Eisenstein's October

An old friend from the Navy is currently working in St. Petersburg, Russia. I asked him if he knows what's going on to mark the centenary of the October Revolution. He replied, "Not much. Tomorrow (October 25) they will show some revolutionary films on the side of the Hermitage, and apparently there's an evening of live jazz at the Museum of Soviet Slot Machines, but I think they are going to let it slip past into history."

How gratifying, I thought, for all those who have convinced themselves that Marxism has been consigned, in the words of Ronald Reagan's clever speech writer, to "the ash heap of history," that what John Reed called the Ten Days That Shook the World is being commemorated with so little fanfare in the city where it all happened.(1) It surprises me, since Russian president Vladimir Putin has called the fall of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe that Russia ever experienced.

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the "revolutionary films" being screened on the wall of the Hermitage Museum is Sergei Eisenstein's October, which was finished in time for the 10th anniversary in 1927 but which, at the eleventh hour, Eisenstein had to radically re-edit, delaying its release until the following spring.

"WEDNESDAY, November 7th, I rose very late. The noon cannon boomed from Peter-Paul as I went down the Nevsky. It was a raw, chill day." That is how John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, wrote of this day in 1917. It was October 25 according to the Gregorian calendar then in use in Russia, which is thirteen days slow. The Russian "October Revolution" was actually the second Russian Revolution of 1917. The first, in March, deposed the Czar and led to creation of the Duma, a government body, led by Alexander Kerenski, that sought to rein in the seething forces of change that had finally found their moment. Kerensky was seen by the Bolzheviks, one of the many political parties in the Duma, as a reactionary figure, determined to maintain the status quo in Russia. This was unacceptable to them, so, after meticulous planning, they staged another revolution in October that deposed Kerensky and dissolved the Duma. Kerensky resigned on November 7, 1917.(2)

Ten years later, after a short civil war, Russia was transformed. Knowing that socialism was designed with an industrialized workers' state in mind, the USSR set about transforming itself from a nation of mostly unskilled peasants into something closer to Marx's proletarian state. Two unexpected blows, however, changed the course of the revolution: Lenin died in 1924, and his appointed successor was Stalin, who immediately came into conflict with the other great leader of the revolution, Leon Trotsky. (Trotsky later claimed that Lenin was possibly poisoned by Stalin.) The resulting power struggle ended with the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR in 1929. 

This power struggle happened to coincide with the making of Eisenstein's film October - or, rather, its final editing. It was supposed to be shown, along with other films commissioned for the Jubilee, on November 7. As Jay Leyda related in Kino, his overview of Russian Cinema, "When October was not shown at the jubilee, and when Trotsky's open anti-Government campaign began, the wildest rumours flew around Eisenstein and his film, believed even by people who saw Eisenstein arriving at the studio cutting-room every day: that Eisenstein and Alexandrov had joined Trotsky's faction, that the film had been destroyed, that parts of it had to be remade, that Eisenstein was forbidden to touch his film, etc. etc."(3) The film that was eventually shown to the public in the spring of 1928 was quickly attacked by Russian critics, but was acclaimed in the West. Few observers in the West could have known what Eisenstein had been forced to excise from his film. Of the 13,000 feet of film that Eisenstein claimed made up the completed film prior to the re-editing, only 9,100 feet was left in the resulting film released to the public. What the 3,900 feet of missing film contained was every shot or sequence that showed Trotsky as a hero of the revolution. One of the reasons for the success of the October Revolution was winning the allegiance of the military. Key to that important ingredient was Trotsky, whose genius in leadership can be seen in the deployment of soldiers in Petrograd. All of these facts had to be either skirted in the narrative of October or completely eliminated.  

How central was Trotsky to the success of October? In John Reed's book Ten Days That Shook the World, the name "Trotzky" appears 84 times. By comparison, "Lenin" appears 91 times, while "Stalin" appears just 3. In the Redactor's Notes included in the Project Gutenberg edition of Reed's book, it reads: 

The original book of this text had a number of newspaper clipings [sic] from the 1920's and 1930's included. Most of these relate to the violent deaths encountered by those playing a part in this book. Others reveal that Eisenstein made a film of "Ten Days". Stalin, who is not mentioned in the book, suppressed the work.

Reed's book was one of the very few that attempted to give Americans a clear, if not non-partisan, account of the events in Russia that scared the daylights out of so many in the West. Its title became attached to Eisenstein's film for publicity purposes. While both works are accounts of the same events, Eisenstein's film is not a work of reportage or even of reconstruction. 

Stanley Kauffmann, writing about a later, failed effort by Eisenstein to express his vision, nonetheless saw in it "the unique Eisenstein flavor - a distortion of reality that creates higher realism: a combination of masterly screen composition and masterly theatricality."(4)

Because of its highly subjective approach to events familiar to every historian of the Russian Revolution, even knowledge of those events and the figures involved doesn't prepare one for Eisenstein's October. It is impossible to properly assess its accomplishments without a full understanding of the pressure Eisenstein was under to be true to history while being true to his art. 

In the 1920s, the two greatest Russian filmmakers were Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Both recognized the essential ingredient of film art was montage, a term more complex than "cutting" or "editing." Pudovkin extolled the use of montage in order to create a chain of images that tell a story. Eisenstein, however, insisted that montage was about bringing images into collision. As summed up by Dwight Macdonald:

'In his article, "The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture", in Transition for Spring-Summer, 1930, Eisenstein denounced the idea that montage is "a junction of elements" as "a most pernicious method of analysis". He continued: "By what then is characterized montage ...? By collision.... By conflict. By collision.... From the collision of two given factors arises a concept. Linkage is, in my interpretation, only a possible special case.... Thus, montage is conflict. The basis of every art is always conflict."'(5)

For October, Eisenstein employed what he called "montage of associations," creating metaphors that give the viewer a better understanding of a character or of an event. For example, in the opening shots of October, the March revolution deposing the Czar Nicholas II is reduced to a group of people pulling down a statue of the Czar, intercut with hundreds of upraised rifles and scythes. The statue finally appears to disintegrate before our eyes. Later in the film, the same statue is shown to reassemble itself miraculously at the moment when Kerensky invokes "God and Country".

Some of these "associations," however, are not as simple and require interpretation. As Marie Seton wrote in her biography of Eisenstein: "[It is] difficult to understand without explanatory notes as Potemkin was simple ... History marched across the screen as never before. But historical action suddenly became suspended while Eisenstein wove a visual commentary, the nature of which was nearer to Socratic discourse on the nature of things than to Art, as it was later to be interpreted in the light of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism. October was an esoteric work of art permeated with symbols of ambiguous meaning to the majority — a work on several levels all developing simultaneously. Being diffuse as well as monumental, October had the power to tire all but the most inquiring mind. No human character served as a focal point and no single emotion ran as a thread through the whole. An encylopaedia of images, the imagery rose to a crescendo that could too easily leave many spectators exhausted by the mental gymnastics required to follow the discursive line."(6)

I have seen other films that tell historical stories - stories that involve a great many details and characters familiar to afiocionados of history but bewildering and impenetrable to a casual observer. Masahiro Shinoda's brilliant and ambitious Assassination requires a familiarity with the period of Japanese history in which the Shogunate fell and the emperor was restored to power. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, which, with incomparable effectiveness, chronicles the last days of French colonial control of Algeria - a story remarkably like October. Except that no two revolutions are alike.

I believe that Seton, for whatever reason, was deliberately misrepresenting Eisenstein's accomplishment. There is plenty in October that is perhaps "esoteric" and "ambiguous," but any reasonably curious viewer will find nothing in it that is inscrutable or obscure. Eisenstein not only made the film for the masses, he made it in the same spirit that liberated the masses. While trying to free society of dogma, he gave society enough credit to have the ability to follow everything he was doing. When Eisenstein employs shock editing that throws images at us so fast it becomes impossible for us to rationally absorb every one of them, he is also aware of our sub-rational vision, capable of absorbing images subliminally. Like Charlie Parker's saxophone solos, when October shock-editing sequences are slowed down and the images, often only a few frames in length, are examined individually, they are in perfect order, even in collision with one another, with the effect that Eisenstein wanted the viewer to perceive.

Eisenstein's great achievement was to express the revolutionary fervor of his time in terms of revolutionary art. What he failed to do, however, was realize how easily his revolution could be perverted. All the while he was satirizing Kerensky and his betrayal of the March 1917 revolution, depicting him living in the Czar's quarters of the Winter Palace, another traitor of the revolution was tightening his grip on power. 

I'm afraid that it is too much to ask an audience today to care much for Eisenstein's film if they no longer care about the history it is telling. Today's citizens of St. Petersburg, a city whose name has been changed three times since 1917, can look back on the Revolution with horror or nostalgia, but it was a moment in history, a very loud and portentous parade, that they would as soon forget.

Throughout Reds, the film that Warren Beatty made about the last years of John Reed's life,(7) you can see some of the people, by then extremely old, who were alive in 1917. Some of them remembered the era with an almost tangible nostalgia. Others tried to forget it. Still others had succeeded in forgetting it. If history has an ash heap or a garbage heap on which it throws the ideas and names for which it has no more use, anyone with a little patience can still find a treasure there if they do some digging.


(1) In Chapter IV of Reed's book, he writes, 'And Trotzky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his rich voice in cool contempt, "All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries,  Bund-let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!"'
(2) Kerensky died in obscurity more than fifty years later in New York City!
(3) Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960)
(4) Stanley Kauffmann, "Bezhin Meadow," The New Republic, March 1, 1969. 
(5) Dwight Macdonald, The Responsibility of Peoples and Other Essays in Political Criticism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957).
(6) Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (New York: Grove Press, 1960). It should be noted what Dwight Macdonald wrote about Seton's book, "a peculiar volume whose rich documentation of Eisenstein's career, feelings and ideas conflicts constantly with her political line, which is favourable to the Stalin regime."
(7) Trotsky is a prominent figure in REDS, and is played by the Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski.