The Restored Battleship Potemkin Opens Today In New York, Expanding To LA And San Francisco This March.

A couple weeks back I wrote about the news that Kino had announced an upcoming theatrical tour of their most recent restored print of Battleship Potemkin.

Since then I’ve learned that this is in fact the print that was on their Blu-ray that was released early last year. The theatrical dates have been announced, and I’m listing them below. The film will open today at the Film Forum in New York, and will screen until next Thursday.

If your city isn’t listed below, I’d highly recommend you get in touch with your local arthouse theater, and make sure they know there is a demand for the film, and hopefully they’ll contact Kino. If you were lucky enough to catch the theatrical tour of the restored Metropolis, then you know how special it is to catch these older films on the big screen.

From the Press Release:

New York, NY – January 11, 2010 – Kino International, a theatrical releasing arm of Kino Lorber Inc., is proud to announce a new 35mm restoration of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925). This brand-new print of one of the most important films ever made is now set to open in Los Angeles (at the Landmark Nuart Theater) and San Francisco (at the Castro Theater) on March 18, 2011, after a US premiere in New York City on January 19.

Including, for the first time since the 1925 Moscow premiere, all of Eisenstein’s 1,374 original shots, Kino’s restored Battleship Potemkin also re-introduces Edmund Meisel’s 1925 score, now performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra. The result is a Potemkin unlike anything you’ve ever seen, now as close as possible to how it was shown at its first screenings, when Charlie Chaplin was not alone in calling it “the best film in the world.”

There’s one maggot in the meat too many for the already fed-up sailors of the armored warship Potemkin, as 1905 Czarist Russia verges on (pre-Bolshevik) revolution. One of the genuinely exciting legends of the cinema, Eisenstein’s epic revolutionized screen editing, treatment of violence, and propaganda: the Battleship Potemkin incident, conceived as a single episode of a planned pageant on the 1905 revolt, in celebration of its 20th anniversary, comprised only one-half page of the original script. The devastating “Odessa steps” sequence (“a few minutes in cinema as brilliantly organized as a movement in a Beethoven symphony” – James Agee), conceived by Eisenstein only when he arrived on location, is still perhaps the most famous, anthologized, and imitated in film history.

Potemkin was edited in less than three weeks, the finishing touches being made to the final reel as the first was already being projected at the premiere. Voted in 1958 by an international jury of 117 film historians as “the best film of all time,” though Soviet-sponsored “restorations” in ensuing decades destroyed the rhythm of Eisenstein’s editing by “step printing” the images to conform to sound speed.

RESTORED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF ENNO PATALAS IN COLLABORATION WITH ANNA BOHN.

PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH DEUTSCHE KINEMATHEK – MUSEUM FUR FILM UND FERNSEHEN SUPPORTED BY BUNDES ARCHIV, BERLIN; BFI, LONDON; GOS FILMOFOND, MOSCOW; FILM MUSEUM, MUNICH