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ABSTRACT: This article aims to trace and articulate the extremely rich production and postproduction history of the early Soviet classic, Sergei Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin, 1925). By engaging Paolo Cherchi Usai's idea that early films exist as multiple objects, the paper explicates how Eisenstein's film was re-edited in three of its most important versions: the original 1925 cut; the first international cut, produced in 1926; and the 1950 cut. By elucidating the distinctive sociopolitical conditions that crucially informed all three cuts of the film, the article interprets and compares the visual transformation of Potemkin in accordance with editorial and re-editorial alterations, identifying a nexus of contributing factors that regulate the economy of the visible in Eisenstein's film. I argue that the junction at which authoritative social impulses are negotiated with Eisenstein's individual vision takes us to what might be one of the critical moments in Eisenstein's early career in which his early, avant-garde-informed approach to filmmaking is recalibrated with the rules of dramaturgy of film form.
KEYWORDS: montage, censorship, re-editing, multiple object, visualization of affects, protocols of seeing, narratocracy, Soviet cinema
"[T]he most vital aspect of our work: the problem of representation and the relationship to what is being represented."
SERGEI EISENSTEIN, "ON THE STRUCTURE OF THINGS"
The dynamic of early cinema is highly resonant with some of the guiding principles of modernist aesthetics, according to which a work of art exists as a modal, processual entity.1 Indeed, if historians and archivists of early cinema are to be trusted, the way in which silent films materially exist should compel us to rethink the way we understand cinema as an art form: not only are early films unstable because they are physically vulnerable (due to the decomposition of nitrate print), but they are also ephemeral in a more profound sense, due to the principal incompleteness and openness of film as an artistic medium. It is with this idea in mind that one of the foremost historians of early cinema, Paolo Cherchi Usai, has alerted us that the earliest films cannot be perceived as unitary, concluded wholes, but as multiple objects, which are "fragmented into a number of different entities equal to the number of surviving copies."2 This proposition, in which the reference is...