Steps + Odessa Sequence

This extraordinary short film from 1987 is a fascinating take on Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence from his famous 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin" in which an inexperienced and highly excitable entrepreneur/tour guide (Lev Shekhtman) takes over a studio to create a tour of a modern-day group of people around the Odessa Steps played out on green-screen as the action is actually happening in the film of 1925. A clever early computer graphic experiment, originally shown in a series of interesting and unusual short films under the heading "Ghosts in the Machine", the film was directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski and filmed in New York with a small cast of NY actors as the various tourists, all in typical 1980s clothing, who get involved in this unique experiment in tourism - although their reaction to the terrible happenings on the steps seems to be very casual... There will be many ways that viewers may interpret what the film is trying to say, but I'm not going down that road (or up those steps...!) - that's for each individual to surmise. For those who may never have seen the famous Russian film, I've included the original sequence on which this film bases its fantasy. The music for this version of the sequence is from Shostakovich's 5th Symphony which he wrote between April and July 1937...