Bruce Loeb on Piano Preceded by: October (excerpt): Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein. Photographed by Eduard Tisse. (USSR, 1928, c.10 min excerpt, Silent with English intertitles, Piano Accompaniment, B&W, 35mm, Print from PFA Deposit courtesy Francis Ford Coppola) (Bronenosets Potyomkin). The Surrealists, having become politicized in 1925 with the Moroccan war, saw in Potemkin "the perspectives of a revolutionary cinema" (Georges Sadoul). It was premiered in Paris by the Ciné-Club de France. Jacques Brunius described the event: "At the moment the sailors throw the officers who tried to make them eat rotten meat into the sea, applause breaks out. The lights go up. The guilty ones are denounced by their neighbors. It is the Surrealist group." The film was banned in France and remained so until 1952. "The Battleship Potemkin is the most beautiful film that has ever been made. That is why you will not see it," wrote Louis Aragon, while Robert Desnos said, "Potemkin is not one of those ships that they sink with torpedos. It has weighted its anchors forever..." For Eisenstein, as for the Surrealists, juxtaposition was a language in itself; he too fragmented the (visual) language and reassociated the parts. The result was not Breton's "total revolt of the object" but a dramatic dislocation nonetheless. Occasionally, as with the bridge raising in October, the results were decidedly surreal. Remembering the isolated passion of certain images from Potemkin-the shattered glasses, the baby carriage on the Odessa Steps-is to see the film through Surrealist glasses.