A Film Canon

For the most part, October replaces Strike and Potemkin's polemicism with pedagogy, anticipating those post-revolution generations that will need to be ceremoniously reminded of events, rather than spurred to participate in them. As a result, large segments of the film feel like an ideologically inflected history lesson, painting portraits of such figures as Lenin, Kerensky, Trotsky and, very briefly, Stalin. This produces a stasis that doesn't play to Eisenstein's strengths. Despite his attempt to co-opt it as a pretext for symbolic montage, the educational (rather than inspirational) imperative makes the comparisons seem far more laboured and obvious than at the beginning of Strike, where a similar process occurs. That said, there is an extended sequence of stillness comparable in its power to the night scene in Potemkin, detailing the twenty minutes that the October revolutionaries were given to surrender Petrograd. However, as in Potemkin, the stillness only achieves its haunting, lyrical beauty by virtue of the anticipation of further action, which doesn't tend to extend to the stasis of the political narrative. For this reason, the most satisfying parts of the film are those that depict the various revolutionary moments, in which the topography of Petrograd replaces the Bolshevik leaders as protagonist. In particular, Eisenstein handles the raising of the city bridges with extraordinary cinematic aplomb, providing a series of spectacular point-of-view shots from deep within the metallic substructure and ornamental latticework, as well as engineering a scene in which a trampled horse and crushed rider are lifted high over the river, and city, by the rising road.