Where to watch Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Trivia & production notes

• Sergei Eisenstein was only 27 years old when assigned to direct the film as part of the Soviet Union's 1925 commemoration of the 1905 revolution.
• Eisenstein abandoned the original eight-episode script covering multiple 1905 revolutionary events and instead focused on just the Potemkin uprising, which occupied only a few pages of the original screenplay.
• The film's premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre on December 21, 1925 was a ceremonial event marking the anniversary of the 1905 revolution, with the public premiere following a month later in Moscow.
• When Eisenstein wanted to show a red flag raised by the rebels, the orthochromatic black-and-white film stock made red appear black, so he used a white flag and hand-tinted 108 frames red for the Grand Theatre premiere.
• The actual battleship Potemkin was derelict and being scrapped during filming; the film likely used the Rostislav, a different vessel that had been scuttled in 1920 but whose superstructure remained above water until 1930.
• Edmund Meisel composed the original score in just twelve days because the film's censors approved it late, forcing him to repeat sections of the score.
• Eisenstein envisioned the score being rewritten every 20 years to keep the propaganda film relevant to new generations of viewers.
• The Pet Shop Boys composed a new soundtrack for the film in 2004 with the Dresden Symphonic Orchestra, premiering it at an open-air concert in Trafalgar Square in September 2004.
• The 2005 restoration recovered the author's original version of the film, including Edmund Meisel's original score, after decades of censorship that had removed frames and altered the prologue.
• When the film's negatives were sold to Germany and re-edited by director Phil Jutzi in 1925, the attempted execution of sailors was moved from the beginning to the end of the film, significantly altering the structure Eisenstein intended.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Battleship Potemkin, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.