H ere for its hundred-year anniversary is a restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering silent classic from 1925, itself commissioned for the 20-year anniversary of the events it showed and reimagined. It is in black-and-white of course, apart from the vivid red flag flown from the battleship’s mast. This rerelease is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Pet Shop Boys in 2005; it is a fervent, continuous score but not, for me, one that engages fully with the drama’s light-and-shade. It also perhaps reopens the debate about when and how a silent-movie musical accompaniment should be content to fall silent in favour of discreet ambient background sound.

The subject is a 1905 anti-Tsarist mutiny on an Imperial Russian Navy battleship in the Black Sea near Ukraine. It is an upris

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