October (aka Ten Days That Shook the World)

A powerful testament to Eisenstein’s genius, artistry, and ambition, October — the director’s third feature, after Strike and Battleship Potemkin — was commissioned by the Soviet government to honour the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Eisenstein had nearly unlimited resources placed at his disposal, including the run of Leningrad’s Winter Palace for several months. His startling re-creation of the events of 1917 is both a sweeping historical epic of vast scale and a magnificent monument to his fascination with intellectual montage — the juxtaposition of two disparate images to convey an idea or concept not inherent in either image alone. The film’s most celebrated examples of the technique include a baroque figure of Christ reduced, through a series of successive images, to a primitive idol, and Kerensky, head of the pre-Revolutionary provisional government, compared to a preening mechanical peacock. Such metaphorical experiments met with official disapproval; the authorities complained that October was unintelligible to the masses, and Eisenstein was attacked, for neither the first time nor the last, for “formalism." He was also required to re-edit the work to remove references to Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Stalin. October remains an immensely rich experience. B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score and English intertitles. 103 mins.