October

Richard Taylor, October. London: BFI publishing, 2002. (BFI film classics series)

ISBN: 0851709168

96pp

£.99 (pb)

(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

Given the general mandate of a series like BFI Film Classics, a significant responsibility for description and redaction falls upon a scholar or critic. The mandate is particularly well-suited for a film like Sergei Eisenstein's October (Soviet Union 1928), with the remarkable frequency of its changes in physical contexts and camera perspectives and the attendant brevity of its shot components. Indeed this silent feature, commissioned as the centerpiece for the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution, contains over 3200 distinct shot pieces and intertitle strips in the span of some 2800 meters. Only a descriptive approach with exact attention to detail can convey the essence of October's montage abutments, its graphic structure at discrete and aggregate levels, and the intertextuality of its visuals and title inserts. The scholar responsible in this instance is Richard Taylor who, as the editor and a translator of Eisenstein's writings, the author of a study on Soviet cinema and politics in the silent era, and of a book on film propaganda, is expertly qualified for the task. Professor Taylor additionally provides a valuable account of political and cultural issues related to the production and reception of October.

Political and cultural circumstances explain many aspects of the Eisenstein film, as in the case of the original intertitles in Russian, which were rendered in all capital letters in part to aid the semi-literate, mass Soviet audience and in part to avoid the vexed issue for Communist society of whether God should start with a capital letter. Taylor's commentary points to moments in the film where the ideology intended by the imagery likely would have left the common Soviet citizen of the day baffled. On matters such as intelligibility - the film after all was constructed according to Eisenstein upon principles of intellectual montage - the book helpfully samples the public debate over October among contemporaries such as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's widow. In the depiction of everyday realities like the sale of vodka, however, where tsarist authority held a monopoly brought to an end by revolution, a mass Soviet audience was readily attuned to symbolism that identified the ancien régime.

Production costs on October ran twenty times more than the average budget for a Soviet feature of the time, and Eisenstein was compensated at a rate twice that paid to the other premier director Vsevolod Pudovkin, then at work on his anniversary work The end of St. Petersburg (Soviet Union 1927). But controversy surrounding October's version of revolutionary events, its political iconography and the question of its intelligibility ultimately demoted it from its intended purpose as the culmination of the 1927 celebrations, and the film was not released until March 1928. The major offense was the prominence Eisenstein and his collaborator Grigori Alexandrov originally gave to Leon Trotsky in determining the course of modern Russian history. When fifty years later Alexandrov published his memoirs, whose reliability is in many respects questionable, he claimed that Stalin personally intervened and censored the film in the course of a 4 am visit to the editing room on the anniversary day of the Revolution. With the elimination of Trotsky and the stolid performance of a non-actor in the role of Lenin, an unintended consequence is that the impression of dynamic leadership from the Party is left to the figure of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, the Bolshevik who formally arrested the Provisional Government during the siege of the Winter Palace. In fact, Antonov-Ovseyenko was one of two Party veterans who acted as a consultant for the production; in time he would become a victim of the Stalin purges.

Taylor's study considers the context most meaningful for an understanding of October to be not the Party but Western traditions of carnival, public spectacle, and mass celebration. Religion instead of politics is the well spring, according to this interpretation, in the film's contributions to a foundational myth for the Soviet state. In this claim Taylor follows the suggestion Oksana Bulgakowa makes in her Eisenstein biography that the director conceived of October as a Soviet equivalent to Cecil B. DeMille's The ten commandments (USA 1923), with Lenin elevated to the position of holy savior. This symbolism is said to remain intact, irrespective of the intellectual montage of the gods sequence, which is intended to disprove the existence of a supreme being through a visual process of devolution. In holding that the film's quasi-religious, celebratory mode fosters a theistic cult of personality, Taylor's study obviously does not subscribe to Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque as a demotic process that asserts the radical cultural and historical will of the masses.

The rewards of Taylor's approach to the film are often a result of his exact attention to iconography and to montage connections and disjunctions. Thematic and political polarity is marked by montage constructions such as the following: close shot of a locked door to the royal apartments in the Winter Palace, into which a politically paralyzed Kerensky has just retreated/a view from outside the prison cells that hold Bolshevik "traitors," who in time will be released in order to come to the defense of Petrograd against the reactionary forces of General Kornilkov while Kerensky collaborates in counterrevolution through his inaction. For the provisional leader Kerensky, as for Tsar Nicholas in his last days, the film portrays the Winter Palace not as a seat of actual political power but as a self-enclosed fantasy world. Grandiose, Napoleonic daydreams are a presenting symptom of this condition, and Professor Taylor delineates the resonances of this iconography within the history of Russian imperial power.

Another domain of October's symbolism is connected intimately to Eisenstein's personal preoccupations, as the director would disclose at some length while writing his memoirs in the 1940s. The dismantling through montage of the monumental statue of Alexander III, of a model of the monument in truth, is linked in the Taylor book, as in earlier studies, to the architectural career of Eisenstein's father and the sequence is thus understood as an act of psychological liberation from paternal authority. Taylor remarks further that the film director was "busy repressing his own homosexual inclinations at this time" (63), but his commentary leaves the depths of such psychodynamics unexplored and it gives no account of the conjectures and interpretations on the subject by Marie Seton, Andrew Britton, Dominque Fernandez, and others. The Taylor book does restore to the film a sexual profanity expressed in the original Russian on a title card but long censored in English versions. The closest available translation is "motherfucker," and the epithet is uttered as a Cossack officer rebukes a common soldier. With relentless irony the film's next images are of a sentimental statue of a mother and child entitled The first steps and located among the palace treasures. Taylor reads the montage conjunction as a logical reinforcement of "the conservative notion that Bolshevism will make the world safe for 'normal' motherhood" (63). Yet the montage moment also stands as a symbolic prelude to the climactic storming of the Winter Palace and the anarchic iconoclasm that attends revolutionary change.

Some of Professor Taylor's s observations about October are interesting simply on an anecdotal level. To play Cossack soldiers in Kornilov's Savage Division, the filmmakers hired immigrants from the Caucasus region living in Leningrad and employed around the city as bootblacks.

The accompanying visual material is wisely chosen and sharply reproduced. It includes production stills, frame enlargements, the Soviet posters for the film's release, and photographs of the 1920 public reenactment The storming of the winter palace. A vivid pictorial comparison is provided of a specific real space and "reel space" (18-22) through a 1912 photograph of the Moscow square in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, with the monumental statue of the enthroned Alexander III prominent in the scene, and a frame still of the film's model of the statue, necessary because the Soviet state had dismantled the monument earlier in the 1920s. There is as well a postcard group portrait dating from 1917 of uniformed members of the Provisional Government Women's Battalion, which helped defend the Winter Palace against Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. As Taylor explicates the film's gender politics, when female soldiers from the "Battalion of death" surrender their firearms after an ultimatum by revolutionaries these women regain their "natural" femininity in accordance with an underlying conservative, Stalinist social agenda. Any consideration of Eisenstein's anniversary film leaves us inevitably with a question that no book on October or on October can answer yet: with the end of the Soviet Union what meaning will the Bolshevik Revolution have in the course of the twenty-first century?

James Goodwin,

University of California, USA.

Created on: Wednesday, 25 June 2003 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 2003