Battleship Potemkin (with Live Score)Battleship Potemkin (with Live Score)

At this special Foyle Film Festival event, Vincent O’Callaghan blends field recordings with an ambient score to reimagine Eisenstein’s seminal icon of film history from 1925: Battleship Potemkin.

A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere, Sergei Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content. Declared the greatest film of all time at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and one of the only films to have appeared on all of Sight and Sound’s critics’ polls (1952 to 2022), Battleship Potemkin has also been widely censored, as much out of fear of the perceived influence of its ideas as for any contentious material on screen.

In essence, it tells a five-part story of a naval mutiny leading to full-blown revolution, but while this material could be crudely propagandist in other hands, Eisenstein uses images of such dynamic compositional strength and editing of such frame-perfect precision that it’s hard not to be swept along, regardless of personal politics. Despite endless quotation and parody, the set-piece massacre on the Odessa Steps still packs a sledgehammer punch.

Sergei Eisenstein | Soviet Union | 1925 | 75 mins | 12 | Silent Film