#The Battleship Potemkin

[jareckiworld]

Guillermo Kuitca — The Sweet Sea (acrylic on canvas, 1989)

[silentagecinema]

beauty in the 1920s

[riqley]

Battleship Potemkin (1925) dir. Sergei Eisenstein

[dailyworldcinema]

Battleship Potemkin (1925) Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

[cosmonautroger]

Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925

[ellevandersneed]

I think if I could look at a huge print of this on my wall whenever I am at my lowest, I would no longer be at my lowest

[spilladabalia]

Baby's On Fire~Brian Eno

[evillesbianvillain]

Girls send me your favourite silent movies reccomendations. Right now im watching The Passion of Joan of Arc

[geekynerfherder]

'Battleship Potemkin' by Rafa Orrico.

Officially licensed 24" x 36" screen prints on 300gsm Gmund Bauhaus paper, in numbered limited editions of 60 for £70 each, with gallery stamp on the reverse.

On sale Tuesday September 24 at 5pm UK through Black Dragon Press.

[amrv-5]

niche post for an audience of maybe 2 but what are the odds do we think that David Lynch was literally visually inspired by noted Soviet filmmaker/theorist Sergei Eisenstein..?

[noirsofia]

Battleship Potemkin (1926) / Top Gun (1986)

[bluehairedspidey]

Battleship Potemkin (1925) // How I Met Grimace (1981)

[porto-rosso]

ugh i need to finish dog day afternoon

[dustedmagazine]

Morricone Youth — Battleship Potemkin (Country Club)

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is a landmark in early cinema, a 1925 silent film of epic scale and ambition, which chronicles a late Tsarist-era mutiny aboard ship that strikes a chord and ignites a full-scale rebellion in the port city of Russia. It is well worth watching, if only for the stunning “Odessa steps” sequence, where the Tsar’s army ruthlessly guns down civilians in sympathy with the striking sailors. The images of a mother begging for her wounded child’s life or a baby in a carriage bumping headlong down the stairs are striking and memorable—and they have special resonance now, when Odessa is again under siege by a Russian army with few qualms about collateral damage.

The film has had a number of scores over the years, the original by Edmund Meisel, one from 1950 by Nikolai Kryukov , and a widely circulated 1975 50th anniversary edition incorporating symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich (that’s the version currently on the Criterion Channel). Eisenstein himself hoped that his movie would be rescored every 20 years, so that its sound would remain relevant to new audiences.

Enter, then, Morricone Youth, a New York City-based orchestra dedicated to live scoring classic films. The ensemble, a sort of bus man’s holiday for musicians in other bands, has performed music for films including David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The band, which is headed by Devon E. Levins, regularly performs its scores while the film is running in select theaters across the country. It is in the process of recording and releasing these scores. Battleship Potemkin is the latest.

On listening to this excellent soundtrack, with its languid, East European waltzes, its stirring snare-shot battle sequences, its antic re-enactments of rebellion and eventual triumph, you might regret not having the opportunity to hear this music in its rightful setting, a movie theatre. And yet, the music itself is evocative enough to hold your attention. “Vakulinchuk’s Dream” with its bell-like keyboard lines and its soaring trumpet is full of eerie yearning, exactly the sort of thing to embody a sailor’s longing for equality. The syncopated lurch of “Giliarovosky Is Watching,” with its sinuous, near-tango-ing tainted sensuality insinuates danger and trickery. “Cossacks Charge,” the music for that Odessa Steps imagery, snaps to attention on military drum rolls and advances relentlessly on piano motifs. And “Funeral” with its haunting, disembodied voices, is lovely and heartbreaking, exactly as it ought to be.

All of which is meant to say, yes, it’s probably better with the movie, but it’s pretty great with just your speakers and your imagination, too.

Jennifer Kelly

[petshopbibliography]

The masculinities of the PSB are inclusive of physical sensuality, rather than traditional masculine stoicism and cerebral transcendence of the corporeal. Male bodies are visually dominant throughout: bodies of sailors, young and old, clothed and bare, virile and aged, robust and dead, powerful and vulnerable. The film is rife with phallic imagery: spyglasses, fishing poles, bullet-shaped missiles cradled at waist level and, most obviously, the recurrent gun turrets where rebelling sailors gather, raising and lowering like erections in the foreground of the frame. During the Odessa Steps sequence, a single-amputee man on crutches is in the crowd and a double amputee is prominent when a mother confronts soldiers with the body of her son they have killed. The body of sailor Vakulinchuk inspires Odessa’s citizens to support Potemkin. As a boat carries Vakulinchuk’s body into Odessa, ‘To the Shore’ (track 6 [2.20]) introduces the primary string motive of the James Bond title theme from You Only Live Twice, originally sung by gay camp icon Nancy Sinatra...

... Physical pleasure and carnality are expressed in the throbbing dance beats underscoring revolution on ship, on the steps and facing the squadron. The very catalyst for the revolt, sailors rejecting spoiled meat, is not solely a rational assertion of nourishment needs but also a demand for sensual pleasure: we deserve something that tastes better. ‘Men and Maggots’, playing over the scenes of infected meat, samples ‘Charade’ (track 2 [0.21]), a sad song of failed love in a theatrical metaphor, written by masters of sentimental popular song, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. The song is the theme of a film of the same name starring boyish Audrey Hepburn (masculinely nicknamed ‘Reggie’) and urbane and allegedly gay Cary Grant, both of whose counterhegemonic genders resonate with those in PSB’s work. Grant’s role in this film is significant, as his character assumes four different identities, each shown in the film’s final image, over which Hepburn’s character expresses her wish for them to have lots of boys so she can name them after his aliases. The allusion here resonates physical pleasure (taste) with literally the production and performance of multiple, variant – but not oppositional – masculine identities.

Scott, D. (2013). Intertextuality as “Resonance”: Masculinity and Anticapitalism in Pet Shop Boys’ Score for Battleship Potemkin. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 7(1), 53–82. doi:10.3828/msmi.2013.3

[iconauta]

May that day come again when we will call each other ...