Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein made this film at the request of the Soviet regime to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. He chose to centre the action on the mutiny that broke out aboard the Potemkin, the warship of the Imperial Russian Navy. Furious at being fed nothing but rotten food and suffering from the policy of terror of their superiors, the crew launched a full-scale insurrection during which a number of officers were thrown overboard. The mutinous soldiers then decided to set sail for the port city of Odessa...

What makes this film unforgettable are Eisenstein's experimental editing techniques and remarkably tight, highly aesthetic cinematography. The staircase scene has become iconic: it shows the massacre of ordinary people, amongst whom a mother walking with her child in a baby carriage, being mercilessly gunned down by the soldiers marching in cadence.

In 2009, film music expert Frank Strobel compiled a new soundtrack for Battleship Potemkin, based on several symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich. The previous soundtrack was composed in 1975 by Soviet musicologists on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the film, and it also made use of Shostakovich’s music.  In Strobel’s new version, the judicious use of excerpts from the Fifth and Eleventh symphonies (Shostakovich's own artistic response to the events of 1905) makes this silent film even more poignant.