Untitled Document

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October (dir. S. Eisenstein, 1927)

Commissioned by the Soviet government in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, this film, also released as Ten Days That Shook The World, is one of several made that year to depict the turmoil of 1917. As you are reading a detailed examination of this film (Taylor), I will not provide much of a summary. Do note, however, that the film moves across several major turning points in the history of 1917: the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, Lenin's arrival in Finland Station in April, the unrest of the July Days, the Kornilov Affair, and the October Revolution itself. See the Suny text for a detailed discussion of these events.

Study questions:

The images of this film are so powerful and so famous, that it is often mistaken for documentary footage of the Revolution itself. What technical and narrative tools do you believe Eisenstein deployed to make such a phenomenon possible?
Writing history is one of the spoils of victory and the tale that Eisenstein tells of 1917 is certainly told from the Bolshevik perspective. The film canonizes myths of the Revolution that were already in the making before the revolutionary dust had settled. What are the dangers of such filmmaking? The strengths?
What do you make of the ways in which class and gender, and the overlaps of the two, are represented in the film?
Soviet films are often dismissed as "mere" propaganda by Western audiences and this is certainly a film in which the propaganda value of the film is inescapable. Do you see the film's obvious political meaning as a problem for interpreting it as a cultural or artistic product? Does the fact that its message is right on the surface distinguish it in any way from films in capitalist countries, especially those made in Hollywood?
what is "intellectual montage?"

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