October (Ten Days that Shook the World)

Eisenstein's film about the October Revolution of 1917, commissioned by the state for its tenth anniversary. The narrative runs from February to October: a tsarist statue brought down, the provisional government, crowds gathering in the streets, and finally the entry into the Winter Palace. What the film is known for is the Winter Palace sequence. It was shot on such a scale and so convincingly that it was used for years as though it were documentary footage. In fact it is entirely Eisenstein's construction, and the real event took place on a far smaller scale. Here he pushed his method built on editing further: he uses objects, statues and images of animals in place of characters, and states an idea in a single cut. The political history of the production is a subject of its own. By the time the film was finished Trotsky had been purged, and the sections in which he appeared were removed. So the film about the revolution was itself re-edited according to the revolution's later reckonings. One of the foundational works for anyone curious about silent cinema, the history of editing and how political propaganda functions. For a viewer expecting characters, the film has no interest in individuals; the subject on screen is the crowd.