It’s now 100 years since Sergei Eisenstein rewrote the book on cinematic grammar with his seminal work of montage-cinema ‘Battleship Potemkin’.  Initially baffling to critics and audiences alike, the film and Eisenstein’s radical approach to film editing was soon taken up and championed as the new gold standard of film storytelling.

Recounting the events of a 1905 mutiny on the titular battleship, Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ injected a new energy and intellect into the film image hitherto unseen, and ‘Potemkin’ catapulted cinema beyond its theatrical limitations, forever changing the fundamental DNA of the seventh art. 

To mark the centenary, the BFI have reissued the film with the 2005 score composed by the team of Neil Tenant and Chris Lowe, better known by their pop-moniker, The Pet Shop Boys. It’ll be 40 years ago this month that the reissue of their failed 1984 single ‘West End Girls’ began its steady climb to number one in the UK charts, making this screening a sort-of double celebration. 

And for those of you who fancy some more Pet Shop Boys, stick around for a screening of their surreal road movie ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ later in the evening.