A confusion of striking images commemorating the Bolshevik revolution
Written: May 14 '04 (Updated May 14 '04)
Product Rating:
Action Factor:
Suspense:
Pros: striking images, dazzling editing
Cons: hard to follow what is going on (let alone understand why!)
The Bottom Line: A very formalistic relic of a revolution that had already failed in 1927 that is not without interest, not least for the complexity of its crowd scenes and cross-cutting.
Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Ten Days That Shook the World
The (non-talking but far from silent) film that the consolidating communist regime commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution has many "Wow!" images and provides a primer in cross-cutting (montage). It is not, however, a movie that is easy to like, nor one that provides a particularly easy-to-follow portrayal of the seizure of power in Petrograd. Long ago, I read John Reed's euphoric on-the-spot reportTen Days That Shook the World, which I am pretty sure was not the basis for the movie, though covering the same revolution, and even longer ago my 11th-grade world history class spent several weeks on the 1917 Russian revolutions, but without any refresher on the sequence of events, I found the movie hard to follow. (I did get that the agitation against the Provisional Government was for failing to provide peace, bread, or land to The People.)
If I remember correctly, the book has characters and a clear plot-line. With no dialogue (though many inter-titles) and no real characters (though Lenin has two appearances of exhorting enthusiastic crowds), Eisenstein's "October" is a series of images in rapid succession. He had a penchant for cutting between objects, particularly statues, groups or individuals in motion, and reaction shots of photogenic (sometimes pretty, more often striking and not pretty) faces. Surprisingly static sequences of images (or images of static objects and people) eventually give way to masterful action sequences (also involving much intercutting of images of people in motion).
"October" portrays the Mensheviks of the Provisional Government as ineffectual politicians, not as the caricature villains of "The Battleship Potemkin" (made two years before "October") or "Alexander Nevsky" (made more than a decade after it). Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, is provided a Napoleon complex with very unsubtle intercutting between sculptures of Napoleon and poses struck by Kerensky.
Lenin is in hiding through most of the course of the film. Images of him are not counterpoised to statues, except implicitly to the one of Alexander III that is pulled down (by one of the many mobs in the movie) and later (and very eerily!) goes back up and together when the Bolsheviks are temporarily thwarted (by raising the bridges, cutting off the imperial center from where the workers live; this includes a famous sequence in which a horse hangs over the river counterbalanced by the cart that it was pulling that is on the roadbed as the bridge rises).
The DVD has a soundtrack from the 11th and 12th Shostakovich symphonies ("1905" and "Leningrad"). I am not at all convinced that they fit with Eisenstein's intentions (as Prokofiev's soundtracks for "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible" definitely do), but they fit with the Stalinist triumphalism (if Stalin appears in the movie, I missed him; there is a vacillating Bolshevik who looks like Trotsky but is not identified). "October" is a propaganda film and those Shostakovich symphonies were favor-seeking propagandistic works. What the artists' true feelings about the Bolshevik Revolution were continues to be debated. My view is that Shostakovich enjoyed playing with loud and heroic music and that Eisenstein enjoyed moving crowds about photogenically, but that neither had any inner commitment to the Soviet state in which they lived and tried to work (surviving denunciations from on high).
Perhaps they were more stirred by the fervor of the mobs than I am by the representations (involving veterans of the infiltration and seizure of the Winter Palace both onscreen and as advisors for filming recreations on the original locations add to the documentary feel, though a documentary with no more objectivity than the photo-ops of Bush or Rumsfeld in Iraq or on Persian Gulf aircraft carriers or of Leni Riefenstahls's photographing Hitler descending from the heavens for the Nuremberg rally in "Triumph of the Will").
"October" is hard to follow as dramatic or historical narrative and only an idiot would look for balanced historical analysis in it even of the ten days, with a civil war across the vast country, disastrous economic policies, and reigns of terror still to come. What "October" provides is a montage of images aiming to glorify the seizure of power by the masses and the incipient Red Army.
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I am dazzled by the footage Eisenstein shot in Mexico, variously assembled as "Que viva Mexico", "Mexican Fantasy", and "Thunder Over Mexico," and consider the two-thirds of a trilogy of films he was able to complete as the greatest of all movies at least in terms of visual compositions.
The 1925 recreation of a part of the 1905 revolution, "The Battleship Potemkin" with the baby carriage rolling down the steps is easier to follow (somewhat less formalist, but also more blatantly propagandistic). See metalluk's review at
http://www.epinions.com/content_136323960452
Russian director sergei eisenstein s powerful retelling of the 1917 russian revolution, october is an acknowledged masterpiece in the use of editing, ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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