Bronenosets Potyomkin

Eisenstein’s depiction of the failed revolution of 1905 in the harbor of Odessa revolutionized the language of film. It became the subject of intensive research by Jay Leyda during his time at the SFA when was given the task of looking for scores for accompanying music from the silent film era. It was already known that Edmund Meisel had composed music whose rhythm was synchronized with the sequence of images for the German premiere of POTYOMKIN in 1926. Yet the score was thought lost for many years until Leyda found a piano piece from Meisel’s composition and parts of the score for the salon orchestra at the Eisenstein archive in Moscow. Arthur Kleiner, the American composer and film music collector, arranged a new recording of Meisel’s music on the basis of this find. To complement the Kleiner version, the so-called sound-on-disc version of BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN will be shown as a comparison, a German dubbed version that was created with Meisel’s music in 1930 and whose reconstruction became possible when Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode found a sound-on-disc recording of the soundtrack at a private estate in Vienna. The guest of the closing evening is film scholar Thomas Tode.

We will show a DCP from the Austrian Film Museum.