‘Potemkin’ gets reconstructed

A newly reconstructed version of the 1925 Soviet silent classic “Battleship Potemkin,” featuring shots cut from the original, will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February.

The film now includes the original’s Russian graphics and the opening words of revolutionary Leon Trotsky, which were cut in “one of the most spectacular cases of censorship in the 1920s,” a festival statement said Wednesday. No complete print of the original film survived, it said.

“Battleship Potemkin,” directed by Sergei Eisenstein, dramatizes the mutiny on the Russian ship and its role in inspiring a failed 1905 uprising against the country’s czars. It is perhaps best known for the “Odessa steps” sequence, in which a child in a stroller rolls down a staircase as fighting rages around it.