Battleship Potemkin
May 20 - May 26, 2011
(Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925, 35mm, 70 min)
Newly Restored 35mm Print!
Considered by many to be the most important piece of propaganda in the history of film, Battleship Potemkin is an influential landmark in 20th-century cinema, as well as arguably Eisenstein's greatest work. A revolutionary film in every sense, it tells the story of the 1905 mutiny on the Russian ship Prince Potemkin, pride of the Tsar's navy. The film was banned in many countries, including Nazi Germany, Britain and France, and even the US. In one enticing account of a screening in the New York apartment of Gloria Swanson, it was projected onto one of Gloria's satin sheets, when the absence of an available screen threatened to disappoint the eager but select audience. The film was commissioned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905 revolution, and its rousing, humane propaganda stands in sharp contrast to the sophistication of its technique.
The scene of the massacre on the Odessa Steps, an incident that Eisenstein invented, cemented Potemkin's enduring reputation. This magnificently edited sequence is one of the most enduring in all cinema, and homage has been paid to the scene by artists as different as Sam Peckinpah and Francis Bacon.
Edmund Meisel, a regular artistic collaborator of Bertolt Brecht’s, composed the ambitious original score featured here. Composed in just 12 days, Meisel's accompaniment was so spectacular that, at the time, the New York Herald Tribune declared the score to be as "powerful, as vital, as galvanic, and electrifying as the film."
“Which is the best picture I have ever seen? My answer is always Potemkin.”—Billy Wilder
“The best film in the world.” —Charlie Chaplin
Watch the trailer:
