For Immediate Release
KINO TO RELEASE A DEFINITIVE RESTORATION OF SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN IN A TWO-DVD SET
Kino International is proud to release on DVD a definitive and unprecedented restoration of one of the most important films of all time: Sergei Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925). Widely considered one the most influential silent film ever made, this undisputed masterpiece is now available in a cut as close as possible to Eisenstein's original vision, which premiered in Moscow in December of 1925.
Kino's two-DVD boxed set of Sergei Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN will prebook on September 25, 2007, with a SRP of 29.95. Kino's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN DVD will be available to the general public on October 23.
With a gamut of exclusive special features, Kino's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN DVD offers a 42-minute documentary ("Tracing Battleship Potemkin") on the making and restoration of the film, a photo gallery, and another presentation of the film with original Russian intertitles and optional English subtitles.
THE RESTORATION
The result of a twenty-year restoration project led by the Deutches Kinemathek in Germany and supported by Bundesarchiv (Berlin), Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and the British Film Institute (London), this definitive version of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN restores all 1,374 of Eisenstein's original shots. Setting this apart from previous re-issues of this Russian classic is the inclusion of never-before-seen segments cut from the original negative at the insistence of German censors in 1926 and 1928.
After Sergei Eisenstein supervised the cutting of the film's original negative (prior to the Russian premiere in 1925), this material was sold to a German distribution company that became responsible for the foreign sales of Potemkin. Still in the throes of a crippling economic depression and concerned with Bolshevik agitation within its own borders, German officials ordered distributor Prometheus to cut the most incendiary shots from the original negative, forcing them to further re-edit the film in order to cover up those cuts. Even the famed Odessa steps scene was altered.
Kino's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN not only brings back all of the film's original shots, rescued from early prints made from the untouched original negative, but also presents the film as close as possible to its original edit, when it premiered in Russia on December 21, 1925. Moreover, all of Eisenstein's original titles have been put back in their original order, re-inserted into the film and retranslated into English. For instance, Kino's version brings back a quote, originally placed at the beginning of the film, by the Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist by Leon Trotsky. Even though Trotsky wrote extensively on the 1905 revolution, Russian censors decided to replace this quote with a less ambiguous excerpt written by Lenin.
And while the 1925 Russian premiere of POTEMKIN was presented without an exclusive score, Eisenstein personally supervised Edmund Meisel's composition in Germany before his film's premiere in Berlin in 1926. As such, Kino's DVD brings back to life the only official music track for Eisenstein's masterpiece, now rendered by the 55-piece Deutches Filmorchestra in 5.1 Stereo Surround.
After 80 years since its world premiere, dozens of missing shots have been replaced, all 146 mistranslated and reordered titles have been restored to Eisenstein's specifications and Potemkin's iconic imagery has been re-mastered in High Definition.
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN returns Eisenstein's magnificent and revolutionary film to a form as close to its creator's bold vision as we are ever likely to see.
THE STORY
Odessa, 1905. Fed up 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 resentment and unrest of 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.
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