Battleship Potemkin!

In September of 2004, Battleship Potemkin, the revolutionary film by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, was shown in an open air screening in London’s Trafalgar Square. Some 40,000 people gathered to see the film. Today it was announced that a newly restored print of Eisentein’s 1925 classic will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival this coming February.

The new print restores scenes that had been cut by Soviet censors. The movie’s original score will be performed live by the German Film Orchestra Babelsburg. Potemkin tells the story of a 1905 naval mutiny under the Czarist regime, and Eisentein’s innovative use of film montage helped establish cinema as a genuine art form. The movie’s politics caused it to be banned all across the globe, but it inspired creative minds from the painter Francis Bacon to the director Brian De Palma.