Battleship Potemkin, a Berlin success

Battleship Potemkin, from 1925, is one of the most famous films in history. Not a German film, mind you, but Berlin played a major role in its commercial success around the world. Apparently Serguei Eisenstein’s production, premiered in December 1925 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, failed to attract widespread acclaim in the USSR, maybe because it was considered too avant-garde for the public.
On January 21st 1926, the Soviet Embassy in Berlin organized a private screening of the film at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, as one of the events to commemorate Lenin's death, two years earlier. Among the public were Richard Pfeiffer and Willi Münzenberg, two of the directors of the small film company Prometheus. Münzenberg had already seen the film at its Moscow premiere. They immediately bought the right to distribute the film in Germany. 
 Miinzenberg asked a distributor in Hamburg to submit the film to the censorship bureau. The censors decided to forbid it, triggering a wave of protests from well-known intellectuals. At last, the film was allowed to show, but Prometheus had trouble finding a theater in Berlin and had at last to accept the offer of a second rate scene, the Apollo Theater. 
Prometheus’ executives invited two internationally famous film stars, none less than Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to attend the premiere. Pickford, who was not only a famous actress but would also reveal herself as a film producer, didn’t like to travel, but she did it in order to promote her films in Europe.
She and Fairbanks, her husband, were greatly impressed by Eisenstein’s film, as this advertisement on the magazine Film-Kurier from May 7th 1926 shows :

The greatest film drama they have ever seen ! The strongest impression of their lives ! The most powerful music they ever heard ! say Mary and Douglas.

 

Apollo Theater was on the southern end of the Friedrichstrasse, in Kreuzberg, far from central Berlin. It had previously been an operetta theater, where another memorable premiere had taken place in 1899 : Frau Luna, by Paul Lincke, one of whose tunes is the famous Berlinerluft, which became in time the unofficial Berlin anthem.
Prometheus asked the composer Edmund Meisel (Vienna 1894- Berlin 1930) to write the music to accompany the film. It was played by a fifteen instruments orchestra. Prometheus even published, and sold, a piano version of Meisel’s score. Meisel composed also the music for Berlin, symphony of a great city, from 1927.
Potemkin’s commercial premiere took place the 29 April 1926. The film was a great success and some consider that it was this initial success that secured the film’s triumphal tour around the world.

The Apollo Theater