Still Raising a Red Flag

'Potemkin' Restoration Makes Russian Film's Politics, and Brilliance, Clearer Than Ever

Most of us have known Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) through descendants of a grimy, public-domain print -- diced up, reconstituted and set to tubby fragments of music by Dmitri Shostakovich -- that has been circulating for the past half-century.

In its brilliant, vibrant celebration of the Russian Revolution of 1905, "Potemkin" might well be the single most persuasive piece of propaganda to come out of the communist movement. And yet it is magnificent filmmaking by any standard and still seems radical, in the best as well as some of the worst meanings of the word, after 80 years.

Now Kino International has tracked down some extraordinarily well-preserved original source material, cleaned it all up and issued "Potemkin" in a two-DVD set. It contains as-close-to-complete-as-possible versions of the film with Russian and English titles, along with the original score composed for the silent film by Edmund Meisel and a German documentary, "Tracing Battleship Potemkin," that explores both the making of Eisenstein's masterpiece and its restoration.

It is one of those problematic motion pictures, like D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" or Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," that cannot be watched today without a certain moral revulsion.

To be sure, the tumultuous events of 1905 should not be compared to the disaster that would sweep Russia in 1917. Yet the film is pervaded by the leveling, dehumanizing class warfare of Leninism, which was already established in approximately one-sixth of the world when "Potemkin" was released, in the first full year of Joseph Stalin's rule.

The story is simply told. Toiling sailors, rebelling against inhumane treatment, overthrow their leaders. The rogue ship is threatened by forces of the czarist establishment, but disaster is averted when fellow sailors on other ships find common cause with the rebels and refuse to fire upon them. The red flag flies, universal brotherhood is affirmed and the revolution begins.

"Potemkin" is a paradox. It is a study of crowds and mass action (with the exception of the martyred sailor Vakulinchuk, there are no named heroes in the film) yet it contains some of the most singular, detailed and unforgettable faces in the history of cinema. It simulates historical documentary, yet its most famous scene -- an unprovoked slaughter on the sandstone steps leading from the Ukrainian city of Odessa down to the Black Sea -- never took place. It exalts the noble, ultra-macho and (theoretically) fiercely heterosexual Soviet worker, yet will strike many latter-day viewers as downright campy in the homoeroticism of its camera angles and tender lingering on buff male bodies. It is deliberately, almost romantically, symphonic in its construction -- set down in five distinct "movements," all with their own titles -- yet one admires it from an objective, depersonalized distance, as one would a powerful machine, above and beyond human feeling.

There's nothing quite like "Potemkin" and it has been wildly influential. There is hardly a war documentary that does not borrow from it, and you can find direct quotations in films as disparate as Brian De Palma's "Untouchables" and Woody Allen's "Love and Death." Eisenstein himself never again approached its mixture of formal purity, revolutionary ardor and wild-eyed experimentalism. No sympathy for the Soviet Union is required to marvel at the film's wonders, and the new print is revelatory.