Sergei Eisenstein
Last night I attended a concert at Birmingham Symphony Hall given by Michael Nyman and his band. The first half of the concert comprised of performances of film music from The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), and Prospero's Books (1991). The second half was the UK premiere of Nyman's new music for Battleship Potemkin (1925) which was screened as the band played the accompanying score.
Before the concert I attended a pre-concert coversation with Michael Nyman in which he described the ways in which his score for Battleship Potemkin is more like other conventional film music in that it was written to reflect the images on the screen, unlike his previous film music that progresses irrespective of what is happening visually.
More about the event here
http://www.thsh.co.uk/event/battleship-potemkin-12/
More about the event here
http://www.thsh.co.uk/event/battleship-potemkin-12/
Sergei Eisentein's epic dramatisation of the 1905 Russian naval mutiny that preciptated a massacre by the Tsarist military (although not how it is portrayed in the film) was projected over the head of the composer at the piano.... and other eleven musicians in the band.
Somewhere I still have Battleship Potemkin on video, but unlike last night's showing... when I have watched the film before the subtitles of this silent classic were always in English.
Not last night.
Perhaps I am missing a vital artistic point here, but having the original Russian titles without translation may have concentrated minds on the music, but for me at least, it didn't do much for the cinematic experience.
I want to know what that wildman of a priest said to cause so much trouble and I want to have those agitators speak to me across the decades, this film has fired up revolutions, so I think the words are quite important.
Somewhere I still have Battleship Potemkin on video, but unlike last night's showing... when I have watched the film before the subtitles of this silent classic were always in English.
Not last night.
Perhaps I am missing a vital artistic point here, but having the original Russian titles without translation may have concentrated minds on the music, but for me at least, it didn't do much for the cinematic experience.
I want to know what that wildman of a priest said to cause so much trouble and I want to have those agitators speak to me across the decades, this film has fired up revolutions, so I think the words are quite important.
This is particularly true since 2004, when a restoration of the film was completed.
Wikipedia tells us that many excised scenes of violence were restored, as well as the original
written introduction by (Leon) Trotsky.
The film was banned in West Germany, Britain (until 1954 and X-rated until 1978), France, and other countries for its revolutionary zeal. It was even banned in the Soviet Union for a short period when the Comintern, under Stalin's Socialism in One Country policy, ceased promoting world revolution.
Here is the trailer to the relaunched film with original 1926 score by Edmund Meisel. Obviously since it was only first performed last night... it is a bit soon to hope to find Nyman's new score online, but the power of the original dama is again captured in the restored version of the film.
The film was banned in West Germany, Britain (until 1954 and X-rated until 1978), France, and other countries for its revolutionary zeal. It was even banned in the Soviet Union for a short period when the Comintern, under Stalin's Socialism in One Country policy, ceased promoting world revolution.
Here is the trailer to the relaunched film with original 1926 score by Edmund Meisel. Obviously since it was only first performed last night... it is a bit soon to hope to find Nyman's new score online, but the power of the original dama is again captured in the restored version of the film.
The previous titles, which had toned down the mutinous sailors' revolutionary rhetoric, were corrected so that they would now be an accurate translation of the original Russian titles in the film. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin
All that was lost on me last night I'm afraid, and probably anyone else there who was not being able to read the original Russian.
Anyway.....
I'll stop grumbling now, the music was excellent, I wish they allowed filming, I would have done a hand held image thing, but surprisingly since the Symphony Hall was only a quarter to a third full there was nowhere to hide.
I must say that given it was Michael Nyman's premiére performance I found it surprising that the place had not sold out and indeed it was more than half empty.
Maybe the venue was too big or something, the Town Hall might have been better?
Or maybe it's just another sign of the economic depression created by corporate capital who are intent upon rolling back expectations with a massive bottom-up transfer of wealth to the benefit of the very few and the detriment of the very many.
If so, this rebellious film is locked into a certain synchronicity which reflects oddly enough the last time I was at the Symphony Hall.
It was around last Christmas when it was absolutely jam-packed to the (very high) rafters for the Kirov Ballet performance of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker which of course is also a thoroughly Russian event as coincidence would have it.
Strange that, but nothing to do with any of this actually because as revolutionary propaganda films go - Battleship Potemkin is indisputably the absolute bees knees.
The scene of the cruel Tsarist troops mercilessly slaughtering men women and children on the steps of Odessa never actually happened, but it has more than once been cited as a real historical event, so powerful was the imagery in this film made 8 years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 created Soviet Russia.
Here is the band playing one of the peices from the first half of last night's performance on YouTube filmed previously at some other concert:-
"Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds" from "The Draughtsman's Contract".
ENJOY!
First off, thanks for reigniting my interest in seeing this film, AA. I first saw this in a university class and was quite taken by the way Eisenstein built up the suspense leading up to the mutiny so dramatically. This film works on such a "gut" level I can't imagine a viewer not getting caught up in this story, unlike some of Eisenstein later works--some of which like "October" (Ten Days That Shook The World) from 1927 that, while also a great film, fiddled with here and there to reflect a larger role for Stalin and a lesser one for Trotsky (at least in the version I saw.)
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that it wasn't banned in Nazi Germany according to Wikipedia. Wonder if they monkeyed with the subtitles? But no matter.
The lack of subtitles I find a bit confounding. As you say, it really would help the film to restore it in as complete a form for the English-language viewer.
In any case, I wish you had had a full house to see this classic film. (Blasted recession!) I think silent films really come alive with a full audience, and a live band.
No matter if one is viewing a Chaplin two-reeler with a live organist or or a full-length German expressionistic work by Fritz Lang or F W Murnau you really get to understand some of the power of what these films meant to audiences 9 or ten decades ago. Television, for all it's bells and whistles, doesn't cut it.
I think "The Draughtsman's Contract" is the only Peter Greenway film I've seem. I always think of that film as being closer to what Kubrick was trying to get in "Barry Lyndon" (1975), a real time machine experience back to 18th Century. I can't say which film is better though.
Lovely to hear part of that beautiful baroque score.
Thanks for your comments Doug . I too was surprised that the film wasn't banned during the Nazi era even though it was banned afterwards by freedom-loving post-war democratic West German governments. One of life's little ironies I think, but in the Cold War context of divided Germany I suppose the Bolshevik threat seemed more in their faces than it did during the halcyon days of the early Third Reich.
DeleteI became interested in why Joseph Goebbels liked it so much and it was I decided because Goebbels just loved propaganda, he was a propaganda freak, had he been born a generation or two later he'd have been working on Madison Avenue as Hillary Clinton's PR consultant or something like that (providing he could make the hate-figure transition from Jew to Muslim of course?).
Goebbels greatly admired the trade in selling ideas to the hypnotised masses... so much that he came to see Battleship Potemkin as the ultimate Bolshevism advertisement and he appreciated it as such I think.
But he was also very interested in film not only because he was captivated by the incrediblle cinematography of Leni Riefenstahl (aren't we all), but also because he was impressed by the anti-British propaganda films of his brother-in-law Max W Kimmich.
Goebebels although a published author was as Wikipedia points out embittered by the frustration of his literary career; his novel did not find a publisher until 1929 and his plays were never staged.
He found an outlet for his desire to write in his diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life. He later worked as a bank clerk and a caller on the stock exchange.
I thought it funny that his fellow Nazi psychopath Heinrich Himmler forbade the SS from watching the film whilst everyone else in Germany could watch it... another odd little twist of irony I thought.
The sort of absurdity in fact, that turns geopolitics into a lethal form of street theatre where club-foot midgets stride out, as blond haired blue eyed demigods of a muscular Aryan tomorrow. What a pantomime that was!
Thanks for your input here Doug, I know films and film making are your specialist areas of expertise so thanks for your contribution here in particular, much appreciated.
The thought of a psycho like Goebbels on Madison Avenue is both chilling and plausible, AA. I was interested especially in your background on his love of propaganda in all its forms.
DeleteI came across this pronouncement he made about Alfred Hitchcock's second American film, "Foreign Correspondent" (1940), a tale of an American reporter caught up in a spot of espionage and romance in a Europe on the brink of WWII. He mentioned Goebbels' diary entry on this film work in a several of his extended interviews.
"A masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries."
A certain impression indeed! There are many great set scenes in the film , including one where an assassin uses a gun hidden by a flash camera to shoot a European statesman and peace advocate (a trick later used by a real assassin in Tehran, Iran, later in the war) McCrea's journalist is almost chewed up literally in the gears of the inside of a Dutch windmill when his trench-coat is caught--a perfect visual of the naive American "observer" in over his head at the hands of a totalitarian spy ring.
Ironically, a couple of the writers of this major anti-Nazi film were later blacklisted for their association with the US Communist Party.
To bring it full circle Hitchcock learned a great deal about film-making from watching German film-makers like FW Murnau at work. "Hitch" was shooting a couple films at the German UFA studios in the 1920's. Ufa was the same studio that was later taken over by the Nazis. Hitch's "muscular aryans" in that war were guys like McCrea and Cary Grant in "Notorious", hard-edged wisecrackers and ladykillers who substituted for the director's portly self--a short and modest-looking chap who looked to me like a City of London bank manager.
Anyway, I do love films and filmmakers and I think there are occasions where propaganda and art cross in a struggle for the ideas that will bring people to action.
ditto to the above, I'm another fan of the original silent film, it's like viewing a lost art form. I've not seen this one in its entirety but ... it looks as violent as any of the modern films and the way in which silent films carry you makes the violence and shock more powerful than many modern film.
ReplyDeleteGlad you had a good evening and yes...........it is a bloody shame this was played out to a half empty venue. But are you sure this is the result of recession and not peoples apathy and disinterest?, note the pubs and bingo halls remain full during this 'recession'.
Thanks for your comment Loretta, I have seen previous screenings of Battleship Potemkim when a cheer has arisen from the audience when the hand painted red flag appears on the mast of the monochrome vessel.
DeleteMind you that was at the Star Club in Birmingham which used to be run by the Communist Party of Great Britain, the only club that would ever have me as a member :-)
I don't know about the bingo halls, but the pubs around here are not full at all Loretta.
According to the FT earlier this year
An average of 16 pubs a week closed their doors in the six months until the end of December last year, according to figures by the beer and pub pressure group the Campaign for Real Ale. This was up from an average of 14 closures a week in the first half of 2011.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ac35c2e-45e1-11e1-9592-00144feabdc0.html#axzz28VpJR1aB
Actually it is one of the interesting things about this recession, in previous downturns including the Great Depression of the 20s and 30s pubs have always prospered, but not this time... they are much less popular now. Boozing has been largely privatised under successive British governments we have become less social in our habits. The smoking ban is another factor in the decline of the pub I think.
I don't know why but at more than £30 per ticket to watch a black and white film (irrespective of the presence of Michael Nyman and band) might have just made the whole thing too expensive.
I think he would have done better to either have the premier in the smaller Town Hall in Birmingham, or if it had been in London I suspect it would have probably sold out, not that I would support that option myself because I am grateful for it not being in the capital.
I agree it was a shame that the impact was somewhat lost because of the poor attendance, but omitting the English titles was the biggest mistake I think.