October (1928)
Directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein

Film Review

On the strength of his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, the great Russian cineaste Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet Union's October Revolution Jubilee Committee to make a film celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.  The result is one of the most remarkable films ever made, although it was badly received by its sponsors, who believed (rightly as it turned out) that it was far too intellectual and stylised to be appreciated by ordinary working class people.  Whilst Grigori Aleksandrov is credited with co-directing the film, it is evident in virtually every shot that Eisenstein was the real creative force behind it.

Originally titled Oktyabr (Октябрь in Russian Cyrillic), the film is known in the English-speaking world as October, October 1917 and Ten Days That Shook the World.  The latter - a manifestly inaccurate description of the film's content - was taken from the title of a book by an eminent American journalist, John Reed, who observed for himself the Russian Revolution.  Confusingly, the date of the "October Revolution" (a.k.a. the Bolshevik Revolution) is November in the current calendar.

October isn't so much a historical drama as a bold experiment in filmmaking technique.  Inspired by dialectic theory (used by Marx and Engels to explain historical progress), whereby conflicting forces (thesis and antithesis) are reconciled (as a synthesis), Eisenstein developed a new technique - dialectic montage.  Here, opposing themes or symbols are rapidly intercut, and a resultant, logically explicable, outcome is shown.  The film's subject is the most obvious example of this idea.  The old order of the Tsars is brought into conflict with the new order, represented by the working masses, and the result is a new nation, the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics. 

Eisenstein's heavy use of symbolism in October is as mystifying today as when the film was first seen.  Some of the visual metaphors are easily understood - such as the likening of Kerenski to the Emperor Napoleon or a preening peacock.  Many others are much more abstruse, and it is this which contributed to the film's initial dismissal - both in Russia and in other countries where it was seen - as a piece of intellectual self-indulgence.

Another reason why the film was less successful than its director had envisaged was because he was obliged to make some dramatic cuts before it could be accepted by his paymasters.  In the original film, Leon Trotsky (the most important figure in the original Communist Party after Vladimir Lenin), was a significant presence.  In 1927, Trotsky fell out with the Stalinist leadership and was expelled from the Party.  (He was driven out of the Soviet Union the following year and, after a decade in which he fervently opposed Stalinism, he was assassinated, most probably under Stalin's orders, in 1940).  Consequently, all the sequences in which Trotsky appeared had to be excised from the film, which resulted in about a quarter of the content being lost.  This no doubt contributed to the film's lack of coherence and its rather jumpy narrative construction.

In a more enlightened age, the genius of Eisenstein's work is far more widely appreciated and October is regarded, along with his other great films - Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944/1958) - as one of the landmark films of the Twentieth Century.   The film's historical inaccuracies have been well-documented (for example, the tumbling of the statue of Alexander III happened in 1921, not 1917), but Eisenstein's main preoccupation was not to give us a textbook account of the Russian Revolution.   Rather, his motivation was to convey some idea of the extraordinary feelings that seized the Russian people in one momentous year.

In his great paean to the Communist Utopia in which he lived, Eisenstein set out to show how the collective strength and heroism of ordinary Russian workers and soldiers could rip the guts out of a failed social system and bring about an historic change.   Even today, the scale of the film's more ambitious sequences - streets swelling with tens of thousands of people, frenzied battles between the opposing factions, the iconic storming of the Winter Palace - leaves the spectator struck with awe.   October is an intensely emotional work of poetry (in the tradition of Pushkin and Lermontov), in which Eisenstein celebrates his belief in the Marxist Communist ideal and rejoices in the inherent nobility of the proletariat - whilst also nurturing an entirely new approach to cinematic expressionism.

Film Synopsis

February 1917.  As one entity, the people of Russia arise to overthrow the Tsarist regime.  In its place, a provisional government is set up, headed by the ambitious Alexander Kerenski.  But the pace of change is too slow.  Ordinary people are still cold and hungry, whilst the rich continue to thrive.  Worse, Kerenski sees himself as another Tsar and acts to strengthen his power base.  Enough is enough.  The oppressed workers of Petrograd ally themselves with the Bolsheviks and take up arms for a second revolution.  October 1917.  The Soviet Union is about to be born...