Interviews - TheTimes: September 03, 2004
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Pop-aganda
Stephen Dalton
Potemkin and the sound of a Pet Shop Boy

FOR SOME pop stars, silence is golden. But for Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, the invitation to write and perform a score to Battleship Potemkin with Chris Lowe in Trafalgar Square initially seemed like a curious mismatch. Only after returning to Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 milestone in Soviet cinema, with its jarring montages and infamous massacre scene on the Odessa steps, did the force of its technique hit home.

"To me there is something amazingly modern about not having speaking," Tennant insists. "Eisenstein was exploring and inventing the language of film, he was going to tell a story by cutting together images in a very sophisticated way. That montage technique is really very modern. But when sound came along about five years later, a lot of film became filmed theatre. So when you put electronic music against Battleship Potemkin it looks very vivid and modernist. If you did the same thing with The Philadelphia Story it would still look like theatre."

The Pet Shop Boys are not the first pop musicians to be seduced by the golden age of silent cinema. Expressionist blood-chillers such as Robert Wiene's visually stunning 1920 feature The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or F. W. Murnau's eerie 1922 twist on the Dracula story, Nosferatu, have inspired fresh scores and live accompaniments over the years, not to mention video homages from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Indeed, many silent films are now part of the grammar of pop itself. Fritz Lang's visionary sci-fi fable Metropolis (1927), for example, was pastiched in the videos to Queen's Radio Ga-Ga and Madonna's Express Yourself. Lang's dystopian epic was even colourised and reissued in 1983 by the Eurodisco pioneer Giorgio Moroder, who added a chugging techno-pop score top-heavy with such guest vocalists as Adam Ant, Freddy Mercury and Pat Benatar.

Bearing the credit "reconstructed and adapted by Giorgio Moroder", this widely derided curiosity felt more like a "remix" than a restoration. Still, you had to admire his nerve. But when the German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk paid homage to Metropolis with a composition of the same name in 1975, part of their lofty agenda was to reconnect with prewar Modernist traditions that had been all but destroyed by the culture- hating Nazi regime.

Lang himself, after all, fled Germany when Joseph Goebbels tried to recruit him to the cause. "We lost a period of cultural creativity," Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter told me last year. "That stopped at the end of the 1920s in Germany with people emigrating or being persecuted. So for us it was a zero situation, like a white space where we can go in and maybe create something with minimal means."

Other pop musicians have scored Battleship Potemkin before Tennant and Lowe. The Michigan rockers Concrete and the Texan jazz-pop outfit Golden Arm Trio, among many more, have accompanied the film at one-off local screenings. But none has yet attempted a live soundtrack on such a grand scale as the Pet Shop Boys.

In a post-political, ephemeral age, scoring a silent cinema landmark also offers pop musicians a short cut to the kind of cultural gravitas that very little contemporary art can muster. Artistically it might be an equal collaboration, but in historical terms it is often a case of standing on the shoulders of giants. After all, Battleship Potemkin was conceived as a propaganda tool of global revolution, and Eisenstein certainly believed his "intellectual montage" technique of jarring juxtaposition could function as a weapon of mass instruction.

"The importance of our method lies in the fact that we have discovered how to force the spectator to think in a certain direction," the director told a rowdy crowd at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1930. How fanciful such notions sound today. But considering that Battleship Potemkin was banned for almost three decades in Britain, the authorities must have feared that Eisenstein was on to something.

For Tennant, this political dimension was another spur to work on the project, despite having always shunned political pop before. "The Pet Shop Boys have always derided the idea of making direct political statements, like Stand Down Margaret," he argues. "But we don't have that many now anyway to deride. I'm kind of missing them. When I rather slightingly said to Chris that the film was "Bolshevik propaganda" , he said it's not "it's a very idealistic, romantic vision of people rising up against tyranny. And that gives it a very contemporary feeling. I was imagining this could be like an anti-Iraq war meeting in Trafalgar Square, and layering Battleship Potemkin on to that."

Other rock acts have sought to recontextualise the political meaning of vintage propaganda films, often with muddled results. On their 1993 Zooropa tour, U2 projected clips from Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Nazi-era works Olympia and Triumph of the Will against images of burning swastikas. Their stated intent was to protest against the rise of neo-Nazism, but also to critique their own celebrity.

Beyond such lofty ambitions, pop stars undoubtedly earn cultural brownie points by reaching back to a pre-rock era, when modernist cinema epitomised the avant-garde cutting edge of its day. So who gains most in this trade-off between 20th-century modernism and 21st-century post-modernism? The old masters or the young pretenders? Both, according to Neil Tennant:"I think we've gained and I think Eisenstein's gained," he says, laughing at his own immodesty.

"Eisenstein said he wanted there to be a new soundtrack every decade. I was delighted to read that Eisenstein said he wanted the music to sound like a machine, to be mechanical. I thought: "Sergei! We've done it!""


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