Pet Shop Boys pass screen test with flying colours

Admiral Nelson high up in his crows nest over London's Trafalgar Square squinted down at a broad, white, tall ship's sail. Around this huge canvas a crowd had gathered to watch Einstein's 1925 silent classic, Battleship Potemkin. There were some 25,000 people - perhaps the biggest crowd for an art film.

The original score had been composed by Shostakovich, but tonight the live music played beneath the giant screen was composed by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, Britain's intellectual pop duo better known as the Pet Shop Boys. This mass screening was an idea thought up by Philip Dodd, head of London's Institute of Contemporary Art, a project enthusiastically supported by Ken Livingstone, the popular anti-war mayor of London.

Potemkin tells the story of a 1905 naval mutiny, a tremor that heralded the earthquake of the 1917 Russian revolution. The film's revolutionary theme was taken up before the screening in an anti-war speech, appropriate for a square that's often been the epicentre of political demonstrations.

One restless member of the audience yelled, 'Bring on the millionaire pop stars', and the Pet Shop Boys dutifully took their places as the first image flickered to life and the Dresdener Symphoniker struck up.

The film's early action was accompanied by a techno beat that thudded and thumped along as it heralded the sailor's mutiny scene, then followed a doleful keyboard lament as the insurrection culminated in martyrdom. The central naval battle was accompanied by a rhythmic mix of pistons and clanging sound effects.

From time to time, Tennant's wistful vocals broke in with quasi-liturgical lyrical fragments, 'give us this day our daily bread', 'do not forsake us now.' During the harrowing Odessa Staircase scene, in which a crowd of innocents are massacred by the Tsar's Cossacks, Tennant mournfully sang, 'Why did we go to war?' Why, indeed?