The setting was somewhat bizarrely a Pet Shop Boys performance of their soundtrack to the Battleship Potemkin, with the BBC Symphonic Orchestra, live at the Barbican.
Making much of the future sounds of their electronica, they managed to bring the film into the present day, inasmuch as the artistry and power of the film were projected better for an accessible and contemporary sound track.
I was less convinced about the accompanying blurb, however. Apart from claiming that they were ‘open sourcing the revolution’ (copyrighted DVDs soon to be on sale) it did not for me make revolution a contemporary and personalisable event as they apparently intended. Rather, given the trajectory of Eisenstein’s career, I remembered how it all ended up, and how his youthful artistic and social idealism were betrayed by the momentum of idealism and revolution.
Of course, one cannot simply say that Marxism and Leninism automatically end up with the Gulag. But the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seems to me to hold the seeds of the decay in moral boundaries which led the Russian state in that direction. In Eisenstein’s case it led to a very sad end, essentially dying of worry after Stalin destroyed the film Ivan the Terrible Part III during shooting. It was expected to be a devastating attack on Stalin’s crimes, as was Part II, which was simply banned, although not destroyed.
Part II used the medieval technique of making a veiled attack on Stalin by criticising the dead parallel figure of Ivan - and went so far as to make this very explicit by portraying Ivan’s contemporaries using the same method of attack by staging a play about an ancient tyrant, much to Ivan’s ire.
Personally, the nature of Eisenstein’s propaganda efforts do not simply separate themselves as art or idealism. They weren’t ever intended to be, of course, although Eisenstein no doubt did not expect people to watch his films with the awareness that he was supporting a totalitarian tragedy.
To paraphrase the original inspiration of the Bolsheviks, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as ironic deconstruction.
