Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

[Saturnome]

Huh? Never heard of a Looney Tunes about Eisenstein..?
Isn't it Histeria! ? I read a episode showcased Eisenstein but I've never seen it.

[markhax]

As best as I can tell from Richard Taylor's book on Potemkin, none of the others exist, and it's not clear that they were to involve other directors. It seems that Eisenstein got the commission for the whole film project. And as Eisenstein said in a 1925 interview, "The production of 'The Year 1905' should be on a grandiose scale like the German film ''Die Nibelungen,'" of which the Potemkin incident was to be but a single episode. He spoke of a cast of 20,000 and 250 days of shooting. In part because of time pressures (it had to be finished for the anniversary celebrations in December 1925) and uncooperative weather, the project got drastically scaled down, and as Taylor writes, less than one month before its premiere "'The Year 1905' finally became 'The Battleship Potemkin'."

I just happen to be reading Mike O'Mahony's excellent new monograph on Eisenstein, and since posting the above have come across the following:

"In March 1925 the State Jubilee Committee, established to oversee the commemoration of the 1905 revolution, approached Eisenstein to make a film entitled 'The Year 1905'. Together with Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, screenwriter and member of the Bolshevik Party since 1907, he began work on a scenario, conceiving the film as a vast panorama of the events of 1905. These were to include, in six parts: The Russo-Japanese War; the massacre of innocent workers in St. Petersburg, subsequently known as Bloody Sunday; popular uprisings throughout the city and countryside; a general strike and its suppression by the state; counter-revolutionary pogroms; and the emergence of a political movement in the worker's district of Krasnaya Presnya. One small episode within this historical overview would address the mutiny on the Russian naval vessel Prince Potemkin."

[Stefan Andersson]

French article, from the magazine 1895, on the various versions of Potemkin, and the rediscovery of Meisel´s score:
https://journals.openedition.org/1895/326

Also:
https://journals.openedition.org/1895/5088