A musical ride on ‘Battleship Potemkin’
(Hamilton Spectator, Nov. 18, 2025)
Some cinephiles will tell you the be-all, end-all of movies is “Battleship Potemkin.”
They recognize it as the Book of Genesis, as being in the DNA of every film that followed. They’ll tell you it’s the code underlying every montage or editing decision of every director in the 100 years since its premiere.
Regular filmgoers might not recognize the title, but watching the film will say, “Oh, yeah! I know that scene.” An opportunity to catch it again, or for the first time, comes this week.
“Battleship Potemkin” gets a reshowing on Nov. 19 at the Playhouse Cinema on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.
The scene everyone recognizes is the one with the pram: the baby stroller rolling down courthouse steps in slow motion during a shootout between Kevin Costner’s character and Al Capone’s thugs in “The Untouchables.” That scene is Brian De Palma’s direct nod to “The Odessa Steps,” which constitutes Part 4 of “Battleship Potemkin.”
The movie, conceived and directed by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, was shot to look like a newsreel, although it is the fictional telling of a 1905 mutiny at sea.
“Eisenstein not only laid the theoretical foundation for much of 20th-century modernist cinema, but in 1925 made one of cinema’s great classics, applying dialectics to montage, composition and meaning,” director Michael Mann is quoted as saying.
The film was banned in many countries, including its native Soviet Union — presumably for the epigraph by Leon Trotsky — and in Nazi Germany, where it was believed the film could incite audiences to action like the mutinous seamen.
The film is often decried as propaganda, but as Hamilton filmmaker Terrance Odette said: “It is a significant and important work (and) no more a propaganda piece than a good deal of Hollywood war films from that era.”
It was Odette who approached the owners of Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton to consider screening the film. Odette also commissioned Hamilton graphic novelist Kevin Mutch to design the film poster.
Just as controversial at the time was Edmund Meisel’s musical accompaniment to “Potemkin.” The New York Herald Tribune declared the score, in a contemporaneous review of the movie, as “powerful, as vital, as galvanic, and electrifying as the film.”
Germany’s Nazi-run press begged to differ and singled it out for criticism. “This, generally speaking, is the first time that political charges have been brought against a musical composition,” Meisel is reported to have said in response.
Eisenstein apparently suggested that the music should be rewritten every 20 years to retain relevance to passing generations, and many have taken him up on the idea. Among those who have created new versions are Dmitri Shostakovich, the BBC’s Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Pet Shop Boys.
And, now, Hamilton composer and producer Adrian Ellis.
Ellis’s group, Projector Assembly, comprising himself on synthesizers, guitars and percussion, Nick (Walker) Grimshaw (synthesizers and percussion) and Brielle Goheen on strings, will accompany the live screening.
Before sitting down to write the new score, Ellis said he had listened to Meisel’s score and found it “post-Wagnerian and symphonic.
“It was very different from what I was thinking (of writing) so I was not concerned about it becoming an earworm or anything.”
Of concern to Ellis was how to “sustain interest and support the narrative. How do you tell a story?” Meisel did a great job of that, Ellis said, particularly in the chilling, sustained-action sequence of “The Odessa Steps,” which is seven minutes long.
When Odette approached Ellis with the idea of a new score for the screening, Ellis was reminded of a Francis Bacon painting influenced by the final image of “The Odessa Steps” sequence: a woman whose eyeglasses have been shot through.
“It made me think of the current political climate, the anxiety and violence we’re facing,” Ellis said. “In its way, it’s very modern and still an important film. It’s about people coming together to overcome an oppressive force. Around the globe, (you see all these) political machinations. So I wanted to produce something modern, with more electronic music. Something anxiety-producing would be appropriate.”