Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one of the great films of the silent era and one of the films that defined the medium aesthetically. It put Russian film on the cinematic map and also made Eisenstein's name as a director and artistic visionary with its extensive use of his evolving theories of montage in cinema. It was also one of the big moments in the short history of Soviet modernism, the brief period when, galvanized by the revolution, writers, composers and visual artists in the new Russia answered the promise of a new society with new, dynamic and advanced art, making Soviet Russia, at least until Josef Stalin took over, the home of some of the most modern artistic ideas in the world.

Originally conceived as part of a series of films relating the events of the year 1905, in which strikes, uprisings and popular sentiment brought the country closer to revolution than at any time before 1917, Battleship Potemkin focuses on one of these events: on an armored cruiser on the Black Sea in 1905, sailors mutinied and sailed for 11 days under a red flag. In the film, tension between sailors and officers explodes over the quality of the food, and the sailors, faced with rifles, turn on their superiors, throw them overboard and hoist the red flag. The people of the port city of Odessa welcome the revolutionary sailors with open arms and are promptly massacred by the Czar's soldiers, for which the Potemkin shells the local military command in reprisal. The sailors of the Potemkin then learn that a squadron of ships is being sent to the area and prepare for battle, not knowing whether they will have to fight or whether their fellow sailors will join them. Potemkin's bold images and masterful cutting orchestrate the emotions of the audience as we share the comradely affection of the sailors, rage at their treatment, indignation at the massacre of civilians, and apprehension and tension as the squadron of ships approaches. Battleship Potemkin is not simply a museum piece, fodder for film historians or simple propaganda: it's also exciting and moving entertainment that engages the brain and the emotions alike.

Originally an engineering student, Sergei Eisenstein went in for the arts after serving in the Red Army during the Civil War. He first worked in theater and began to develop his ideas about montage -- the communication of emotions and ideas through the juxtaposition of visual elements -- in the context of stage production. A film buff since his student days, Eisenstein was aware of American director D. W. Griffith's innovations in film cutting which did so much to establish the unique visual language of film. Another influence on Eisenstein was his study of Japanese, and the system of Chinese ideograms on which Japanese writing is based. Gravitating towards cinema, his first feature, Strike, began to put his ideas about montage into film. Strike was not particularly successful at home, but it did well enough abroad to lead to a commission to make another feature which would result in Battleship Potemkin. Strike also introduced Eisenstein to cinematographer Eduard Tisse, who guided the inexperienced director in the practical problems of putting his visions on film and became a valued friend and collaborator for most of Eisenstein's career.

Potemkin's premiere at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater was an artistic triumph, but as was the case with most of the work of the artists of the new Soviet modernist scene, the film was still too new and too sophisticated for many ordinary Russians, and the film did less well in box office terms. But the effect of the film abroad, especially with Eisenstein's counterparts in the world film community, was nothing short of electrifying: filmmakers all over the world applauded Eisenstein's achievement and he quickly became an international celebrity.

But the export of Potemkin abroad led directly to the problem that has bedeviled the film for eighty years: censorship and the lack of a definitive version. At issue was, of course, the film's politics -- after all, this was a film from the Soviet Union, and it depicted rebellion against state and especially military authority -- and also its violence, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Czarist soldiers fire on the people. This is one of the most celebrated passages in cinema and a tour de force of Eisenstein's montage technique, but it was also unsparingly violent for its time -- a small boy is nearly trampled to death; his mother, holding his body and appealing to the soldiers, is cut down by rifles; an unattended infant in a perambulator rolls down the stairs; an old woman is slashed in the face by a sword-wielding Cossack. Before Potemkin could be shown in Germany in what was for all practical purposes the film's international debut, the German government required cuts of the most violent and inflammatory content. In this case at least, the required cuts were achieved in consultation with the director, who re-edited the film in order to accomodate the cuts without sacrificing the film's integrity, and a score was written by German composer Edmund Meisel at Eisenstein's request. When the film was shown in other countries, other cuts, not so mindful of the director's vision, were made, and the film was also subject to the prevailing political winds at home: an opening quotation by Leon Trotsky, for example, was excised after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in the late twenties. For most of the film's existence, there have been a number of versions of the film but no definitive version representative of Eisenstein's original intent.

Which is where Kino International's 2007 DVD release of Potemkin comes in. The restored version on this DVD is the fruit of decades of work, in part by Russian film historian Naum Kleinmann, who used materials in the possession of Eisenstein's widow as well as the archives of the state film school VGIK in an attempt to reconstruct the film in the seventies, and by the director of the current project, Enno Patalas of the Deutsche Kinematek, with input from the British Film Institute, the Gosfilmofond in Moscow and the Munich Film Museum. As the only film score specifically written for the film, Edmund Meisel's score is used, as adapted by Helmut Imig (the score was, after all, written for a shortened version of the film) and performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra. The restoration was completed and premiered in 2005 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Potemkin mutiny, and is probably the closest to a definitive version we will ever see.

Battleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein world-famous, but his subsequent career was hampered by unremitting frustrations. His work in the Soviet Union was subject to increasing scrutiny from political bosses, and his independently funded project, Que Viva Mexico, collapsed amid time and budget overruns. He did manage to make Alexander Nevsky in 1938, and the first two installments of Ivan The Terrible, a projected epic trilogy of the life of Ivan IV, the king who first declared himself czar (emperor, literally "Caesar") and unified Russia in the 16th century, in 1945 and 1946. Teaching and writing provided solace for the director from the unending, frequently humiliating problems of filmmaking, but overwork and stress overtook Eisenstein and he passed away in 1948 at the age of 50.