Director: Sergei Eisenstein
With his most ambitious application of his theory of intellectual montage editing, Sergei Eisenstein’s October is his true masterpiece of the silent era. His visual sense is at his heights, reveling in the fog of twilight and the dingy camps wherein the Lenin-led Bolsheviks plot their next actions, as well as the surreal juxtapositional discourses into mechanical peacocks and thrusting church incense burners. The picture was one of two commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the October Revolution of 1917, and in it Eisenstein dramatizes the events leading up to the overthrow of the provisional government concluding with the storming of the Winter Palace. Several critics, as well as Leon Trotsky himself, have criticized the ending struggle of the picture, suggesting that the drama of the upheaval isn’t wholly successful. It, however, is much more effective than the often numbing conclusion of the otherwise great Battleship Potemkin, as the chaos is truncated and Eisenstein’s greater interest seems to be in the moving of the chess pieces preceding the take-over, making the drama all the more effective because of the sublime build-up. The picture is full of unforgettable moments – the dangling horse and carriage on a bridge, the rapid-cut montage of a machine gun and the man firing it, the succession of religious icons that suggest that religion is a tool of the government and must be overthrown. It is a film that stimulates more than thrills, and for that reason it leaves a more lasting impression than the all-out revolutionary anarchy of Strike or Battleship Potemkin.
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