Audio transcription

The mutiny on the Potemkin in 1905 was seen as a harbinger of the Revolution to come, and Eisenstein seized on the opportunity to make a name for himself among Soviet filmmakers by making a film for the mutiny’s tenth anniversary. Gone are the vaudevillian eccentricities of Strike, replaced by a taut and moving pageant of injustice, rebellion and massacre, capped by an extremely suspenseful and supremely skillful showdown between the battleship and the rest of the fleet. The Odessa Steps sequence has earned the countless homages and pastiches it has inspired over the decades, and yet its power is undimmed; it remains a terrifying depiction of a military turning against its own citizens. But this sequence is best appreciated as one movement in an exquisitely constructed whole, presented here with the stirring score written for its Berlin premiere by Edmund Meisel.