October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)
Eisenstein dramatizes the 1917 October Revolution, from the fall of the Provisional Government to the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace, restaging history at the actual St. Petersburg locations with thousands of extras.
October was commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the revolution it depicts, and its Winter Palace assault became so widely mistaken for genuine newsreel footage that it still shapes how the event is popularly remembered; Eisenstein reedited the film after Trotsky’s fall from favor to cut him from the story.
Background
October: Ten Days That Shook the World was made to mark the tenth anniversary of the 1917 revolution, and Sergei Eisenstein co-directed it with Grigori Aleksandrov. The film restages events from the fall of the Provisional Government to the Bolshevik seizure of the Winter Palace, shot at real St. Petersburg locations with large numbers of extras. Its version of the palace assault was so widely taken for authentic newsreel footage that it has shaped popular memory of the event. Eisenstein later re-edited the film after Leon Trotsky fell from favor, removing him from the story.
What to watch for
The film is built from crowds and montage rather than a single protagonist, so workers and soldiers appear as collective forces. Watch the sequence of the Winter Palace assault, with crowds surging through the building and a statue of a tsar pulled down, which Eisenstein stages through rapid cutting and dynamic angles. The film also uses symbolic inserts and juxtaposed images, a hallmark of Eisenstein’s style. It is openly propagandistic, and knowing the anniversary context helps explain its heroic framing and its portrayal of the Provisional Government as ineffective. Its influence on later screen depictions of revolution is hard to overstate.
