BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN / BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Once ubiquitous in any self-respecting Film-101 class, the Sergei Eisenstein classic has lost a lot of cachet. But two generations on from Top Rank in the ‘Sight & Sound’ poll, perhaps now’s a good time for rediscovery. Especially with the superb 2007 restoration out on KINO, a roaring success that brings together excellent visual elements, the original Five Part structure, long censored materials and the superb score Edmund Meisel wrote (with input from Eisenstein) for the German release of ‘26, slightly rejiggered to synch with the original Moscow edit. What a pity the film is largely hauled out (if hauled out at all) as film-study assignment for its technique and/or politics. After all, it made its mark first & foremost as crowd-pleaser, often to illiterates. (‘Pre-literates’ might be the Stalinist word.) Structured less as a traditional narrative; more as a Visual Symphony in Five Movements (think Mahler 2, 3 or 8), the chapters move briskly & logically from PART ONE: Horrible Conditions at Sea to TWO: Insubordination & Mutiny; THREE: Martyr’s Legacy; FOUR: Cossack Revenge (with the Odessa Steps Massacre) and finally, FIVE: Brothers At Sea! Plus a coda to once again Raise the Red Flag!* The film hasn’t looked as convincing, as rabble-rousing, as easy to follow, as (dare one say it?) as fun for about two generations. Maybe never, since only now has the Meisel soundtrack been married to the original cut. Fit for Film-101 classes everywhere.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The new KINO edition offers recreated Russian Inter-titles (with optional English subtitles) or Inter-titles in English. The graphic look of the Russian alphabet should make it the obvious choice, if only some of the longer titles didn’t obliterate the English sub-titles, making a few all but unreadable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The DVD’s enclosed booklet proclaims that the stenciled coloring of the RED FLAG on the Potemkin hasn’t been seen on screen since 1925. Not so. Ann Arbor projectionist extraordinaire Peter Wilde was hand-coloring those frames directly onto his 16mm print back in the 1970s with a little Red Sharpie.

DOUBLE-BILL: POTEMKIN occurs during the proto-revolution of 1905. So too, Dimitri Shostakovich’s highly programmatic Symphony No. 11: ‘In the Year 1905.’ Once dissed as mere movie music posing as symphony, it’s not movie music at all, but a movie, a movie in sound. Quite a different thing. (Though that may explain why the ‘official’ 1975 Soviet restoration used Shostakovich music on its soundtrack, disastrously ‘stretching’ the image with double-printing to match sound to image.) For this Audio Double-Bill, try Stokowski’s spectacular 1958 audiophile account with the Houston Symphony Orchestra or a recent release from Boston under Andris Nelsons.