Pictures. His decision to use Theodore Dreiser's book "An American Tragedy" as source material for his film raised objections with the studio and he left the United States without completing a film. In 1937 at the Cinema Workers' Conference Eisenstein was forced to make a public apology for his "political and artistic errors". In 1938 Eisenstein came back into favor with his film "Alexander Nevsky", for which he won the Order of Lenin. After the Nazi-Soviet pact in August of that year the film was banned because of its anti-German tone. During the war Stalin commissioned Eisenstein to make "Ivan the Terrible", the first part of which was very popular and awarded a Stalin Prize. The second part was banned after Stalin found the film to be "unsuccessful" and "erroneous".

Results of Incident: In 1948 Eisenstein died from a heart attack after the creative frustration and personal attacks became too much for him to bear. The ban on "The Battleship Potemkin" was finally withdrawn in Britain in 1954.