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Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

Posted By: Someonelse

Date: 31 Jul 2021 14:53:23

SD / DVD IMDb

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Writer: Nina Agadzhanova (script by) (as N. F. Agadzhanovoy-Shutko)
Stars: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barskiy, Grigoriy Aleksandrov

Odessa, 1905. Enraged with the deplorable conditions on board the armored cruiser Potemkin and raising the red flag of revolution, the sailors' revolt becomes the rallying point for a Russian populace ground under the boot hells of the Czar's Cossacks. When ruthless White Russian cavalry arrives to crush the rebellion on the sandstone Odessa Steps, the most famous and most quoted film sequence in cinema history is born.

IMDB | Wikipedia | Rotten Tomatoes | Roger Ebert

This exciting two-disc edition of the definitive restoration of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) includes the restored film transferred in high-definition, including all of the footage edited from the film before its premiere in its original and intended sequencing with all of the original Russian intertitles in their correct order.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

The results are very impressive for a reconstuction, with a reasonably consistent range of graytones and image quality throughout, despite being conflated from a number of 35mm negatives and prints. All restoration work was performed optically on filmstock rather than digitally. We do not know whether any digital clean-up was performed on the natural-speed HD video transfer. While there a sections of footage with moderate print wear, the majority of the film has a normal amount of dust, speckling, filmbase and emulsion wear that would be present in material of this vintage. The overall image quality is very-good to excellent.
SilentEra

An extraordinary accomplishment, Kino International’s restoration of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin has made the film more glorious than ever. Working with the Deutsche Kinematek, British Film Institute, Bundesfilm Archive Berlin, and the Munich Film Museum, Kino’s effort was to return Battleship Potemkin as closely as possible to Eisenstein’s original cut, as originally seen by Moscow audiences during its world premiere run. What happened after that, according to the German restoration team extensively interviewed in an engrossing documentary ("Tracing Battleship Potemkin") on one of the two discs in this set, was that the film’s very negative was re-cut by German censors and others. (It’s likely, the team says, that Eisenstein himself secretly supervised the German cut to accommodate demands while also keeping personal control over the film’s dramatic flow. What this means is that Eisenstein probably ended up with two authentic versions of Battleship Potemkin.)

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

"Tracing Battleship Potemkin" goes on to detail the extensive number of shots long lost from constant authorized and unauthorized re-cuts in the last 80 years, and how many of those shots have been returned. Indeed, the film is all the more powerful and lyrical with a number of key scenes (especially the famed "Odessa steps" sequence) filled out and shaded with emotional nuance. But there’s more: a glimpse at numerous stills from shots that Eisenstein himself left out of the first cut (these have not been reintroduced in the film itself), two versions of the film with English and original Russian intertitles (with English subtitles), and the original, monumental score by Edmund Meisel (composed for the German version) make this Battleship Potemkin a brilliant experience.
Tom Keogh, amazon

If ever a DVD release set a trap for a reviewer, this would be it—it's so easy to sound fatuous ("Potemkin's got a good beat, you can dance to it, I give it a 93"), stupid ("Dude, this movie *sucked*") or pompous ("The most important cultural achievement since the Gutenberg Bible"), because this is one of those movies that even if you haven't seen it, you've sort of seen it, because its influence is everywhere. Filmmaking and Communism reached Russia at about the same time, and the deprivations of the Revolution led the Russians to becoming the great film theorists—when they did in fact get to make movies, there was no getting around the strict political agenda set forward by the Party, because flouting it could kill more than just your career. What's kind of stirring, then, watching this movie, is what a grand pageant it is—it's a fantastically vital, visceral piece of filmmaking, on a sense of scale that's almost unimaginable now, made when film seemed to provide endless possibilities, and that nothing was out of bounds.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

The director, Sergei Eisenstein, is really the great man of early Soviet cinema, and this is his crowning achievement. He tells the story of the 1905 riots that led to revolution, focusing here on the sailors of the great battleship of the film's title—and you can see a raft of influences, and Eisenstein digesting them and making it all his own. The movie is made some sixteen years after the death of Leo Tolstoy, and you can almost feel Eisenstein taking on the mantle of the great Russian storytelling tradition; he's also got a keen sympathy for the terrors and deprivations of everyday life in Czarist Russia, and the first grand revolutionary moment here, the sailors complaining about the maggot-ridden meat they've been provided with for meals, is straight out of Upton Sinclair. Essentially, the whole movie pivots on a borscht riot—the men on board have had enough of exploitation, and they throw off their shackles, having nothing to lose but their chains. They create a sort of People's Paradise at sea; the ship-of-state metaphors are kind of inescapable, and Eisenstein seems even to be inviting them.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

The movie twins its sharp eye for social realism with a grand, almost expressionistic sense of composition—when you see the men in their hammocks, for instance, hung every which way in a cramped room and unbearably close together, it's like watching a Sheeler photograph set in action. (Throughout, in fact, the film has a fascination with form, and with machinery—it brims with gleaning wheels and turrets, pinions and pistons, almost a Valentine to the means of production.) So much of Potemkin's influence has to do with its formal elements, but it's kind of stunning to see the acting here too, as you can almost see the prevailing style changing before your eyes. Yes, the villains in classic melodramatic fashion favor, quite literally, twirling their elaborate moustaches; but Stanislavski and what would become Method acting are very much in the air, and no one in Eisenstein's cast goes in for the kind of grand emoting gestures, necessary and suitable for the stage but looking buffoonish to our contemporary eyes. Similarly, there are strains of the great nineteenth-century adventure tales here—the sailors shout "All for one! One for all!", and it may be a function of the English translation, but they seem more in league with the Three Musketeers than with Lenin and Trotsky.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

The film is broken into five parts, and its signature image, which you're sort of waiting for from the jump, comes in the fourth of these—the Odessa Steps sequence is a paragon of epic filmmaking, and with images of violence that remain deeply unsettling. There's no getting around some of them: we see a child shot in the head by Czarist thugs, then stomped on, as his mother watches in horror before she's shot too. And before that baby carriage comes careening down the steps, the baby's mother is massacred as well—this juxtaposition of tenderness and terror is what makes so much of Potemkin so startling, and the kind of thing that gets lost in its many imitators (cf., the climactic shootout in The Untouchables). And it's not even an hour and ten minutes long, so even the most jaded and media-saturated among us can appreciate this unparalleled achievement without fear of boredom.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Special Edition]

Superlatives get tossed around too easily—every week seems to bring another movie of the year, every year an instant classic, if you believe the pull quotes—but it's no exaggeration to say that no film has been more important to the history of the medium than Battleship Potemkin. What may stun you is what a rousing pageant of a movie it is, no tepid exercise in formalism or theory. It looks remarkably fine on this set, which couldn't be recommended more highly.
digitallyOBSESSED!com

Eisenstein’s masterful use of symbols, concepts and montage theory editing, forgoing character development and individuality, have created something so far away from the sporadic flashes of sex and violence that have infiltrated the television and movies of today’s, aptly named, X-Generation. I enjoyed the film for its story and historical meaning in cinema, but am also saddened that so many, including my younger girlfriend, will never see it or have any desire to. The turning of the century has further distanced so many with its bombardment of quick gratification and image stimuli, who could not hope to appreciate the impact of Battleship Potemkin simply giving it the opportunity to speak. I recommend it quite strongly to all budding film buffs and film students before, like many other classics, it becomes unavailable.
Gary Tooze, dvdbeaver

Special Features:
- Feature the original 1926 Edmund Meisel score performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra, offered in 5.1 or 2.0 flavors
- Scans: Cover, Disc Scans, Inlay, Inside

DISC ONE:
- The Movie (with English intertitles only)
- "Tracking Battleship Potemkin" documentary (42:25, in German with English subs)
- Photo gallery

DISC TWO:
- The Movie (with Russian intertitles and optional English subtitles)

All Credits goes to Original uploader.

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Subtitles (from opensubtitles.org)

1925 Classics Drama DVD Video History Russian Sergei M. Eisenstein War