October

As I may have mentioned I’m a trained acolyte of Clio, an inclination I sometimes indulge much to the dismay of my readers.

Eisenstein’s October is not history, it’s not even good fiction. It is propoganda.

As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian puts it-

October has fierce, declamatory intertitles with exclamation points, unforgettably intense closeups on faces, staggering crowd scenes with swarming masses, savage and ambiguous satiric digressions and epic set pieces for which Eisenstein was pretty much given licence to do what he liked in Leningrad (as it then was). He was recreating or reimagining historical events so soon afterwards, and with so many of the original participants, that the film is almost a docu-hallucination of what happened.

The action follows the historical record, in its way. The February revolution sees the pulling down of the statue of Alexander III; there is tension and frustration between the workers, peasants and soldiers. April sees the incendiary arrival of Lenin from exile, demanding an end to the Provisional government. The July Days are shown, with their riots, the Bolsheviks’ unwillingness to attack and the spectacular urban disorder. General Kornilov launches a Tsarist counter-revolutionary assault, which is foiled after a reverse-time vision of the Tsar statue being de-toppled; the Provisional government’s leader Kerensky is shown strutting pompously around, affecting his Napoleonic mannerisms; and finally there is the storming of the Winter Palace itself.
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Eisenstein doesn’t offer any characters for us to relate to. Lenin and Kerensky hardly count. My personal theory, moreover, is that the puffed-up, boastful figure of Kerensky is not only to be compared to Napoleon – apart from the lack of a moustache, he could be Marshal Stalin himself in his uniform and his stiff bearing.

The storming of the Winter Palace is a concept Eisenstein almost invented. It became the eternal trope for the revenge of the dispossessed: a simple, dual image. Power and wealth inside the luxurious palace; downtrodden poor outside. In reality, it was a chaotic and weirdly anticlimactic affair involving far fewer people. Eisenstein reimagined it for posterity as a sweeping battle scene, like the storming of the Bastille. He also added irresistible images, such as the Bolshevik jeering incredulously at the padded lavatory seat in the Empress’s bedroom.

Perhaps more astonishing is an earlier sequence, in which the government orders the raising of a drawbridge to prevent the Bolshevik masses from entering the city; in the melee, a dead white horse, attached to a carriage, is caught at the point where the bridge separates. It dangles high above the river: poignant, awe-inspiring and in some mysterious way sacrificial. It has a stranger-than-fiction reality. What a horribly undignified end for this noble beast. What on earth can it symbolise? In its pure unreadability it has a poetic power in excess of Eisenstein’s much-discussed montage pairing of the conceited Kerensky with shots of an imaginary mechanical peacock.

Above all else, October is about violence. The whole movie is shot through with an atmosphere of delirium. For all that it is a loyal and ideological tribute to the revolution, it also looks like a bacchanal of violent insurrection, or a panoramic portrait shattered into thousands of shard-like images. This is partly due to the unfinished first world war: Russia was in conflict within and without, and its own civil war – that great unmentioned subject that comes between the events of this film and the circumstances of its release – hovers over it. October is an intuition of what Pushkin called the merciless senselessness of the Pugachevshchina, the 18th-century peasant revolt from which the ruling classes learned secretly to fear and hate the lower orders. Lenin himself said the “proletarian state” is a “system of organised violence”. Eisenstein’s film could be said in its own way to have systematised it.