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'Potemkin' Restored to Uncensored Glory

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- "Battleship Potemkin," Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent classic, has been restored and seen in its uncensored form for the first time in nearly 80 years.

Cut by the Germans who bought the film, altered by the Soviets and banned in Britain and France for its revolutionary zeal, it nonetheless became one of the most important movies in cinema history. Restorers have worked for three years to insert scenes removed by German censors for their extreme violence and to correct translations of the Russian "inter-titles" which toned down the mutinous sailors' revolutionary rhetoric.

"What we have restored now is more or less the version in which the film was screened in Moscow in January, 1926," Enno Patalas, the former director of the Munich Film Museum who led the restoration effort, told Reuters.

Based on a true story, "Battleship Potemkin" dramatizes a mutiny on a Russian ship and how it inspired a failed 1905 uprising against the country's tsars. Shot for the 20th anniversary of the event, seemingly minor incidents have bloody consequences, none more so than the shot by a Cossack that triggers a massacre on the steps of Odessa in the film's most famous passage.

The scene, including a baby's pram hurtling towards the sea after its mother has been killed, is back to its brutal best, with close-ups of feet stepping on a child's corpse and a distraught mother holding aloft her dying son.

A written introduction by Leon Trotsky, removed by the Soviets after he fell foul of Josef Stalin following Lenin's death, has also been reinstated. "The only censorship cut in the Soviet Union was the omission of the epigraph by Trotsky which we have restored now. That of course was taken away in the 1930s and replaced by a Lenin quotation," said Patalas.

Orchestral accompaniment

The most widely watched edit of the film is based on a sound version made in the 1950s, which includes the changes German censors imposed. Late on Saturday, as part of the annual Berlin Film Festival, a packed theatre cheered after the restored five-act film was shown, accompanied by an orchestra playing an adaptation of the original score written by Edmund Meisel.

Gunshots are accompanied by cymbals crashing, drums thunder for cannon fire and tension builds through gradual musical crescendo. The only flash of color is the garish red of the ship's flag, painted on to the negative. The film's overt Soviet propaganda means much has been made of its political agenda. But Patalas said it was also revolutionary artistically, relying heavily on acrobatics and caricature, and often ignoring logic.

Eisenstein used a rush of images to intensify emotions in a style often likened to a newsreel, he juxtaposed shots in order to shock and his techniques have been copied well into cinema's era of sound. "Battleship Potemkin" had a huge critical impact when it was screened in Europe and in 1958 was voted the best film ever made by a jury of historians. His masterpiece was praised by James Joyce, Albert Einstein and American star Douglas Fairbanks, and yet Eisenstein was to struggle with Soviet censorship again and again.