Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it?

> I never thought much about this film after watching it years
> ago, but it's a very artistic film that I'll be watching again, along
> with other favorite Eisenstein films.
>
> Rich Wagner

I also thought the restoration of Battleship Potemkin was great. I
tried Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky a couple of years ago (Image DVD)
and thought it was awful. Criterion has a better DVD version but that
won't help a film I didn't like. Hoping to have better luck with Ivan
the Terrible.
 >> Stay informed about: Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it? 

On Oct 22, 11:16?am, BigMovie....DeleteThis@webtv.net (Old Movie Fan) wrote:
> I got up and watched Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925)
> this morning and all I can say is: Amazing. KINO spent twenty years
> researching the film sources in many different European countries to
> restore the print and create a new musical score. The film is just 75
> minutes long, but it's very intense from beginning to end, making it
> seem much longer.

TCM listed the films running time as 75 minutes, but it not even
75 minutes long if you include both the before and after comments by
Robert Osborne.
Not that I'm complaining, but the film seems to play too fast.
>From start to finish, the film is just 67 minutes long, and when
watched carefully, many movements do seem unnaturally fast.
In an older video catalog, the film was also listed at 67 minutes,
but a second video was offered in what was termed, "Video Accu-Speed,"
a process that returns the film to it's original running time, which
they listed as 73 minutes. Like the (much too long) 22 second gap in
"The Jazz Singer" (when Jolson's father yells "Stop"), it would seem
that these issues would be important when restoring an old film for a
new release.
The same thing occurred with a recently restored version of
Hitchcock's "The Pleasure Garden." Even though two additional scenes
were added and nothing was removed from the original un-restored film,
the restored film was actually about seven minutes shorter than the
film with the fewer scenes. Comparing identical parts of the film
played at the same time, the restored film played about 15% faster
than the original.

The idea that silents are too fast, has always been a problem and it
doesn't seem to be going away.

Rich Wagner
 >> Stay informed about: Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it? 

bigsilentfan RemoveThis @aol.com wrote:
> On Oct 22, 11:16?am, BigMovie... RemoveThis @webtv.net (Old Movie Fan) wrote:
>> I got up and watched Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925)
>> this morning and all I can say is: Amazing. KINO spent twenty years
>> researching the film sources in many different European countries to
>> restore the print and create a new musical score. The film is just 75
>> minutes long, but it's very intense from beginning to end, making it
>> seem much longer.
>
> TCM listed the films running time as 75 minutes, but it not even
> 75 minutes long if you include both the before and after comments by
> Robert Osborne.
> Not that I'm complaining, but the film seems to play too fast.
>>From start to finish, the film is just 67 minutes long, and when
> watched carefully, many movements do seem unnaturally fast.

To whom? Not to my eyes.

> In an older video catalog, the film was also listed at 67 minutes,
> but a second video was offered in what was termed, "Video Accu-Speed,"
> a process that returns the film to it's original running time, which
> they listed as 73 minutes.

Please take "Video Accu-Speed" with as many grains of salt as you can.
It's advertising, not based on historical research. And of course not
all these prints contained the same amount of footage in the first
place. The new restoration has shots that weren't in the commonly
available prints.

> The idea that silents are too fast, has always been a problem and it
> doesn't seem to be going away.
>
> Rich Wagner

There was, of course, no one fixed speed at which silents were
photographed. There is extensive evidence that many silents were
intended to be projected at a slightly faster speed than the camera rate.

We've had similar discussions of projection speed before. As always, I
recommend Kevin Brownlow's article:

http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm

Please read it now before continuing with the following.

It's perhaps time to review the technical problems of showing silent
film in the sound-film era. After theater projectors had been converted
to a constant 24 frames/second sound speed, most cinemas couldn't show a
silent film properly any more. Even by the early 1930s, clips from
silent films were being assembled into humorous short subjects with
"funny" commentary and sound effects, because (especially for pre-1920
films) sound speed was too fast for them to look realistic.

16mm projectors typically had two fixed speeds for "sound" and "silent"
films, but the "silent" one was intended for home movies shot on
spring-wound handheld cameras (usually 16 or 18 frames per second). A
lot of us high-school projector threaders got the idea from these
machines that all theatrical silents needed to be shown that slowly.
Brownlow's article clearly refutes that notion.

With POTEMKIN, the only prints most of us have seen before yesterday
derived from a Soviet print that was step-printed: every other frame of
the negative was imaged twice on the positive print, so that it could be
shown in theaters at 24 frames per second; the result was an effective
speed of 16 frames per second. To my eyes, the resulting action was too
slow, and it really affected the impact of the film.

There's another problem when this step-printed film is transferred to
30-frame-per-second NTSC video. The necessary frame-repeating process
that converts 24 fps film to 30 fps video turns out to catch the
step-print doubling differently in successive cycles, so the action of
the film on video has an additional jerkiness which makes it almost
unwatchable.

Kino's restoration is based on earlier prints which didn't undergo the
step-printing process. And, of course, they can use modern digital
techniques to transfer the film at something other than the mechanical
2/3 speed of step-printing. I haven't attempted to analyze the new
video transfer frame by frame, but it might be at 18 or 19 frames per
second instead of the old equivalent of 16 that we're used to seeing,
and which I always found unnaturally slow.

You and I might argue over the roughly 5% difference between 18 or 19 as
to which looks better to us, but I don't think that's very useful. The
important point is that the film now moves smoothly, even on video, in a
manner that wasn't possible before. (And of course, the restoration is
also sharper, finer-grained, and with a much better tonal scale.)

There was never anything "Accu"rate about the 16 fps rate of the old
prints...it was the inevitable result of the limitations of mechanical
step-printing.

-Neil Midkiff
 >> Stay informed about: Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it? 

On Oct 23, 1:00 am, Neil Midkiff <nmidk... DeleteThis @earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Please take "Video Accu-Speed" with as many grains of salt as you can.
> It's advertising, not based on historical research.

<<snip>>
>
> -Neil Midkiff

That's right. I have an old Video Yesteryear "Video Accu-Speed" VHS
of LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN. It's the complete film, but the running time
is excruciatingly slow--120 minutes for a film that should be about
90.

Dr. Giraud
 >> Stay informed about: Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it? 

Thanks Neil for taking the time to respond as well as adding Brownlow's
link. In his link (which begins much like the "Hollywood" series), the
preference of slightly faster being preferable to slower also came
through loud and clear. As you said, the film plays very smoothly and
the pace, along with the music is a perfect match.
There are so many wonderfully clear images that I had never noticed,
and it was when I went back, only to take a close look at some scenes
that I noticed some of the background or subtle action moving faster
than seemed natural. That's when I checked the actual run time of the
film.
As was said, I'm not complaining about this film, that I had once
considered a chore to watch.
As they've said about director, John Ford, Eisenstein was an artist,
and film was his canvas. It's an amazing film indeed.

Rich Wagner
 >> Stay informed about: Potemkin on TCM. Anyone see it?