It is impossible to assess a film that does not exist and never existed, but it is also true that one cannot ignore the masterpiece that it undoubtedly could have been when viewing the very few remains that miraculousy have been restored to us. Just a few photos, focused on a series of important scenes.
They are not shots, because in one shot there is movement, nor are they probably sequences since it is doubtful that all the successive shots of any of the scenes that were shot are preserved, although we would like to think so.
But then there's the famous church desecration scene, in which the town turns a church into a meeting room, dismantling and removing all Orthodox iconography. This sacrilegious scene becomes, by the work and grace of Eisenstein's genius, one of the most beautiful and elevated sequences in the history of cinema. We do not watch to how a religion is destroyed or humiliated or abused, but how it is transformed, reborn into a new one. By dismantling the statues, the icons and replacing them with themselves, the people incarnate in angels, apostles, in the Virgin Mary and in the child Jesus. A Samson separates the columns of the iconostasis, a child is crowned and raised in arms to the heavens. Prokofiev's beautiful music underlines this sacred character of the scene. What could have resulted from blasphemous cruelty, as so often in Soviet cinema, becomes a scene of sweetness and purity unmatched in the history of cinema.
If it is impossible to value a film that no longer exists or that really never existed, we still can value the beauty of some images, imagine how the rhythm and movement would enhance them and regret that a masterpiece of such caliber had been lost. The remains are still a creation of absolute beauty and a lesson about cinematography.
