FILM

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents MFAH Film Revival:  Battleship Potemkin.  Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Silent with musical soundtrack.

Odessa 1905. Enraged with the deplorable conditions on board the armored cruiser Potemkin, the ship´s loyal crew contemplates the unthinkable: mutiny. Seizing control of the Potemkin and raising the red flag of revolution, the sailors´ revolt becomes the rallying point for a Russian populace ground under the boot heels 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.

For eight decades, Eisenstein´s masterpiece has remained the most influential silent film of all time. Yet each successive generation has seen Battleship Potemkin subjected to censorship and recutting, its unforgettable power diluted in unauthorized public domain editions from dubious sources.

Until now.

Kino is proud to join the Deutsche Kinematek in association with Russia´s Goskinofilm, the British Film Institute, Bundesfilm Archive Berlin, and the Munich Film Museum in presenting this all new restoration of Battleship Potemkin. Dozens of missing shots have been replaced, and all 146 title cards restored to Eisenstein´s specifications. Edmund Meisel´s definitive 1926 score, magnificently rendered by the 55-piece Deutches Filmorchestra, returns Eisenstein´s masterwork to a form as close to its creator´s bold vision as has been seen since the film´s triumphant 1925 Moscow premiere. — Kino International

"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." — Washington Post

Russia, 1925
Black & White
69 Minutes