The 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin is a true classic and has inspired many great movie moments over the years, with one of the most famous scenes being that of the Odessa steps. That is the scene probably most recently remembered from the homage in The Untouchables, where a baby in a pram race down the stairs as a fight ensues around them.
The film was created by Sergei Eisenstein and dramatises a mutiny on a Russian ship showing how this event allegedly then inspired an uprising against the country’s Czars in 1905, which then failed.
Massively rearranged quotes from the BBC:
A newly reconstructed version of the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin will premiere at Berlin Film Festival…
…The festival, which is showing the film next year, said no complete print of the original movie survived…
…the film, which was shot for the 20th anniversary of the failed uprising, was victim of “one of the most spectacular cases of censorship in the 1920s” after being cut by the Soviets…
…As well as the inclusion of the graphics and Trotsky’s words, changes and cuts carried out on the famous staircase sequence as a result of the film’s censorship have been corrected…
…Edmund Meisel’s original musical score has been revised for the screening…
The reconstruction has been supported by the British Film Institute and Germany’s federal film archive.
That last part adds the credibility to the reconstructed version, and should mean that the work done does nothing but enhance the original cut and bring back everything that was removed to give it what Eisenstein originally created. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
Even the original score has been revised, and for the screening at the Berlin Festival from 12th to 13th February 2005, the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg will accompany the entire restored movie. That would definitely be something to experience.
