Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin: The Odessa Steps Massacre
The 55th Berlin Film Festival will present a reconstructed version of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin, considered by many film scholars one of — if not the — greatest motion picture ever made.
Battleship Potemkin was originally commissioned by the Russian communist leaders to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Odessa uprising, during which mutinous sailors rioted at that Ukrainian port. The massacre of the protesters on the Odessa Steps is still shown in film schools all over the world as a classic example of montage — the art of editing used for greater dramatic effect.
A team headed by film historian Enno Patalas has worked on this reconstructed version, which includes sequences that were cut by the Soviet censors at the time of the film's release. The print to be shown at the Berlinale is supposed to be as close as possible to Eisenstein's original cut.
The more rabid ideologues within the the Soviet government may not have thought so, but the film's message has been deemed so effective that Battleship Potemkin was, at some time or other, banned in numerous countries, from Brazil to South Korea.
Battleship Potemkin will be presented on February 12 and 13 at the Volksbühne theatre at the Rosa Luxemburg Platz. The German Film Orchestra Babelsberg will accompany the screenings of the silent film, with a revised version of Edmund Meisel's original score.