October speaks with two voices. Falsetto and bass … The voice has a habit of breaking at transitional age. At an age when you are growing. The transition to adulthood. October appears at a similar turning point for cinema.
Immediately after The Battleship Potemkin Eisenstein planned a three-part film about China, based on a scenario by Sergei Tretyakov, to be called Zhunguo. The Chinese political question was then a topical one to which Eisenstein hoped to make a contribution. By 1926, the Russian Communists were already deeply embroiled in Chinese events. Stalin’s ideological programme for China was to secure ‘the hegemony of the proletariat’, but he believed in collaborating with the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalists. He asserted that the Chinese situation was in important respects parallel to that in Russia on the eve of 1905. Trotsky dissented sharply from this view, arguing that it was necessary to strike for Communist power and a socialist economy. Trotsky and his colleagues attacked the Politburo for ‘Thermidorism, degeneration, Menshevism, betrayal, treachery, kulak-NEP-man policy against the workers, against the poor peasants, against the Chinese revolution.’ This opened up a further gap between Stalin and Trotsky as they struggled for power.
Naturally, Eisenstein, under cover of the political topicality, thought it might give him the opportunity to probe further into the oriental culture that intrigued him. But, in the spring of 1926, he was asked to make a film on a more crucial, domestic political issue: the collectivisation of agriculture, which was intensifying. With characteristic enthusiasm, and after the usual massive documentary research, including the reading of Zola’s La Terre, a depiction of the harsh life of the peasant in 19th-century France, he set off with a team to tour the villages of the Moscow region. By May 23, he and Alexandrov had outlined the scenario for the film called The General Line, and the following day he presented it at the Centre for Agriculture and Forestry. The complete shooting script, written between June 23 and 30, was discussed by the cinema’s Artistic Council on July 7, after which filming commenced.
Filming continued for a month in a succession of villages and farms. The team shot old peasant huts, the death of a bull, a religious procession, the repair of a tractor, and a cow pulling a plough. After a month, however, filming was broken off by Sovkino, which had to produce a film in honour of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Vsevolod Pudovkin had already started work in Leningrad on The End of St Petersburg, a film on the same subject in the same location for the same occasion, and Boris Barnet was completing Moscow in October.
Such was the nature of state patronage that, at the State’s command, Eisenstein had to turn his mind from collectivisation to the event that made it possible. His meticulous research covered hundreds of historical memoirs and papers, newspaper reports and old newsreels. A further source was John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World, the title under which October was released in America. There were also Eisenstein’s personal memoirs of the events he had witnessed in 1917 (the dispersal of the demonstration on the Nevsky Prospect).
Unlike Potemkin, the scenario, written with Alexandrov, was ‘iron-clad’ in that it was worked out in minute detail that, in principle, left little room for improvisation when it came to filming. But, as with the earlier film, they intended to cover a broader spectrum. The first versions of the screenplay of October encompassed the stages of the Revolution from the overthrow of the monarchy to the end of the Civil War and the transition to peace-time construction.
At first, Eisenstein had the idea of showing the events through the eyes of an officer and a few other characters caught up in the Revolution, but he felt it ran counter to his theoretical aims to focus on the historical not the personal. Pudovkin, on the other hand, used an uneducated peasant boy, arriving in St Petersburg in time to witness the Revolution, as a central figure with whom audiences could identify, which may have helped make it the more popular film.
One of the leading consultants on Eisenstein’s film was N.I. Podvoysky, an elderly man who was also cast as the revolutionary Chief of Staff, the post he himself had held in November 1917. When the reading of the script was taking place before the Artistic Council, Maxim Strauch observed that ‘Podvoysky was taking notes so energetically, that I got scared. I sent a note to Eisenstein: “It looks as though we’ll have to spend an evening with Podvoysky discussing things.” … Podvoysky agreed to go to Leningrad with Eisenstein to look for locations. Then added, “You know how stubborn I am, you’d better not argue with me! Better listen to me, and then later don’t do it. But make a note of everything I say so that I have the impression I’m being listened to.” Leaving, he yelled across the hall: “Eisenstein! Be prepared!”’1
Time and money again imposed limits on the film’s scope, and the final version of the script concentrated on the year 1917, from the February uprising to Lenin’s assumption of power when, at the Congress of Soviets, he announced, ‘The working-class and peasant revolution has been accomplished.’
In an article in Kino-Front in December 1927, Eisenstein, freely arguing for a State Plan for cinema, wrote: ‘The surrender of the material was carried out with unusual cruelty and with the routine sighs about the State Plan. The damage done to the material did unprecedented violence to the nature of the film. Time compressed and nullified things that could never have been called superfluous. The script for October was compressed, not according to principle, but according to area: the front, as envisaged, went. Moscow in October went; the Civil War, the partisans went, as did a great deal of integral material …’2
Shooting on October started on April 13, 1926 with Leningrad becoming a vast film set. The Tsar’s palace, the streets, and the populace were put at the disposal of Eisenstein and of Pudovkin, who was filming simultaneously. Eisenstein again insisted on the film’s entire cast conforming to his typage theory, and a search for suitable types began. Maxim Strauch scoured the streets and the doss houses, going unshaven among the jobless. The outcome was a detailed dossier, complete with photographs, of a huge selection of possibles, from which Eisenstein selected for closer personal inspection those approaching his ideal. One of the first questions asked was ‘How is Lenin to be depicted?’ A wide search turned up a worker called V. Nikandrov, who was a near double of Lenin, and could play the late leader with a minimum of make-up. Nikandrov, however, was of limited intellect, though he did manage to imitate Lenin’s way of walking and gesturing after being thoroughly drilled by Eisenstein.
The tall, blond Tisse, the cinematographer once more, played a German officer; a student, N. Popov, got to play Kerensky, whom he resembled, and Boris Livanov portrayed a cabinet minister. The rest of the cast was almost entirely drawn from the citizens of Leningrad. Strauch, evidently wearing rose-coloured spectacles, noted: ‘Tomorrow we’re filming the hunger queue at the bread shop. But no gaunt faces! We even went to the T.B. clinics. We must have thin children. There aren’t any! Whenever we find a thin child, his expression is too happy – the inside shows! – no sad eyes.’3
For the opening scene, the toppling of the statue of Tsar Alexander III, Strauch observed that pieces of the original were stored in the cellars of Christ Saviour. ‘Padlocked, and inscribed “People’s Commission to Preserve Monuments of Art.” Dust. Wires rusted. Had to saw our way through … two hundred pieces of the monument … Found Alexander’s head in another cellar. They had torn down the monument with “prehistoric methods” – ropes and clubs.’4
For the storming of the Winter Palace, there were gathered thousands of sailors, soldiers and workers. ‘I always say that the masses can only be used like this in our country because there are not many countries where you can lead two or three thousand armed workers onto the streets with impunity!’ Eisenstein claimed. ‘Everyone wanted to play the Bolsheviks and no-one wanted to play the Mensheviks. In that case we used a very simple process: we gave the actors the text of an inflammatory speech and they spoke it with great fervour. After this we added titles that said the exact opposite.’5
Before shooting the attack on the Winter Palace, Eisenstein explored the interior exhaustively, having himself photographed mischievously lounging on the Tsar’s throne, just like the little boy in October who curls up on the throne.
Grigori Alexandrov, the assistant director, recalled: ‘When we filmed the storming of the Winter Palace, the headquarters of our unit was underneath the big bronze horses on top of the arch that leads into the square from the main part of the city, and exactly opposite the Palace itself. It was from this position that Eisenstein shouted his orders through a megaphone to the vast crowd that stormed the Palace on our behalf. There were more than five thousand of them altogether, armed with rifles and blank ammunition, and nearly all of them came from the factories of Leningrad. Many had taken part in the October Revolution of 1917, and had attacked the Winter Palace in reality ten years before. Their job was to do once again what they had done then. So, at the agreed time, our orders went out from beneath those bronze horses, and three thousand people went into action from the various sides of the square. The rest came running from beneath us, under the arch, heading straight for the Palace.
‘In 1917, the real attack had taken place at night and in the dark, and so we filmed at night. But in those days it was very difficult to light a large area, even though we chose to shoot the sequence in June during the so-called White Nights. But the film stock available to us in 1927 was by no means “fast” enough, and for much of the time we were forced to crank the camera more slowly than usual to increase the exposure; which in turn had the effect of unnaturally speeding up the tempo of the crowd movements. This was a problem we could anticipate and allow for. Other hazards were totally unexpected. For instance, some of those who took part in the sequence had returned from various fronts of the Civil War, bringing some of their live cartridges, and decided to add to the realism by using them for the filming, so that when it was all over we had difficulty in accounting for some of the windows in the Palace that had been smashed by bullets, and a few of the rare sculptures outside the building that had been clipped by the same cause. We had arranged to explode dummy grenades during our shooting to help the realism of the atmosphere, but compared with the live bullets they were innocence itself. Not surprisingly, we had our own genuine casualties, and most of them were caused by badly handled bayonets. Indeed, it has long been a joke in the Soviet film industry that more casualties were caused by Eisenstein’s storming of the Winter Palace in June 1927 than by the attack of the original Bolsheviks in October 1917.’ After this exploit, Eisenstein recalled being told by an elderly porter who had been sweeping up the broken glass, ‘Your people were much more careful the first time they took the palace.’6
Eisenstein also bombarded the Winter Palace from the Aurora, which he had towed from the naval port of Kronstadt into the Neva, where it was stationed in 1917. Once again fixated on conveying the idea of sound through visual images, he wrote, ‘In the palace rooms I achieved a plastic recreation of the impressions made by a salvo from the Aurora’s guns. The echo rolled through the rooms and reached a room where everything had been covered by white sheeting and where members of the Provisional Government were awaiting the fateful moment – the establishment of Soviet Power. The crystal chandeliers tinkling in reply to the rattle of machine-gun fire on the square was more successful and remained in the audience’s memory.’7
However, the single image that most impressed itself on the audience’s memory is that of the dead white horse being caught at the top of an opening drawbridge, and then plunging into the river below. This was one of those inspirational, improvisational moments that came to Eisenstein during shooting.
‘God knows why I should wake up one morning in the Nicholas Library after filming interior shots for the storming of the Winter Palace and see through a window the giant arms of the Palace Bridge, raised heavenwards like the arms of a dying man. I saw the arms of the bridge almost as a vision; then the broken cab and the shot horse appeared, and then the golden rays of the sun played upon them before turning into the fair curls of the dying girl. The bridge evolved into a symbol; a symbol of the city’s split, between its centre and the workers’ dormitories during the July days … Thus a chance glimpse at dawn, the silhouette of the raised bridge, evolved into an image which in turn branched out into a complex of images, ultimately the symbol of two outstretched arms, reaching out to each other in a firm grip. This was of structural importance in my conception of the whole film.’8
But the filming of the scene of the palace bridge was more complicated than Eisenstein could have imagined. He spoke to the bridge operators about the best way to raise the bridge repeatedly for half an hour, from six o’clock when the bridge was due to be raised, until six-thirty. Otherwise the trams would be late arriving at Finland Station, and the passengers, streaming in from the dormitory suburbs to the factories and plants, would be delayed.
‘On our last day of work we dodged the vigilant mechanics, who were so engrossed in what they saw going on above that we were able to hold the bridge’s maw open for a further ten minutes. And the rows, the disruption of work, the hold-ups and irritation! But you can’t blame us for heaven’s sake! We only had twenty minutes a day. And in those twenty minutes we had to kill a white horse, as it galloped madly pulling a cab; let drop a golden-haired girl, let the two halves of the bridge open up, let the golden hair stretch across the bottomless abyss, let the dead horse and the cab swing from the raised edge of the bridge, let the cab fall … On screen this takes a lot less than twenty minutes. But to film it takes hours!’9
October was completed in a phenomenally short time, thanks to having two film crews shooting simultaneously (and to the pep pills they took to keep them going day and night). ‘October is ready. Ready and not ready,’ wrote Eisenstein in Kino, a week before its first public showing on March 14, 1928. ‘A year of quite back-breaking toil. A year in which coping with thirty to forty hours’ shooting was regarded as the easy part of our job and most of our energy was expended on a fight with the slow, sluggish and malevolent machinery in the Leningrad studio. Towards the end of the year this flattened us. We had no teeth left to bite out another ten days from the inexorable deadlines … All we needed was a clear head and a little time. We did not manage, as it were, to redeem our new-born infant. So the film is tainted with a certain hint of negligence which in places hinders perception and everywhere provides “dilettanti” with ammunition for their derision.’10
Eisenstein edited most of the lengthy footage by himself, occasionally asking Esther Shub’s opinion about certain montage effects. During the editing, he claimed that his head was ‘so full of celluloid’ that the mere mention of the ‘utterly detested’ word ‘film’ was enough to send it ‘spinning dizzily … And perhaps something of this dizziness, this chaotic confusion of kilometres of film transferred itself to the film’s composition.’11
In the midst of the editing, Edmund Meisel arrived in Moscow to compose the music. For the scene when the collapse of the statue of Alexander III is shot in reverse, Meisel wrote the music in reverse, the same music that had been played ‘normally’ at the start. Eisenstein recalled ‘the trick with the “palindromic” music … Filming in reverse is always diverting and I remember how the first old comic films made use of this device … But I do not suppose anyone noticed this musical trick.’12
The French film scholar Léon Moussinac visited Eisenstein in November 1927, when he was cutting October: ‘Eisenstein was aware that side by side with the overpowering sequences … there were other sequences of considerably lesser quality, and he foresaw that his film could never be “complete” in the way he would have liked. He knew perfectly well that it would have to undergo certain revisions and cuts, and that even under the best circumstances only fragments would be shown abroad.’13
The first cut of 3,800 metres was ready for the anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1927, but only a few selected reels were shown at the anniversary celebrations. By the time the film was re-edited, it had lost 1,000 metres. The reason for this was clear. In an article submitted to Pravda, Trotsky called on his adherents to follow the example of Clemenceau (who had opened the way to take over from his predecessor’s failures in World War I) in case war engulfed the USSR. Stalin promptly engineered the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. After the two men led street demonstrations on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (i.e. November 7, 1927) while Eisenstein was still cutting October, they were expelled from the Party. The way was now clear for Stalin to oust the opposition from the Party en masse. The XV Congress in December 1927 decreed as much. Trotsky refused to accept the Congress’s decision and was thereupon exiled to Alma Ata in Central Asia, where Eisenstein would film Ivan the Terrible years later. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted and were permitted to crawl back into the Party.
Late one night, according to Alexandrov, when Eisenstein was working on the film, Stalin unexpectedly dropped in at the studios. He did not meet Eisenstein, but was shown several sequences. He ordered Trotsky, who figured prominently, to be expunged from the film altogether, and those scenes that showed Lenin in ‘an unsatisfactory light … Lenin’s liberalism is no longer valid today’, as Stalin remarked. Therefore numerous changes had to be made for political reasons, the first experience Eisenstein had of direct state interference. He would never again enjoy untrammelled freedom to create.
An advantage of being a film-maker in the Soviet Union has always been the financial support and the positive encouragement of all ideas which are not regarded as politically ‘mistaken’. So Eisenstein was relatively happy in the 1920s, and seems quietly to have accepted political ‘advice’ during the editing of October. If he complained, then few of his complaints, other than the occasional moan about technical facilities in Leningrad, have been recorded. Alexandrov’s attitude is that in 1927, at the peak of the Trotskyite dispute, some degree of political interference was generally regarded as a fact of life.
There were rumours alleging Eisenstein’s adherence to Trotsky – rumours which he felt compelled to repudiate publicly in a press article – explaining at the same time his reasons for the film’s delay. Eisenstein must have thought the allegations pretty serious to have broken off in the midst of work to write an article purely to clear his name.
In December 1927, two Harvard graduates, Alfred Barr and Jere Abbott, arrived in Moscow for a visit. Barr noted in his diary of January 1928: ‘He [Eisenstein] was extremely affable – humorous in talk, almost a clown in appearance … We saw four reels of October – his revolutionary film which was supposed to be finished three months ago – and may be ready by February. His mastery of cutting and camera placement was clearly shown, especially in the July riot scenes. We didn’t see the storming of the winter palace, which is the high point of the film. Certain faults appeared – he seemed to yield to the temptation of the fine shot – viz. the drawbridge scene. At times the tempo was too fast. The film seemed, however, a magnificent accomplishment … We asked whether much of the excellence of Eisenstein’s films did not develop in the cutting rather than the shooting. He laughed, and answered that the critics wrote of his filming as “always carefully premeditated.”’ A few weeks later, Barr wrote: ‘Found him very weary. “Will you go on vacation after October is finished?” “No, I’ll probably die!”’14
The premiere of the full and final version of October was held in Leningrad on January 28, 1928, two months after Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg was applauded at the Bolshoi on the precise day of the anniversary. Pudovkin’s film, as Eisenstein was swift to recognise, was ‘the first epic from an individual psychological theme of the past.’15
Audiences were disorientated by October with its dynamic montage, the constantly contrasting images, its visual metaphors, everything that makes the film such a rich experience today. It was perhaps unwise of Eisenstein to allow himself to experiment with a film whose subject matter was as sensitive as that of the Russian Revolution. Everyone from Lunacharsky down to the selected ‘representative’ workers had their say about the film in the press. Unlike Lunacharsky, who hailed October as ‘an enormous triumph’ and a ‘symphony after the étude of Potemkin,’ both Mayerhold and Mayakovsky tended towards the negative. Mayakovsky’s main criticism was the portrayal of Lenin. ‘For all the outward similarity, there is no hiding the inner emptiness. How right the comrade was who said that Nikandrov doesn’t resemble Lenin, but a statue of Lenin.’16 Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, expressed the same opinion in an article on October, although she qualified her criticism by saying that it represented a ‘landmark on the road towards a new art, towards the art of the future.’17
The film historian Nikolai Lebedev, looking back in 1947, dismissed October as one of the ‘conspicuous failures of the experimental cinema … Eisenstein considered that the basic facts of the October days were generally known, so that he presented not these, but, by his own admission, “my own associations, my visual puns” that those facts called to mind.’18
Eisenstein tried to answer his critics in an article in Kino in March 1928 called ‘Our October: Beyond the Played and the Non-Played’. ‘It would be a very great mistake to judge October by the criteria generated by the appearance of Potemkin … In some reels, October is trying to take the next step, trying to seek out speech that in its construction will wholly correspond to a similar vocabulary …’19
In a letter to Moussinac in December 1928, Eisenstein wrote: ‘From the point of view of construction, October is by no means flawless. It is just that in this film that is so much of “the people”, of the “masses”, I allowed myself to experiment. Despite the fact that my experiments are seldom appreciated … they were enough to break the composition of the work as a unity. But on the other hand they were also enough to allow me to make deductions which are very, very far-reaching.’20
Eisenstein’s ‘montage of film attractions’ reached its apotheosis in October. It developed his theory of ‘intellectual montage’, at which the audience must not only be shocked, but shocked into thinking. The number of shots – 3,200 – was more than double those in The Battleship Potemkin and more than in any of his other films. October also took the idea of the visual metaphor to its extreme, spreading layer upon layer of meaning over almost every image. The Latvian film writer Yuri Tsivian has revealed numerous connections between many of the film’s images and Russian symbolist culture that the general viewer could not be expected to make. For example, the white horse falling from the bridge (which seems to be a white horse falling from a bridge) is explained by Tsivian thus: ‘For Eisenstein and the Russian symbolists, the Russian Revolution was connected with the Apocalypse. One of the images in Russian symbolist poetry was a white horse in the sky. Andrei Bely wrote that film is the end of art, an apocalypse of art. A falling white horse represents the end of culture.’21 October, among all of Eisenstein’s films, lends itself to endless interpretations of this sort. The film opens with the toppling of the statue of Alexander III, the autocratic father of the newly-ousted Tsar Nicholas II, an emblem of the overthrow of the monarchy. It is later reconstructed (by reverse photography) to represent the reactionary measures of the Kerensky government. Other symbols abound, some obvious, some arcane. A strutting Alexander Kerensky, who embodies all of Eisenstein’s hatred for his father’s bourgeois mentality, is rapidly cross-cut with a gilded mechanical peacock. As Kerensky enters the Winter Palace as leader, the peacock turns and the doors close behind him, implying that power has trapped him into the notion of vanity. Both Kerensky and the advancing monarchist General Kornilov, are seen as twin Napoleons, represented by busts. A girl in the Women’s Death Battalion guarding the palace from the Bolsheviks, poses wistfully against Rodin’s statue of Spring, a variation on The Kiss, which reminds the audience that, under her uniform, she is just a young woman after all.
During the protracted Menshevik speeches, Eisenstein inter-cuts hands playing harps (a Busby Berkeleyesque moment) until a Bolshevik (to the relief of the audience) reacts by saying, ‘The time for words is past.’ The most puzzling of all the symbolic sequences is that which follows General Kornilov’s declaration that his anti-Bolshevik crusade was taken in the ‘name of God and Country!’ Here, a baroque Christ gives way to a many-armed Indian deity, and subsequently Japanese and African masks as well as voodoo idols, a sacred Chinese statue and Buddhas, exploding the myth of monotheism.
Because of the advanced style of the film as ‘slogan’, the characters, more than in any of Eisenstein’s other works, have little intrinsic personality beyond the strict typage imposed on them. Rather like Christ in Hollywood movies Lenin is treated hagio-graphically, depicted in historic leadership poses, while his audience glows in his presence.
But October is a magnificent constructivist propaganda poster brought to life. (While working on the picture, Eisenstein wrote, The time has come to make films directly from a slogan.’22) It captures the sweep of revolution, and the political comings and goings, leading up to the spectacular climax (equal in scale to many a Hollywood epic of the period). Because of the absence of newsreel footage of the event, this replication, obviously imbued by Eisenstein’s reading of the French Revolution, has long been taken as truth – the classic image of the Revolution – and is still frequently used in documentaries of the Russian Revolution; stills from October have appeared in school history books. (The following year, a similar mutation from fiction to fact happened with Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet On The Western Front, the battle scenes of which were so realistic that they have often been incorporated into documentaries about World War I.)
October completed Eisenstein’s trilogy of the Revolution through which certain motifs reappear – especially that of turning wheels representing change which eventually, in October, become clocks showing different times from various cities around the world, implying the cataclysmic moment when ‘Workers of the World Unite.’ The factory bosses in The Strike become the naval officers in The Battleship Potemkin who reappear as the bourgeois leaders of the provisional government in October, while in all three films the workers/sailors/Bolshevik activists fight nobly for their liberation, each time having to submit to government repression by police or soldiers; in the first case ending in defeat, the second in partial triumph, the third in ultimate victory.