Battleship Potemkin and Drifters Blu-ray Review

• 18th Nov 2012

Despite its long history and the seemingly endless reels of antique footage, film is a fragile medium. Many of the silent screen stars who shaped the cult of celebrity as we know it today are remembered only through photographs and yellowing newspaper reviews; the movies that made them famous are lost and gone forever.

The BFI continues its sterling work to save what is now the world’s collective cultural heritage with a revival of the most seminal double-bill in English film history:  the 1929 London Film Society screening of Eisenstein’s now-legendary Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929).

There is not much to say about Potemkin that hasn’t been said already, other than if you’ve never seen it before because you’ve been put off by its status as an ‘epic’ then you’ve been depriving yourself unnecessarily. Potemkin is surprisingly brief – at only 69 minutes, it’s about half as long as Waterworld and wholly more worthwhile. (And that may be the last time you ever see those two mentioned in the same sentence.) The restored print looks fantastic, even though the hand-colouring of the red flag hoisted by the Potemkin’s crew seems incongruously dinky.

Drifters is an altogether more subtle viewing experience, which is unsurprising given that it’s all about herring fishing. It’s surprisingly gripping for a glorified puff piece about British industry, perhaps because it documents a way of life that was already fading into obsolescence at the time. Although the film itself is beautiful to look at it, the real star is Jason Singh’s ethereal and entirely appropriate score.

Apart from Grierson’s obvious aesthetic debt to Eisenstein, the films make interesting companion pieces as each reflects quite different aspects of the ‘romance’ of a life at sea.

Extras on the DVD include New Zealand artist Len Lye’s six-minute piece Trade Tattoo (1937), Harry Watt’s mini-drama North Sea (1938) and Grierson’s follow-up to Drifters, Granton Trawler (1934), and the disc is packaged with an informative and well-written booklet.

Battleship Potemkin – Black and white with hand-coloured detail. Silent, with Russian and English intertitles.

Drifters – Black and white. Silent, with English intertitles.

Clare Moody