At this point in my life I have seen Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary classic Battleship Potemkin more times than I can count, and its ahead-of-its-time visual power never ceases to amaze me. Yet, watching the 2005 Berlin-Deutsche Kinematek/BFI/Gosfilmkino restoration with the original, definitive orchestral score by Edmund Miesel was like seeing it again for the first time. The various censor cuts and reconstructions that have been passed down in succeeding prints over the decades have been corrected, bringing it back to 1,374 shots and 146 intertitles, thus allowing us to fully appreciate the impact of Eisenstein’s revolutionary montage aesthetic. As one of the most powerful examples of film theory brought to life, Potemkin is a political, historical, and cinematic masterpiece reborn. (DVD)