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October -- Sergei Eisenstein's overlooked masterwork

© John Nesbit

"We have the right to be proud that to us fell the good fortune of beginning the building of the Soviet State and by doing so, opening a new chapter in the history of the world." Vladimir Lenin

Commissioned by the Soviet Central Committee in 1927 to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the October Revolution, October ( also known as Ten Days that Shook the World) is the last significant silent film of legendary director Sergei Eisenstein. The Russian government desired the finest documentary possible, so they assigned their finest director the task of re-creating the Russian Revolution, and gave him immense resources to create his film. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Eisenstein's films conform to the party line. Yet, the great director is still able to find enough artistic license to experiment.

"In the light of the resolutions of the Central Committee, all workers in art must ... fully subordinate our creative work to the interests of the education of the Soviet people. From this aim we must not take one step aside nor deviate a single iota. We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perceiving reality and history ... This is a guarantee that our cinematography will be able to surmount all the ideological and artistic failures...and will again begin to create pictures of high quality, worthy of the Stalinist epoch." Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein's epic drama comes as close to being an eyewitness documentary account about Lenin and the Socialist Revolution as possible since Nikolai Podvolsky and other leaders of the uprising served as consultants. Filming the events in their actual locations in Petrograd (later to be named Leningrad, Stalingrad, and return to St. Petersburg) give the film added credibility that historians will find especially fascinating-especially notable is the storming of the actual Winter Palace. On the other hand, modern viewers with little interest in the Russian Revolution will think October overdoes its history, as occasionally events feel like they are tediously filmed in real time.

Nevertheless, Eisenstein ranks as a leading film grammarian-his editing techniques and use of creative camera angles have been studied and imitated for years. Given free creative reign and a large budget to produce October, Eisenstein pulls out all the cinematic tricks he can muster with his impressionistic style and ability construct incredibly complex large-scale mob scenes.

Imagine the technical challenge of staging such scenes in 1927! Filmmakers couldn't rely on CGI to fill in for the thousands of extras involved with these massive scenes. Much like his famous Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, the famous director communicates a sense of the chaos through a montage that combines large scale shots, a slowly rising bridge with dead horse attached, more intimate shots of a woman with hair draped over the bridge, and a fallen corpse. Individually many of these shots would appear to be lifted from a surrealistic Goya painting, but taken as a whole it makes sense and can only be Eisenstein. This bridge montage stands as the highlight of the historic film.