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Original Potemkin Beats
The Censors After 79 Years

By Ronald Bergan

18 February, 2005
The Guardian

It was appropriate that a newly restored version of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin should be shown during this year's Berlin festival with a full orchestra playing 'the original' score by Edmund Meisel.

When The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, finished just in time to commemorate the (partially successful) 1905 Revolution, it had an uninspired musical accompaniment played on an organ. The film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from Hollywood.

Box-office figures were exaggerated by the authorities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there was a large Soviet audience for Soviet films.

A short while later, The Battleship Potemkin was shown in Berlin where it became an enormous hit, moving from a small cinema on the Friederichstrasse to twelve cinemas around Berlin. Encouraged by the film's success, its German distributor decided to commission the Austrian-born Edmund Meisel to write a score for the theatre orchestra. By the time of Eisenstein's arrival in Berlin, Meisel had reached the last reel in which the battleship, with the mutinous sailors on board, goes out to confront the Tsar's navy, tension mounting as the ships approach one another.

Eisenstein's advice to the composer was 'the music for this reel should be rhythm, rhythm and, before all else, rhythm.' He dissuaded Meisel from composing purely illustrative music and got him to accentuate certain effects. (Meisel's score was thought lost for some years, and other music has been tagged onto it over the years from extracts from Shostokovich symphonies to the Pet Shop Boys.)

At Berlin, 79 years later, the pulsating score, which included gunshots realistically simulated by drums and cymbals, made a tremendous impact, especially during the final 'music for machines' sequence, where it reaches an almost unbearable percussive crescendo, counterpointing the speed of the ship. (In fact, it was an illusion created by montage. The ship was stationary.)

During the Odessa Steps sequence, against which the whole of cinema can be defined, the music reflects what Eisenstein called 'dialectical montage'.

Eisenstein's method is one of collision, conflict and contrast, with the emphasis on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots that forces the audience consciously to come to conclusions about the interplay of images while they are also emotionally and psychologically affected. The 80-minute The Battleship Potemkin contains 1,346 shots, whereas the average film around 1926 ran 90 minutes and had around 600 shots.

Curiously, the music was one of the aspects of the film considered to be subversive at the time. In some cities of Germany, the film was passed for screening but the music was forbidden. The Battleship Potemkin's depiction of a successful rebellion against political authority disturbed the world's censors.

The French, banning it for general showing, burned every copy they could find. It was only shown in film clubs in London, where it had been banned. Initially, in the USA, it was forbidden on the grounds that it 'gives American sailors a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny'. Likewise, in Germany, the War Ministry forbade members of the armed forces to see the film.

The German censors cut a scene when an officer is thrown into the water and a close-up of a brutal Cossack. A few years later, after Stalin came to power, a written introduction by Leon Trotsky was removed by the Soviets and replaced by a quote from Lenin. This latest version reinstated the original as well as some other intertitles felt too inflammatory at the time. (Despite the festival's claims of restoring a few missing scenes, there is not one frame that I had not seen previously.)

However, the one aspect of The Battleship Potemkin that has never aroused any censorship is Eisenstein's mischievous homoeroticism, which is more evident to modern audiences than ever. In the 1980s, Nestor Almendros, the exiled Cuban cinematographer, wrote: 'From its very beginning, with the sailors' dormitory prologue, we see an "all-male cast" resting shirtless in their hammocks. The camera lingers on the rough, splendidly built men, in a series of shots that anticipate the sensuality of Mapplethorpe, and at the great moment when the cannons are raised to fire, a sort of visual ballet of multiple slow and pulsating erections can easily be discerned.'

Although subjective, Almendros, and other gay commentators, cannot be accused of special pleading. Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic obsessive. Knowing this, it is not unlikely that Eisenstein was slyly playing with the slowly rising guns as well as the scenes with sailors polishing pistons in a masturbatory manner.

There are also the fleeting shots of a young man tearing his shirt in fury to reveal his bare chest (a young monk has his shirt torn off him in Ivan The Terrible) and of two sailors obviously kissing as the cannons rise. None of this was lost on the sophisticated festival audience, who gave the performance (film plus orchestra) a standing ovation.


 

 

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