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The Pet Shop Boys were here to play their 72 minute score to "Battleship Potemkin" live, accompanied by the Dresdner Sinfoniker. It was great to have an event like this in central London. The last time I saw a show in Trafalgar Square it was a celebration of South Africa's freedom with Nelson Mandela and R.E.M. on the stage. (plus The Corrs, and Billy Ocean, and David A. Stewart covering U2, and lots of other horrors I thought I had erased from my memory). On that occasion to be in the audience you had to win wristbands in a lucky dip-style draw to control the size of the crowd, and we were hemmed in by traffic like so many battery chickens. Now that one side of the square is pedestrianised, the audience for the Pet Shop Boys event numbered 25,000 (according to the police) and we had breathing space, were able to move around, and we didn't have to suffer the fountains being covered over, cordoned off, and generally getting in the way. It is difficult to judge a lengthy piece of music based on just one listen - but on the whole I enjoyed the score. There were some points where it worked extremely well. The film sequence of the mutiny developing on the deck as the sailors fight against the prospect of the firing squad for refusing to eat their soup was underscored by a frantically rousing house-stomper. It genuinely added musical power to an already charged scene. Likewise the music that backed up the earlier scene where the ship's doctor declares the maggot-ridden meat fit for human consumption carried a growing threat and tension with it. Later on the Pet Ship Boys picked up the pace again, as a backdrop to Eisenstein's quick cutting images of pistons turning and machinery clanking as the Battleship Potemkin prepares to face the fleet. There were also some very clever moments, aided no doubt by the ability of computers to synchronise with the images, where the music echoed the (historically fictional) firing of guns at civilians on the Odessa steps, or when a discordant smack of notes coincided exactly with the moment a foot connected with a set of piano keys in an attempt to scramble over the instrument. There were also some moments where the soundtrack seemed to work against the movie - notably when the Pet Shop Boys perform what must surely be a future single, and the track they used as an encore. The new track was mainly piano lead and lyrically echoed the cry of the mutineering sailors - "One for all and all for one for freedom". Whilst working well as a counterpoint to the frenetic action as the sailors fought on the ship and then bought Vakulinchuk's body ashore, it distracted from the moment when the spirit of anger grows in the people of Odessa. Whilst on screen tears were shed, faces tightened, fists were clenched and revenge was vowed, the Pet Shop Boys were balladeering. Contemporary politics reared their head in the lengthy, and to be honest tedious introduction which featured a diatribe at the crowd with an anti-Iraq war message, overshadowing the interesting facts read out - for example - that there had been 1322 political demonstrations in Trafalgar Square since it was built. It also seemed misguided, as the audience wasn't consciously there as part of an anti-war protest. In truth, boasting about how many protests against the war had taken place in central London over the last two years with every single member of the audience knowing full well that the country still went to war regardless only seemed to emphasise how ultimately futile the well attended protests last year were. [Perhaps the anti-war protesters should have enlisted some privileged friends of the establishment to storm the House of Commons on their behalf to increase their public profile?] And modern day politics also reared its ugly head in Neil's lyrics. The soundtrack contained two new songs, the ballad mentioned above, and one which had the lyrics "If you didn't really understand the cause...how come we went to war". This didn't seem relevant to anything other than 2003, and certainly not relevant to the events in 1905 that Eisenstein was depicting - where it was quite clear that everybody *did* understand the cause. As for the movie itself, a multitude of film studies students and genuine critics have written about it and added far more worth to the sum of human knowledge than I ever will. Suffice it to say that if you have any interest in either the history of the cinema or the history of the Soviet revolution in Russia it is required viewing. You can't help but admire Eisenstein's work. There is no CGI on display here, when he wants to film the whole of Odessa paying respect to Vakulinchuk he films a city's worth of extras marching through the streets and across the bridges of the city. The technical accomplishment of the film is impressive, from the proto-special effects shots of the faded-in imagined corpses hanging from the Potemkin's metalwork, to the achievement of stable tracking shots of a flotilla of small sailing boats. It can't be faulted, and even as a silent black and white movie the cinematography barely looks dated. As an event I enjoyed it, although to be honest you'd be hard pushed to arrange something more to my taste - as a long standing Pet Shop Boys fan and student of Russian history everyone I spoke to the following week from my mum to my friends said "Oh I knew you'd be at that thing in Trafalgar Square". I hope that at some point the film and soundtrack will be made available as a dual package - I'd love to be able to sit down and watch/listen to it again in a situation where I wasn't jostling with fans & tourists & film buffs & fountains in the drizzling rain.
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