Battleship Potemkin

Reconstruction of the 1926 German film version

The reconstructed version of the classic Battleship Potemkin premiered as a special presentation at the Berlinale on 12 February 2005. After years of scouring film archives, the film historian Enno Patalas and his team were able to almost fully reconstruct the re-edited film as it was originally intended.
It was no coincidence that the revolutionary classic premiered in Berlin. The Moscow director Sergei Eisenstein's international career took off after his movie was shown in Berlin in 1926. One of the reasons for its success was the film's score composed by the Berliner Edmund Meisel. The film itself and the score were edited and re-recorded over several decades, the film underwent frequent edits without Eisenstein's approval, a version of which was authorized by Stalin as the authentic Soviet version. Piecing together negatives stored in archives in Moscow, Berlin and London, the project team was able to reconstruct an original version as intended by Eisenstein accompanied by a new recording of Edmund Meisel's original score. Helmut Imig was responsible for the musical arrangement of the original, wonderfully composed score by Edmund Meisel for the reconstructed version.

The "Berlin version" was presented in Essen in January 2008 with a live performance of the score by the renowned Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg conducted by Helmut Imig.


Reconstruction: Filmmuseum Berlin
Artistic director: Enno Patalas

Battleship Potemkin, UdSSR, 1925
Director: Sergej Eisenstein
Music: Edmund Meisel