Domino dancing: "Battleship Potemkin"

To mark the film's centenary, the BFI have reissued 1925's Battleship Potemkin with the Pet Shop Boys soundtrack commissioned by then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone for the open-air screening in Trafalgar Square in September 2004. (These boys were ahead of the trend for reprogramming the silent canon: at my screening, the film was preceded by a promo for the new Silents Synced initiative's upcoming first iteration, setting 1922's Nosferatu to the Radiohead albums Amnesiac and Kid A. Play two Radiohead albums back-to-back, and reawakening the pallid undead is the very least you can expect.) It wouldn't surprise me if some purists still cavilled at this attempt to convert a space as sacred as the cinema hall into a common club or dance tent, yet the PSBs' EDM closely aligns with the Eisensteinian push for agitation: the maggots in the meat rhyming with the sailors wriggling about the ship, the swinging galleys and ever-pumping pistons, the crowds scuttling this way and that, the general rat-a-tat cutting, even before any rifle is picked up in anger and everybody heads for the Odessa Steps. (Watch them all fall down.) These were always moving pictures from an era when the very idea of motion pictures was still in flux, with montage sequences - edit suite mash-ups - which themselves wanted to make the viewer dance in some way. But this is the version that bangs down the Es in Eisenstein.

It is, then, a markedly different experience from watching Potemkin on a dusty VHS with a traditional orchestral score, as I must have done in my film student days. This busy score, performed with the Dresdner Sinfoniker (conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, with orchestrations by Torsten Rasch), matches Eisenstein's cast of thousands with a cast of a thousand instruments, striving to seize our ears much as the director sought to seize our eyes: the push-and-pull extends to some battle between sound and vision. The agitation is mostly ambient, though there are places where you can see and hear the Boys having mischievous, sight-specific fun: a synthesised reveille, a Lord's Prayer inscription on a plate sung as a vocal refrain, an electronic heartbeat in the moments before the uprising that inevitably recalls the duo's hit single "Heart", a stretch towards the end that may well be the closest PSB have ever sounded to Depeche Mode. (The revolutionary urges Eisenstein preserved are so powerful they begin to change the composers themselves.) Potemkin made subject to a very 21st century accelerationism, brought back into synch with the turbulence of the modern era, the film now seems quicker and more propulsive than it's ever been: a brief sketch of shipbound hell, the paradise of self-determination regained and then decisively lost, before the tatters of the red flag are finally, stirringly picked up and waved anew. It's no longer historical drama, but perhaps the first great action movie: the original Red October, a proto-Crimson Tide, and never once caught being boring.

Battleship Potemkin is now playing in selected cinemas, and available on limited-edition Blu-ray through the BFI.