In December of 1925, when Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic, aesthetically revolutionary film “The Battleship Potemkin” made its premiere at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow to an audience of Soviet Communist Party officials and veterans of the failed 1905 Bolshevik revolution depicted in the film, the writer and director was just 27 years old. Much has been written by Eisenstein and others about politics, montage, and the theoretical foundations for the film’s unprecedented vibrancy. It is nevertheless worth remembering that the energy and audacity that have kept “Potemkin” at the forefront of world cinema for 80 years, even as it has been mauled and re-edited to a degree only recently rectified in a new restoration, bore the power of youth.

Eisenstein may only have been in his 20s, but when he made his pitch to production heads at the Soviet Union’s main studio, Mosfilm, the Russian film industry itself was barely in its teens. And yet from its infancy to its present-day, postcommunist role in the world movie market, Russian film has sustained the same assured creative zeal. Beginning today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in association with Seagull Films (architect of Lincoln Center’s previous odes to Russian cinema) and Mosfilm itself (still Russia’s main film production hub), will present Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking. This threeweek retrospective of classic movies produced under Soviet rule and recent fare created to compete in today’s global economic free-for-all is an unusually far-reaching survey of Russian film’s unfathomably deep creative well.

Whether in Moscow or Burbank, making pictures has always been a logistically unwieldy enterprise in which form and content are contoured as much by vision as compromise. The actual production of “Battleship Potemkin” was so beset by bad weather and delays that its director was forced to narrow what was originally conceived as a continent-spanning, multiple storyline retelling of the 1905 uprising into a single historical vignette about one ship, its crew, the oppressed people of Odessa, a detachment of ruthless Cossacks, and the staircase where they all met.

Until the collapse of the USSR, Mosfilm’s output was subject to the influence of something far more pernicious than bad weather — prevailing party politics. The decades of extensive re-edits and excisions that hobbled “Potemkin,” for one example, were mostly due to an ongoing editorial winnowing that resumed every time a new Soviet leadership took power.

A dark and funny assault on peasant-class pieties, 1934’s “Happiness” is one of the lesserknown highlights of a Soviet silent cinema associated more with sober polemics than slapstick. But the film’s ruthless send-up of rural life before and after the revolution was considered gallingly un-politically correct by Stalinist bureaucratic tastemakers. Serf or worker, according to a signpost in “Happiness,” life’s choices boil down to “Go to the left and thou will find thy death, go straight forward and thou will croak, go to the right and thou will not die, but neither will thou live.” Small wonder that a film industry tempering the aesthetic dogma of Social Realism, in which capitalism was invariably the villain, with an effort to portray an idealized communist state bearing little resemblance to Stalin’s reign of terror, kept “Happiness” suppressed for decades.

While Soviet censorship saw to it that native films fudging the party line received limited exhibition at home, Western anxiety about the proliferation of communist propaganda ensured that such light entertainments as 1939’s delightful musical romance “Tractor Drivers” were rarely exhibited outside of the Eastern Bloc. Far from an incitement to world overthrow, “Tractor Drivers” begins as a deceptively easygoing trifle, by the end becoming a reminder that with World War II in sight, tanks would soon replace tractors as instruments for turning Soviet soil.

As American filmmakers, reined in by moralists and production codes, found ways to hide forbidden ideas within Hollywood films of the 1940s and ’50s, Mosfilm’s postwar creative cadre smuggled potentially divisive shadings into mainstream patriotic fare. Eldar Ryazanov’s 1956 rock ‘n’ roll youth romance “Carnival Night” deftly sent up Soviet bureaucracy without incurring any bureaucratic ire. Mikhail Kalatozov’s “The Cranes are Flying” (1957) and the hallucinatory, grim, and spectacular “The Unsent Letter” (1959) connected with universal emotional truths that no Sovietera filmmaker had previously found in a World War II homefront romance and a flag-waving heroic wilderness adventure, respectively.

Though it’s arguably the bestknown and loved homegrown film of the Soviet era in Eastern Europe, 1970’s “The White Sun of the Desert,” a wickedly entertaining Russian take on the American Western, has yet to build the cult it deserves stateside. Saddled with a script so problematic that it was turned down by a handful of other Mosfilm filmmakers (including Andrei Tarkovsky), the film was picked up and re-tooled on the fly by director Vladimir Motyl, who transformed what had been a dry yarn about a Red Army soldier encountering bandits on his way home from the 1917 revolution into a tough and funny mixture of folk tale, action film, musical, and historical critique. “White Sun of the Desert” encapsulated the Russian enterprising spirit so drolly and perfectly that it remains mandatory pre-flight viewing for Russian cosmonauts (and latter-day “space tourists”) before they blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan.

Lincoln Center’s program also features four of Mosfilm’s more recent releases, including the New York premiere of Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Elegy of Life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya” (2006) and Vera Storozheva’s excellent “Traveling With Pets,” a uniquely pitched, exquisitely photographed wide-screen mixture of pathos and poetry set in an alternately exploitative and forgiving contemporary Russia.

“Here is something to show in the near and far West,” a Soviet journalist wrote after “Battleship Potemkin” made its premiere so long ago. The cumulative product of a creative hive that has endured eight decades of seismic social, political, and technological upheaval, all of the pictures in Lincoln Center’s Mosfilm survey deserve the same trip abroad.

Through February 14 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).