Posted by Larry Gleeson
Cinema Ritrovato 2017: Battleship Potemkin and Edmund Meisel
“Consider soundtrack Meisel only in its musical component, it is to misunderstand its purpose. Of course, occasionally there is a musical theme, but this soundtrack can be described perfectly as a comment to the film and at the same time a component thereof, a headset symbolism that harmonizes rhythmically and emotionally with sequences of images that strengthens.”
In describing the soundtrack composed by Edmund Meisel ( Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, love the mountains ) for Battleship Potemkin , William Hunter captures the ultimate meaning of such a pioneering music that, even today, thanks to the surprising its complex essence and its incredible power. The same force with which the symphony of the warship most famous film breaks into a frame with a projection alive and pulsating Piazza Maggiore, live music by the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Timothy Brock. An experience that has become reality thanks to the synergy of film historians and commitment stock ranging from Russia to the United States, and Great Britain to Germany, which has the merit of having finally restored the original version of the masterpieceEisenstein and soundtrack Meisel.
It’s been 92 years since its first showing, however Battleship Potemkin is always able to renew the astonishment of those who attend to its staging. Freely inspired by an episode that led to the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the collective drama in five acts of Potemkin winds through the most classic forms – that of tragedy, making those stylistic innovations that decreed – rightly – his elevation to the subject of worship in smoky film clubs of the ’70s. Projections in which mounting of the sights of the Eisenstein film, although stripped of its soundtrack, was gutted in its fundamental components: the worms in the flesh to the wheelchair, to the eye of the mother.
Images – or cinepugni , which have helped to carve in the collective memory for a movie that even the most indifferent, have seen more or less directly: whether the fantozziana average man’s revenge or the lyricism of Ettore Scola We had so beloved . However, it is the theme of the movie, not a hero or a real protagonist, surprises even today with its raw vitality with the recovery of those fundamental values identified that, long ago, had been its another revolution. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
—- Federica Marcucci
(Sourced from Ilcinemaritrovato.it)
