Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein is one of few films that one can re-edit with a great deal of freedom. The way the film was shot lends itself to re-arrangement, and the lack of sound, save music, makes it easier to manipulate the footage and the meaning. I feel my choice to re-edit Battlship Potemkin was appropriate because I’m not the first to do so, Eisenstein would no doubt appreciate it, and it was just a lot of fun to do.
Firstly, the DVD version of Battle Ship Potemkin that you saw is not the original. No original copies of the film survive. Copies that were not destroyed are of disparate lengths, and for this reason it is known that they have been re-edited/ re-interpreted by someone else. The original film footage survives but it is in too delicate a state to be re-printed. For this reason the full-length versions of the film being circulated today might be close to what the original was but they are still between 5 and 20 minutes shorter than what was originally exhibited. Most of these versions have been pieced together from memory and Eisenstein’s notes, so an evolution involving many hands has no doubt taken place over time even though Eisenstein was never involved in a re-editing of the film. For this reason I felt more empowered to attempt a re-edit, considering that the order and length of many of the shots have already been altered.
Secondly, Eisenstein shot Battleship Potemkin in such a way that he could rethink the film during the editing process and emphasize certain moments and actions. For example, the scene where the sailor washing dishes breaks the dish angrily. Eisenstein shot this scene from many different angles, breaking up the actions and expressions, as with Kabuki theater, so that he could re-edit the elements that he filmed later. He combined the shots in the dish-breaking scene so that we see the same motion from 3 different angles but it seems continuous to the viewer. He was one of the first filmmakers to shoot and edit this way, and these “disintegrated” scenes allowed me to also re-interpret the story. I believe Eisenstein would have appreciated my interpretation because it proves that his filmmaking was sufficiently disintegrated and neutral that someone could create a whole new film from the elements of Battle Ship Potemkin.
Finally, Re-editing Battleship Potemkin is extremely stimulating because it is without a doubt one of the most famous and highly regarded films in the history of cinema. Even though the film was banned for a long period of time for supposed “suberversiveness” . it has remained popular since its release in 1927 and I believe it owes much of this popularity to the way the film was edited. Just as Eisenstein says that shots should remain “neutral” this film has a sufficient number of neutral shots and close-ups such that the entire plot can in a way be turned on its head through editing. You can use A and B to create C in the minds of audiences or you can use A and B to create D with Eisenstein’s footage. Mining the film for the right shots to include helped me to pay attention to Eisenstein’s editing decisions and see them with a more critical eye. I realized that the true power of his film stems from the juxtapositions he creates. Like Haiku poetry, sometimes he uses images that are seemingly unrelated to help you fill in the gaps in your mind and create meaning. For example, during most of the Odessa step sequence the soldiers and the people are rarely in the same shot. Because of the screen directions and the cross-cutting of fear and running with guns firing, we understand his meaning intuitively. This cross-cutting technique makes editing flexible as all the actions in frame don’t have to necessarily happen in a certain order. Using his same editing techniques I created “Battleship Pirates” as an experiment to see if Esienstein’s film lives up to the ideals set forth in his writings and in his philosophy of filmmaking and also to experiment with editing.
My Rules:
1. Use no new footage
2. Communicate an overarching plot as well as “montage cells”
3. Use none of Eisenstein’s original edit points. (I used 2 in the end)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAKgYEa2obI
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