The Battleship Potemkin
Cultural Centre Concert Hall
Ends tomorrow
Despite its propagandist message, the energy and perfection of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin - a Soviet film classic made in 1925 about the mutiny on the Potemkin in the midst of Russia's 1905 revolution - remain entrancing.
In 1976, Soviet musicologists added to a restored version of this silent film the music of another Russian genius - Dmitri Shostakovich - using materials from his fifth, eighth, 10th and 11th symphonies. In the 1990s, a performance score of this soundtrack was recompiled by American Sheldon Rich and his colleagues. This new production, which has toured the world, is now getting its Asian debut as the Hong Kong Philharmonic performs live to accompany screenings of the film.
Potemkin is a brilliant demonstration of Eisenstein's montage aesthetics - the rhetoric of cinematic editing - especially in the 'Odessa steps' sequence, the most famous montage sequence in film history. What's more, the composition of virtually every shot is astoundingly perfect, further highlighting the filmmaker's genius. But great music does not invariably fuse with great cinema.