Potëmkin is not the type of ship that can be sunk with torpedoes. She has weighed anchor forever. She sails. Her wake contains everything. Elements, borders and mankind are powerless again- st her and its immaterial propeller can break the sharpest reefs.

Robert Desnos, Le Soir, 26 March 1927

This new version by the Gesamtleitung der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, presented at the Berlinale 2005 with Meisel’s music executed by the Babelsberg orchestra under the direction of Helmut Imig consists of 1372 shots, 15 more than the previous version (the 1976 sound version) and 45 more than the version handed down by the Gosfilmofond. The 146 opening credits and intertitles are, for the first time, in keeping with the original.

Edmund Meisel

When Edmund Meisel died in 1930 at the age of 36, his admirers and detractors (many on both sides) unanimously agreed on one thing: the music for Ejzenštejn’s Potëmkin, his debut as a film composer, was his masterpiece. This work brought him fame that has lasted beyond his death and provided silent cinema with a permanent legend. Meisel’s music for the Battleship, forgotten for decades and only later rediscovered, adds a second dimension of wonder to the wonder of the film about the Potëmkin: a sonic creation that Meisel’s genius was able to fuse into an organic whole, rendering it irreplaceable and inseparable from the cinematic experience. On 29 April 1926 at the German premiere in Berlin’s Teatro Apollo Meisel presented his score, which was utterly revo- lutionary for the period. Composed over 12 days it conveyed to the cinematic world a musical language that immediately drew the attention of the Berlin audiences who now flocked to the Erwin Piscator theatre where Meisel, as of 1924, had been performing as orchestra director and composer.

Helmut Imig

Helmut Imig was Kapellmeister in Osnabrueck, Munich, and with the Essen Philarmonic. Since 1985 he has worked free lance completing radio recordings in Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Lugano and Lubiana. The key points of his work are experimental music and the accompaniment of silent films. He has composed original music in the style of the period for Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and So This Is Paris. With the German Babelsberg film orchestra he has directed, for ZDF, the music of Wolfgang Zeller for Lotte Reiniger’s film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed.