Battleship Potemkin is the second silent classic released on Blu-ray by Kino (and for that matter, any label) in the United States. I review the film and the disc for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Psst! "Battleship Potemkin is now on Blu-ray, comrade.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the failed 1905 uprising against the Czar. The government hoped for a traditional film extolling the heroism of the sailors who led the mutiny against the Czarist military commanders. Eisenstein delivered a film that carried his revolutionary message of collective action against corrupt authority in the very form of his film, most directly through the editing that put his theories of montage to practice. Battleship Potemkin is agitprop, but cinematically magnificent agitprop, an attempt to redefine the conventions of narrative storytelling away from emotional connections with the dramatic journeys of individual characters and into a “socialist ideal” of revolutionary art where the hero is the collective hero and the individuals are simply members of the movement: faces in a crowd dedicated to the ideals of social justice.

Read the complete feature here.

My fourth report from the screening rooms of SIFF is now up on GreenCine.

There are various world premieres and the dozens of guests arriving for screenings and audience Q&As, but the highlight event will surely be the screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at Benaroya Hall, with Sergei Prokofiev’s score performed live by the Seattle Symphony and Chorale with mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld.

The film is undeniably a classic, and just as undeniably a bald piece of nationalist propaganda that celebrates the salt-of-the-earth heroism of Russian citizens who rise up to defeat the invading German Teutonic Knights (backed by the blessing of the Catholic Church), not just to defend their homeland but to bring glory to their national honor. It’s largely pageant until the famous battle on the ice, which is a thrilling work of cinema and illustrates just what a magnificent action painter Eiseinstein was. The epic scenes of the Teutonic Knights on horseback (looking like some unholy combination of Viking invader, aristocrat soldier and Klu Klux Klan grandmaster) overwhelmed by the onrushing armies of Russian peasant foot soldiers is as evocative a portrait of action cinema as you’ll see.

The other exciting development for the last weekend will be the three days of screenings at The Cinerama, the crown jewel of Seattle cinemas. Not that it’s necessarily showing the big screen spectaculars that should have been reserved for this venue, but it should be a kick to see the Hong Kong collaboration Triangle and the French war movie Female Agents thrown across the Cinerama’s huge screen.

Read the full piece here.

A final note: I wrote this before embarking on a day of interviews followed by screenings at the Cinerama. And I can attest that it was indeed a kick to see the full widescreen Triangle, a highly entertaining tangle of a movie, and the “Dirty Dozen”-inspired Female Agents, which delivers neither more nor less than an otherwise conventional war thriller done up with style, romanticized sacrifice and stoic heroism in the face of brutal torture, was indeed a kick. And also note that, appearances aside, the nasty Nazi tortures, which include near-drowning of prisoners, inflicted upon their French and British prisoners is nothing like the patriotic interrogation methods that the U.S. humanely applies to the prisoners held in out bases (which include the near drowning of prisoners). To even suggest otherwise would be downright unpatriotic, for as we know, the right to speak out against the injustices of our government is a principle to defended to the death, but never actually acted upon.