In February 1917, in the midst of bloody
war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it
became the first socialist state in world history. How did this
unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward
country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but
two revolutions? Historians have debated the revolution
for over a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of
literature can be daunting. But most of us now know and accept what came next: the Revolution’s nightmare offspring –
Stalinist terror and the 20 million dead. No one contests the
catastrophe, but there are those, who look back to the events of 1917 and are still haunted by the
thought that “it might have been otherwise. It might have been
different”.
Sergei Eisenstein’s powerful testement to his genius, artistry, and ambition, his amazing dramatisation 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.
