Battleship Potemkin

ALL-NEW 35mm RESTORATION! ► Eisenstein’s revolutionary masterpiece is one of the cinema’s touchstone works and immortal classics. This beautiful new restoration, available for the first time on 35mm, returns the film to its original glory, and includes a new recording of Edmund Meisel’s rousing 1926 original score. Commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the failed Russian revolution of 1905, Battleship Potemkin centres on a mutiny launched by the crew of a naval vessel against their Tsarist officers. The film’s “Odessa Steps” sequence — complete with bouncing baby carriage careening perilously down the stairs — is one of the most celebrated, analyzed, and imitated in cinema history. The power, excitement, and impact of Eisenstein’s artistry is astonishing. Potemkin is a sensational showcase for the director’s legendary genius at montage — at imparting ideas, emotion, rhythm, and tone through the juxtaposition of images. The film also exemplifies his use of character “types” and his rejection of the individual hero in favour of an aggregate, collective protagonist — part of an attempt to dispense with bourgeois traditions and create a truly revolutionary mass art. Potemkin, like most Eisenstein works, may have been too full of visual, aesthetic, and intellectual derring-do to ever pass muster as mass art, but its great international success, which helped put Soviet cinema on the map, did allow Eisenstein to dodge the charges of “formalism” that would otherwise dog him throughout his career. A 1958 jury of international film experts voted Potemkin the greatest film ever made, and it remains a perennial pick as one of the top ten films of all time. “Its place in the pantheon is deserved” (The Rough Guide to Film). B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score and English intertitles. 69 mins.

A Note on the Restoration: Battleship Potemkin has rarely been seen in its intended form since it premiered in Moscow in 1925. When the film travelled west to Germany, the Weimar government, worried about incipient Bolshevism, demanded cuts; this edited version then became the basis of U.S.- and British-release versions, which were subject to further censorship. After World War II, a drastically cut German negative became the basis even for Soviet versions. This all-new restoration, undertaken by German film historians Enno Patalas and Anna Bohn with support from film museums in Berlin, London, and Moscow, restores dozens of missing shots, all 146 original title cards, and some original colour tinting, and features a new recording of Edmund Meisel’s definitive 1926 score, returning Potemkin to a form as close as possible to Eisenstein’s bold original vision.

A Note on the Score: Edmund Meisel (1894-1930), a Vienna-born, Berlin-based composer who was a frequent collaborator of Bertolt Brecht’s, was commissioned to write an original orchestral score to accompany Potemkin’s 1926 German release. “I told Meisel I wanted the score to be rhythm, rhythm, and above all pure rhythm,” Eisenstein later wrote. Meisel’s score, completed in 12 days, was carefully designed to emphasize and enhance the film’s visual movement and structure, paralleling rhythm, shots, and editing in ways typical of motion picture scoring today but revolutionary at the time. The results were spectacular; the New York Herald Tribune proclaimed Meisel’s music to be as "powerful, as vital, as galvanic, and electrifying as the film." Eisenstein, also impressed, later hired Meisel again, to compose a score for 1927’s October. Meisel’s Potemkin score was lost for many years, but was reconstructed in the 1990s using other source materials, including the official piano reduction of the music.