《十月》经典观后感10篇
《十月》是一部由格里高利·亚历山德罗夫 / 谢尔盖·爱森斯坦执导，Nikolay Popov / Vasili Nikandrov / Layaschenko主演的一部剧情 / 历史类型的电影，文章吧小编精心整理的一些观众的观后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《十月》观后感(一)：关于《十月》的不连续性剪辑及其背景
（本文摘选自《电影艺术：形式与风格》。摘取这一小段的目的是为了使我和一些普通观众能够大致了解本片的背景，以及应该从何种角度观赏本片。）
在20世纪20年代，对多数的苏联导演而言，剪辑是组织影片形式的主要方法，它的作用不只是在连续性系统中加强故事的发展。爱森斯坦早期的影片——《罢工》、《战舰波将金》、《十月》、《旧与新》(Old and New)，无不尝试以某些剪辑手法来组构一部影片。爱森斯坦不愿让剪辑技巧屈就于叙事，反而视影片为剪辑的产物。
爱森斯坦反对连续性剪辑，而寻求并开发好莱坞所谓的不连续性剪辑；他经常通过设计、拍摄和剪辑，以期在镜头及场次间制造最大的冲击(collision)。因为他相信，只有这种冲突的处理方式可使观众也参与理解影片的过程。
爱森斯坦不愿受制于传统的戏剧束缚，因此他的电影自由游走于时空之间，形成的影像模式旨在刺激观众的感官、情绪及思想。在此以《十月》中的一个片段，简短地说明爱森斯坦如何运用不连续性的剪辑法。
总之，爱森斯坦的空间剪辑，也如同他的时间、图形剪辑，旨在形成相互关系、模拟及对照，进而诠释事件的涵义。这层诠释并非以告知方式传递给观众，而是在不连续性的剪辑中，迫使观众推敲出其中的关联。这个片段以及《十月》的其他部分，都显示除了传统的连续性剪辑法外，还有其他强有力的处理手法。
:观赏20世纪30年代和20世纪40年代的美国电影，可让你熟悉传统连续性剪辑手法，试着预测接下来会是什么样的镜头（你会惊讶于你的命中率）。如果你看的是录象带，试着把声音关掉，这样你会更容易注意到剪辑的手法；若看到违反连贯性的镜头，要思考其目的；若看到不遵循传统剪辑手法的电影，找出其特殊的剪辑模式。如果有可能，利用录像机或DVD上的慢动作、静止和倒转等功能，仔细分析影片的每一场戏。（这对所有影片都奏效。)如此一来，你对剪辑的观察力及理解力势必大增。
《十月》观后感(二)：十月 教材汇编
认识电影272页 爱森斯坦在冬宫做好几个月陈设 电影景象是巴洛克式 结构丰富形式复杂 只要人工的(形式主义的)效果 认识电影362页 全片宣传意味十足 对未来充满希望 也把沙皇过去统治时期鄙称为黑暗时代 意识形态粗劣明显 辩证剪辑风格制作的并列影像出奇美丽 电影艺术69页实验电影 电影艺术98页 情节可以利用银幕长度延长故事长度 本片利用剪辑技术延长短时间发生的事件
电影艺术224页 倾斜镜头并不是表示脱序的世界 反而增加了推进大炮的动力感
电影艺术269页 重复好几次桥座升起的镜头 来强调此刻的重要性 重叠剪辑
电影艺术297页 不连续性剪辑的功能：十月
电影艺术355页 其他影片会用非比寻常的技术呈现画面 若要了解它 我们必须用这些陌生技巧来构组在新风格上的期待 比如本片中的不连续性剪辑手法
电影艺术356页 显著技巧 很可能就是影片中大量运用的技术 本片中的快速剪辑 都引发观众注意去进一步留心观察
电影艺术358页 分析者必须找出风格在影片整体形式中所扮演的角色 不连续剪辑是不是像我们曾分析过的《十月》一样 是为了产生叙事上的全知观点？
《十月》观后感(三)：转载Sperber细读爱森斯坦《十月》，逐个镜头解读爱氏的镜头语言
《十月》是爱森斯坦使用蒙太奇最有试验性和创造力的电影之一。尽管著名镜头很多，但是其中意象繁多，结构复杂，非电影专业的同学们（比如我）很容易看着看着就抓瞎了。这篇文章是Murray Sperber1977年发表于Jump Cut杂志上的，是细读《十月》的评论文章里比较早也比较有名的一篇。不知是否有中文译介。我全文转来，贴在这里，希望对大家有一些帮助和启发。全文英文，每一段我用中文大致标注了一下我觉得比较重要的点。
erber的主要论点是，爱森斯坦在《十月》中，全片贯彻了他的马克思主义思想：
1 艺术与其还原历史细节的真实，不如说是展现辩证历史的真实，而辩证历史的真实则是导演通过对于历史的理解而把握的历史与政治的核心；
2 辩证历史是通过矛盾冲突与辩证发展来体现的，具体说来就是“正题-反题-合题”这样的进展，在具体的历史情境中，两种相互对立的力量可以视为正题与反题，两者的冲突必将导致一个新的结果，而这个新的结果又将遇到自己的反题，在此逻辑中不断的发展下去（所谓螺旋上升，即绕了一圈后回到了出发点，但是更高，再绕，再更高）；
3 艺术即冲突，蒙太奇是用来表现冲突的艺术工具。
JUMP CUT：A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Eisenstein’s October
y Murray Sperber
from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977, pp. 15-22
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1977, 2004
INTRODUCTION
ergei Eisenstein, in the first decade of the Soviet Union and his own first decade in the cinema, was deeply committed to Marxism. This fact, so obvious in Eisenstein’s films of the 1920s, is denied or distorted by most critics of his work.
oliticos often attack or apologize for him in “vulgar Marxist” or “vulgar Free World” terms: e.g., the Stalinist and American Legion charges against him during his lifetime (OCTOBER was considered particularly “deviationist” and “subversive”), and the Soviet Union’s veneration of him in safe death. The majority of writers, including many of the luminaries of film criticism, evaluate Eisenstein mainly for his technical achievements and failures, and his place in film history. That he happened to make movies about political revolution appears in their eyes inconsequential compared to his innovations in film direction and editing.
This aesthete position gained momentum in the West during the Cold War when the safest way to discuss film—or any art—was in formalist terms. And when film came to the academy, film teachers and historians, codifying and clubifying their language and discipline also felt most comfortable discussing the director out of political context and in terms of a mystified film history: e.g., partially influenced by Griffith but little impact upon Hitchcock, etc..
西方对于爱森斯坦的解读多是通过美学角度（时值冷战）。
The study of actual history is difficult and the more distant and foreign the period—e.g., the Soviet 1920s—the greater the problems. Also, an idealist approach to film (film as an art object) is generally easier than a materialist one (what actually occurred and why). Thus aesthetic criticism of Eisenstein continues. But denying an artist’s political content is a highly political albeit conservative act. If Eisenstein’s films are art objects, then we can ignore his political—i.e. Marxist—messages. Although in the last half century a number of critics, mainly French, have inquired into the connections between politics and art in his work, their impact upon film criticism, especially British and U.S., has been negligible. (For the best of the French writing, see the special double issue of Cahiers du Cinema, Jan.-Feb., 1971.) The purpose of this essay, therefore, is not to add to the existing criticism on Eisenstein but to shift the discussion, to consider him in terms of his Marxism. Here I will try to understand his use of dialectical materialism and to evaluate whether and how he translated it into cinema. Only in this way do Eisenstein’s triumphs, as well as his failures, become intelligible.
THE CRITICISM OF OCTOBER
对于《十月》的批评
art of the problem for Western critics and viewers is that the subject of Eisenstein’s OCTOBER—the 1917 Russian Revolution—is unfamiliar. Furthermore, the print of the film they see is butchered and far from the director’s intention. In foreign distribution, especially in the United States, the film was cut and even censored in various ways. The usual Western version is both distorted and at least 1,200 meters shorter than the original Moscow print. Even the usual title, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, is incorrect: Eisenstein always called his work OCTOBER. The German distributor renamed it TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD after John Reed’s famous eyewitness account of the Revolution, which was one of Eisenstein’s many sources.
美国放映的《十月》有所删减（后文提到主要是关于宗教的一段）。
In discussing the film, it is important to use the best print available in the West. This is the French S.N.A. version, the closest to the original Moscow print. And to help the reader understand the action better, to retrieve the past, in a sense, it is useful to provide ongoing identifications of the historical persons and events. Although cumbersome at times, this positivist approach supplies the facts of the film, facts upon which any understanding and comment should be—but have not been—based.
OCTOBER has always been a problem film, for Eisenstein, his viewers, and especially critics. From its premiere, the film has served more as a Rorschach for critics’ projections than as a work seen and understood in its own terms. Mordaunt Hall, the reviewer for the New York Times, found it
“clever, but a bore. It is kaleidoscopic... His masters, the Soviet, get their due.”
Then, in complete disregard of the images of the screen, he states:
“Mr. Eisenstein revels in showing the pillaging of Bolshevik troops as they found their hobnailed boots for the first time on the waxed floors of a palace” (Nov. 3, 1928, p. 24).
Even critics predisposed in favor of the Soviet Union and its cinema complain of the film’s “rococo discursiveness and its lack of organized dramatic development” (Alexander Bakshy, The Nation, Dec. 28, 1928, p. 721). Another maintains,
“OCTOBER has no central slant. It is built up out of a collection of what might be called imaginary news reels. It darts about Russia, rushes through time, skips whole pages of history to fasten its frenzied eye in turn on ... etc” (Robert Littell, The New Republic, Nov. 21, 1928, p. 17).
The standard critical line on OCTOBER was soon established:
“The film as a whole is difficult and incoherent” (William Hunter, Scrutiny of Cinema, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1932, p. 31).
Critics, especially in the United States, did have the problem of seeing butchered versions of the film. Nevertheless, one suspects that even if they had viewed the original Moscow print, they probably would not have understood the film any better.
The problem for most critics is that they have been unwilling or unable to see the film in dialectical terms. Eisenstein described OCTOBER as “the first embryonic step towards a totally new form of film expression.” He called this form the “intellectual film,” and he based its methodology on his interpretation of Marxism (Film Form, New York, 1949, p. 63).
大部分影评人认为《十月》不够连贯，不够具有故事性。
To analyze Eisenstein’s OCTOBER, we must first understand his theoretical premises and then examine whether he was able to render them cinematically. If we apply Western film values and sit passively in the dark, regarding OCTOBER as simply another sequence of moving celluloid, we watch the movie through a distorted lens. If we gain entrance to the world of OCTOBER, its political and cinematic meanings, we begin to see Eisenstein’s work, walk around its filmscape. participate in it, and achieve a new and richer understanding.
EISENSTEIN'S FILM THEORY AND HIS PLANS FOR OCTOBER
爱森斯坦的电影理论和他对于《十月》的计划
Eisenstein not only made movies but he wrote about the cinema in a detailed and original manner. In one of his most important essays, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” written one year after completing OCTOBER, he tried to explain his sense of dialectical materialism and its application to film (his main example was OCTOBER). Eisenstein began by stating:
“The foundation of this philosophy is a dynamic concept of things:
eing—as a constant evolution from the interaction of two contradictory opposites.
ynthesis—arising from the opposition between thesis and antithesis.” (Film Form, 45).
在《辩证看待电影形式》中，爱森斯坦写到：“这一哲学的基础是事物的动态概念：存在——作为相反的两极的互动中持续的变化。合题——从正题和反题的对立中产生。”
Eisenstein believed that “art is always conflict (his italics) and that montage captures conflict on the screen. By montage, he does not mean only the editing and arranging of film, but a much deeper dynamic:
“By collision. By the conflict of two pieces of film in opposition to each other from the collision of two given factors arises a concept” (Ibid., 37).
同一文章中，爱森斯坦说：“艺术是冲突，蒙太奇在银幕上捕捉冲突……通过碰撞。通过两个对立的电影片段的冲突，在两个既定因素的碰撞中产生新的概念。”
He rejects the linear editing and narratives of his colleagues, Pudovkin (“linkage”) and Kuleshov (“brick-by-brick composition”), because their
“approach overrules dialectical development, and dooms one to mere evolutionary ‘perfecting,’ in so far as it gives no bite into the dialectical substance of events” (Ibid., 37).
他反对他的同事使用的线性剪辑和叙事方式，他说这种方式：“掩盖了辩证发展，使人只能不断的追求‘更好’，而对于事件的辩证本质则没有触及。”
Dialectical montage cannot be confined to editing single shots. It must connect to the “organicness” of the whole work. In his later essay, “The Structure of the Film,” he argues that
“organicness can be defined by the fact that the work as a whole is governed by a certain law of structure and that all its parts are subordinated to this canon” (Ibid., 161).
In the essay, he shows how in POTEMKIN he worked dialectically, seeking the dynamic quality within the whole work, then carefully connecting sections to sequences and sequences to individual shots.
In the same way, his conception for OCTOBER was dialectical. He constructed his shooting ｓｃｒｉｐｔ in five act form (he had done the same in POTEMKIN. He began each act with a thesis, set up its antithesis, and at the end of the act, resolved the conflict with a synthesis which became, at the opening of the next act, the new thesis. Dialectical conflict characterizes each part of the act and frequently each sequence and even each shot. (See S.M. Eisenstein, Octobre: découpage intégral, Editions de l'Avant-Scène, Paris, 1971.)
爱森斯坦在此文中以《战舰波将金》为例，解释了自己的这一理念。《战舰波将金》分为五部分，每一部分开始都是一个正题，然后给出反题，这部分的结尾，在两者冲突之中得到合题，而这一合题则会成为下一部分的正题。
The ｓｃｒｉｐｔ, like the film, opens with the symbols of the old order, the supposedly timeless power of Tsarist Russia. Immediately, the oppressed Russian masses challenge the Tsarist thesis. The first six shots of the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ are of gold and jewels, the Tsar’s crown, scepter and imperial globe. The next seven shots are of starving crowds of women, machine-like workers, and bent peasants. And the next two shots read: “And the crown begins to tarnish and fade. Then the blinding brilliance disappears” (Octobre, p. 12). Within this opening sequence of the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ (which Eisenstein did not film), we can see a thesis-antithesis and the suggestion of its synthesis.
原定的《十月》开头，没有拍摄，是依照此结构而写的。
The next sequence, a more powerful opening, is the famous scene of the Tsar’s statue: shots of the statue, appearing omnipotent and permanent; shots of the angry masses of people who surround and rope the statue; then the stone Tsar begins to wobble and tilt; back and forth between the statue and the people the struggle goes on, until, with shot 31, the Tsar falls and breaks into pieces, into the synthesis, “FOR ALL, FOR ALL.”
《十月》开头，沙皇雕像（正题），人民推到雕像（反题），镜头31，沙皇雕像倒下，合题：“为了众人，为了众人”。
Immediately, a new thesis is established: “LONG LIVE THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.” Once again, the people must struggle with it until, at the end of Act I, it is resolved into the Menshevik synthesis: “LONG LIVE THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.”
新的正题：临时政府万岁；新的反题：人民群众的斗争；第一幕结尾：孟什维克的合题：“社会主义革命万岁。”
Act II opens with this synthesis immediately turned into Lenin’s thesis; “SOCIALIST AND NOT BOURGEOIS/DOWN WITH THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.”
第二幕开场，上一幕结尾的合题立即变成列宁的正题：“社会主义，而非资本主义。临时政府下台。”
The second act, probably the most exciting and dynamic in the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ and later in the film, has the Petrograd workers in mortal struggle with their enemies. Back and forth the fight continues. And out of this collision comes powerful drama—until in the final scene of the act, the Bolshevik agitators convince Kornilov’s “Wild Division” to come over to their side.
The third act opens with the title: “THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION WAS PUT DOWN BUT THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION DID NOT GIVE UP THEIR ARMS.” Then we read Lenin’s famous dictum: “IT IS NECESSARY TO SEIZE POWER.” (In the shooting ｓｃｒｉｐｔ, Eisenstein uses these quotations and titles much more extensively than he does in the film. In fact, one of his triumphs in OCTOBER is the translation of abstract and verbal political argument into visual terms.)
第三幕
In the third act, the Bolsheviks contend directly with the Provisional Government and those whom they lump together with Kerensky: the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. The act ends with the Bolshevik Revolutionary Military Council drawing up plans for the insurrection and tracing them out on a map of Petrograd.
This synthesis, the Bolshevik plan for a coup d'etat, becomes the thesis for Act IV: Move the red troops into position. This is also the point where the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ loses much of its dynamic quality. Eisenstein presents the Bolsheviks as inexorable:
“shot #249, One after the other, the [red] detachments come into the city; shot #250, One after the other, the orders fly from the small office [the Revolutionary Military Committee’s headquarters] along the telephone lines; shot #251, One after the other, the regiments occupy the strategic positions of the city; shot #252, One after the other, the detachments occupy: shot #253, the railroad stations, shot #254. the electricity stations, shot #256, the water stations ... “ (Octobre, p. 12).
Instead of contending and struggling with the antithesis, the thesis simply overwhelms it.
Acts IV and V become a paean to the Bolshevik seizure of power. What should be the most dramatic moments of OCTOBER become flat and inevitable. Eisenstein violates his own principles of dialectical montage. There is no collision merely a walkover. There are ideas for excellent scenes and sequences, but the drama of the seizure of power is not present. Instead, the director plans a pageant.
第四幕，第五幕。第四幕和第五幕失去了辩证的冲突，人民群众的力量被展现得非常强大，几乎没有什么冲突就会直接获胜，因此第四幕和第五幕失去了爱森斯坦的戏剧性的力量。
In the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ for Act V, he scheduled only sixteen shots of the storming of the Winter Palace (16 out of a total of 479 indicates their brevity). Eisenstein, however, made movies on location as well as in the conference room. When he came to shoot these scenes, he took fuller advantage of the magnificent Winter Palace. He added whole new sequences, such as the fighting in the crypts and the lumpenproletariat raiding the wine cellars. Thus, he turned the unpromising last act of the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ into an acceptable conclusion to the film.
As his ｓｃｒｉｐｔ predicts and his film shows, Eisenstein’s triumphs in OCTOBER come from his method of dialectical montage, and his failures spring from the same source. Because he prepares his viewer for a dialectical and dramatic struggle—and part of his dialectic is to move the viewer into this struggle—when he undercuts the tension in the final two acts, he loses his audience. He also fails to gain the full impact from his final synthesis, Lenin’s statement “THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ REVOLUTION HAS SUCCEEDED/LONG LIVE THE WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.”
The viewer responds: It was too easy—where was the struggle？
ANALYSIS OF OCTOBER
《十月》分析
（注：接下来进入非常高能的逐个镜头解读段落！篇幅太长，我只做一点关键词的摘要，至少可以方便大家查找吧。）
(The following attempts to show how Eisenstein’s dialectic works—or fails to work—in the film. Because of limitations of space and readers’ patience. I have concentrated on the important scenes and shots.)
ACT I
第一幕
The Statue of Alexander Ill—the despotic Tsar’s huge image dominates the screen. Thesis: the old order. The scene is at twilight, the end of an era. The symbols of the old order—throne, crowned head, scepter, and imperial globe—dominate the picture. The director shoots from a low angle to make them appear even larger and more powerful. Behind the statue is the steeple of the Church of Christ the Savior—the tie between church and state.
宗教与国家
Crowds of people run up public steps. Eisenstein, always translating political ideas into visual images, announces one of his dominant metaphors: Those ascending steps are moving to power, those descending are losing power (he had used the same metaphor in STRIKE and POTEMKIN). The people, the antithesis, have come to oppose the Tsar’s power.
上下台阶和夺权/失去权力的视觉比喻
For his contemporary Soviet audience, Eisenstein has immediately stated a crucial premise. He is creating his own version of revolutionary history. He is shunning strict verisimilitude for an impressionistic view of events. The statue of Alexander III was in Moscow—not St. Petersburg, where the February riots occurred. And the statue was not pulled down until 1921, four years after the revolution. As he says in his essay on dialectical montage, one of his aims was the
“Liberation of the whole action from the definition of time and space. My first attempts at this were in OCTOBER”
(Film Form, 58).
史实的错误（沙皇雕像不是十月革命弄倒的）是为了象征意义的强烈。
The people surround the statue and a peasant woman climbs onto its base to harangue the crowd. At first the woman seems tiny against the Tsar’s image, she barely comes up to his ankle. A rope is thrown up to her, then three workers climb onto the crown and tie ropes about the head and neck. They are a tiny group of people against the massiveness of Tsarist Russia. Eisenstein’s political message, and one of his main themes, is that although the people are ready for revolution, they need the leadership of the energetic and audacious few: the Bolsheviks.
画面的政治意义：人群热情高涨，但是与沙皇的旧权力相比仍然渺小，需要布尔什维克的领导。
Eisenstein cuts first to a crowd of soldiers who raise their rifle butts to the sky, then to a crowd of peasants holding sickles against the sky. All acts in history connect. The army and the peasant masses are ready to join the revolution. The first title announces “February.”
The ropes for the Tsar’s statue are in place. Their great number underlines the countless ties between the old order and the new—out of imperial Russia has come its revolutionary proletariat. The dismembering of the statue begins—in the same way, imperial Russia was dismembered by the war. The head shakes, the arms come off and the Romanoffs rock upon their throne. It is decayed and dismembered but still it does not topple (Russia from 1914 to February, 1917). Shots of the army and the peasants, then, finally, with a tremendous heave, the statue falls forward.
“For all, for all, for all” (Eisenstein plays with the title’s connotation: this was the way announcements and telegrams began). A close-up shot shows two men, grossly bourgeois according to the best Eisensteinian “typage,” congratulating each other. The director said,
“In concept from beginning to end, OCTOBER is pure ‘typage’”
(Film Form).
A shot of a church incense burner. “FOR ALL.” The temporary synthesis of the February upheaval: the bourgeois take-over.
二月革命的结果是资产阶级得到权力。
The opulence of the Church and the absurdity of the Metropolitan of Novgorod is juxtaposed to a poor peasant woman, praying: the people must learn that religion is fake and a tool of the state.
Tsarist Army officers burst into laughter; politicians sing “Huzzah” (through the rhythmic montage we seem to hear them). But the soldiers want peace. Bayonets stuck in the snow, fraternization of Russian and German troops (honest, open faces including the long, thin one of Eisenstein’s cameraman, Edward Tisse, as a German soldier). “BROTHERS.” One particularly intense soldier gives a political speech (probably he is a Bolshevik). The cut from his face to the crowd shows the dialectic between them. Soon all soldiers, Russian and German, applaud.
德国士兵与俄罗斯士兵：“兄弟！”
An allied embassy: a flunkey in full morning coat and tails walks onto an ornate, mosaic floor—its center, a Medusa head—and extends a sheet of paper. The diplomatic document appears to sprout snakes. The war must continue, the Provisional Government is the lackey of the Allies (the Bolsheviks called for immediate peace). Shots of the imperial eagle, church crosses, bayonets in the snow.
缔结外交关系。地砖上是蛇发魔女美杜莎的头，外交文件似乎在喷蛇。
An explosion: the friendly soldiers panic and flee to their trenches. Montage of soldiers running—explosions—men falling—debris falling—montage of a huge machine pressing down, the meat grinder of The Great War. All men are brothers and only kill each other when trapped by machines, literal and institutional ones.
战争的影像与工业机器的影像。
Out of the unstable synthesis of the Provisional Government’s war comes greater oppression of the workers and the army, and starvation. A tableau of a breadline at winter twilight. The scene, a change of pace and an effective counterpoint to the frantic battle sequence, conveys the static, endless waiting for bread that is not there (a situation Eisenstein must have remembered from his life in Petrograd in 1917).
面包队伍。
“Everything is the same as before. Famine and war. But at the Finland Station, on the 3rd of April.” Night: lights play on the crowd, honest faces of workmen, soldiers and sailors. In the crowd a glimpse of Lenin’s face (played by his look-alike, Nikandrov). He climbs up to a platform by stepping on a wheel. Close-up shot of his foot on the wheel (the Bolshevik wheel of history is about to roll). Lenin speaks: “Down with the Provisional Government.” Eisenstein shoots up at Lenin to confirm his domination of the scene and the historical moment. Then he shoots down so that Lenin seems to fuse with his audience. Lenin’s synthesis, which becomes the thesis for the next act, is “ALL power to the Soviets. Long Live the Socialist Revolution. Socialist and not Bourgeois.”
列宁讲话。（车轮的象征。拍摄角度的象征：列宁对于镜头的掌控象征列宁对于历史时刻的把握。）
As the first act shows, Eisenstein sought a dramatic view of revolutionary history. His controlling idea came from his understanding of Hegel and Marx: history as dialectical conflict. Although generally following the flow of events in early 1917, he moves beyond specific events and searches for dialectical tension and drama. When showing the Army’s desire for peace, he does not distinguish between regiments (a few were still Tsarist in sympathy, most supported the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, and a handful were Bolshevik) or even fronts (some were more antiwar than others). Instead, he tries to focus on the deeper feelings of the muzhik soldiers and the fact that although victims of the military machine, they were not quite ready for revolt. Eisenstein’s premise is that the overview contains the dialectical truths of history.
历史中的辩证的真理。
In Act I, he telescopes five confused days of street fighting in Petrograd in February, 1917, into one sharp sequence—the statue toppling—which he does not specifically locate in Petrograd. He recreates Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station but sees no reason to mention either the squabbles within the Bolshevik leadership or the ambiguous nature of Lenin’s return (the Germans transported him from Switzerland in a sealed train). For Eisenstein, history is dialectical and its essence, rather than its surface, is crucial.
历史是辩证的，它的本质才是关键，而不是它的表面的事件。
ACT II
第二幕
The second act focuses on the July Days: a series of strikes and street fighting incidents led by the Anarchists and the far left-wing Bolsheviks (against the will and strategy of the Bolshevik Central Committee). Why was Eisenstein fascinated by the July Days？ Some critics suggest purely technical reasons: he was filming in high summer and these were the main summer events of the revolutionary year. A less superficial reason—and the film reveals it—is that for Eisenstein the July Days provided the greatest drama of 1917. The workers and soldiers struggle against a strong opponent and are temporarily set back. This is the drama of STRIKE and POTEMKIN. Here again Eisenstein probably gravitated to a favorite theme.
七月的无政府主义者和极左布尔什维克的罢工与街头冲突。与《罢工》和《战舰波将金》主题相近，是爱森斯坦最爱的主题。
The July Days sequence opens with crowds of people mounting the steps of public buildings (resonances of the opening of Act I). The seemingly spontaneous uprising demands that, the Provisional Government resign. The people rise up, the bourgeois government must come down. Streetcars pass between a speaker and the camera (the moving engines of history).
Trotsky addresses a group of sailors. He is wearing a Red Army uniform, gold rimmed glasses and a goatee; the sailors are identified as “Kronstadt Marines—Trotsky’s special followers. “The uprising is premature.” The sailors discuss this among themselves and decide to sheathe their bayonets. The people start down the public steps. But the Provisional Government provokes an incident and fires on the crowd. Montage of machine gun barrels—the dispersing crowd—the firing guns—the fleeing crowd—banners fall. Revolutionary banners are a key motif in this sequence. When raised high, they signify the people moving toward power; when fallen, the bourgeois counter-attacking.
旗帜的象征意义：旗帜高举象征人民有权力
The camera is perched above the intersection of Sadovaia and Nevsky Prospects and there are sharp newsreel-like shots of masses of people fleeing across public spaces. Then comes the famous montage of the machine gunner intercut with his firing gun. In the montage fusion, the soldier becomes his machine, he is reified into a brutal, dehumanized object. The dialectic within this shot connects to the movement within the sequence—the machine gunner versus the fleeing crowd; within the Act—the Provisional Government versus the people; and finally, within the film—oppression versus revolution.
著名的机关枪与枪手的交错蒙太奇：在压迫的军队中，枪手变成了他的枪——一个残忍的物。
The director relentlessly shoots down into the fleeing crowd to produce the sense of the distant and brutal bourgeois government always aloof from the masses below. The people must obtain guns to bring Kerensky and Co. off their high perch.
A young worker, with a revolutionary banner under his arm, runs along the river quay (this area, near the Nevsky Prospect, was one of the wealthier sections of Petrograd). A fancy parasol fills the screen—through it we see a luxuriously dressed woman and her officer lover in a boat. They spot the worker with the flag. “A Bolshevik.” The officer attacks the worker, the lady calls out to well dressed passers-by and they join in beating the worker. The coquette sits in the boat, twirling her parasol and coyly holding her chin up to watch this spectator sport. It’s the utter decadence of the Russian bourgeoisie, like the Romans watching the mauling of Christians. By piling up his arresting images of the bourgeoisie, Eisenstein moves the viewer to his perception of middle class life. In this act particularly, the Provisional Government and Kerensky seem the occasion for his much wider and deeper attack on everything bourgeois.
一个年轻工人掉入水中，被资产阶级殴打。
ome women attempt to destroy the Bolshevik flag. One tries to tear it with her teeth, another lifts her skirt to try to stomp its pole. The bourgeoisie are so reified, so turned into their objects of wealth, their possessions—visually, the women become their fancy hats—that they live in a world of fetishes and false symbols. Thus, they think that by destroying the flag, they can obliterate the Bolsheviks. But the bourgeoisie is impotent. The women are unable to destroy the flag; they cannot destroy even the symbol of Bolshevik power, never mind the real thing. (Eisenstein’s consistent satire and vengeance upon the bourgeoisie—he is the Daumier of the cinema with his brilliant eye for épater—probably derives from his own middle class origins. A proletarian director would not care enough to sustain such anger.)
资产阶级女性由她们的帽子体现——资产阶级的拜物本质
A well-dressed old gentleman cheers on the women by clapping effetely with one gloved hand. A bourgeois woman’s cruel laughter dissolves into a montage of machine guns and wounded bodies. Then Konavalov, the Minister of Trade and Industry—his symbol is a very ornate telephone—orders the Neva drawbridges raised, separating the bourgeois and working class sections. He also confuses these symbols with actual power, and later he will discover what occurs when the telephone wires are cut.
The still understructure of the bridge fills the screen; slowly, inexorably, the machines move. Eisenstein, always fascinated with machinery (and during his earlier constructivist phase, optimistic about it), equates it here with inhuman destruction. At the exact center of the bridge lies the body of a young woman—her long hair is slowly stretched as the bridge opens. She is a symbol of the human tragedy of civil war. Shot by government troops, she is at the exact symbolic center of this divided country. While the Provisional Government raised the bridges in order to preserve class division, the Bolsheviks will lower all bridges.
吊桥升起（国家分裂）
A white carriage horse hangs from the opening bridge. A symbol of luxury and waste, its plunge into the Neva implies the abuse of nature and the end of a decadent era. The impassive stone head of a Pharaoh fills the screen. The Provisional Government does not care about the loss of human and animal life. (“Pharaoh” was also a popular epithet for the Tsar’s police.) As the sides of the bridge stand apart, we realize that the revolutionary synthesis was not possible in July.
白马的象征
ut within the Provisional Government’s power are the seeds of its own destruction. The bourgeois, on their bank, laugh and clap as the workers flee. An army officer throws a stack of captured Pravda (truth) tracts into the Neva. They bob about and some do not sink.
The streets of Petrograd: those soldiers who have fought with the workers trudge in file, guarded by their captors and jeered at by the bourgeois spectators. Treated like trained animals, they are forced to march in unison with the hoofs of their captors’ horses. A cut to the face of an elderly man. In the sentimental tradition this face would signal a kindly old man, but when we see the man mocking the soldiers, Eisenstein breaks through the surface and reveals class venality. This sequence, some of it shot through columns and ruins with the resonances of prisoners being led into Rome, repeats the analogy of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
慈祥的老人嘲笑士兵——阶级矛盾
A corridor in the Winter Palace. First the back, then the body of a man in a Provisional Government officer’s uniform walking down the long corridor of ornate columns: Kerensky. As he moves away from the camera, he becomes smaller and dwarfed by his surroundings. In February, Kerensky loomed large but as the months went by, he shrank to his true insignificance. At the end of the hail is a large stone crucifix: Kerensky is moving closer to the establishment church and the old order. Visually tiny, slowly he begins to mount the huge staircase. He is the usurper coming to power and his slow, unsure pace contrasts with the people’s earlier rush up the public stairways (and the Bolsheviks later charge up these same Winter Palace steps).
The sequence of titles is ironic. “Dictator.” Kerensky’s shiny boots fill the screen, all surface and polish. “Commander-in-Chief.” Kerensky has power backwards, he is all symbol and title and no reality. He begins to trot up seemingly endless stairs—the comic sequence continues at length because he will never arrive at real power.
He passes a statue of the goddess Diana. She extends the laurel wreath of victory. Kerensky studies her—again mistaking stone symbols for real victor. “The hope of the homeland and the revolution: A.F. Kerensky” (a pun on Kerensky’s surnames, Alexander Fiodorovich, and initials, the initials of the hated Tsarina, Alexandra Fiodorovna). “The lackeys of the Tsar” await Kerensky on the landing. Fat, bemedalled Rodzianko, former Lord Chamberlain to the Tsar, greets him.
Eisenstein shoots, Kerensky from side angles to make him appear even less important. For much of the sequence, a naval attaché’s white uniform dominates the picture. Kerensky chats politely with the liveried Palace servants. Rodzianko exclaims, “Ah, what a democrat!” (This is doubly ironic because Rodzianko was working to restore the monarchy and Kerensky, upon assuming the Prime Ministership, insisted upon moving into the Tsar’s Winter Palace.) Kerensky moves down the line of servants, threatening to slip through the frame and out of every picture.
临时政府的克伦斯基，影像如何体现爱森斯坦对于他的看法：以旧权力的象征物为真正的权力，意识不到真正的权力何在，对于历史没有把握
Kerensky’s polished boots fill the screen. (Boots and feet are a central metaphor and we are to contrast these shiny ones with the battered boots of the captured soldiers, and later, the ragged, urgent feet of the Bolsheviks at their Smolny headquarters). We see either the parts of Kerensky’s body—boots, gloves, back, etc.—in close up or his whole body in miniature. We never view Kerensky as a whole, life-sized person.
靴子和脚的象征
A padlock on a cell door: Kerensky’s synthesis becomes the Provisional Government’s thesis of oppression. Two sailors, one the famous Bolshevik, Dybenko, in chains, on mattresses. “Traitors.” “Bolsheviks.” Shots of the ransacked Khesinskaia Palace—the Bolsheviks had liberated the palace of the Tsar’s ballerina mistress for their original headquarters and after the July Days’ uprising, government soldiers wrecked it.
Antithesis—a moonlit night in the country, the pastoral quiet of a lake and a hut in the woods: “Underground ... Lenin in his cabin.” A simple campfire with a kettle over it. When the kettle begins to whistle, the Bolsheviks will move.
These sequences, with their sharp dialectical montages and transitions, produce the rhythm of drama and revolution. The chambers of “Alexandra Fiodorovna,” the immense opulence of the palace apartment (all for Kerensky) contrast with the squalid, overcrowded prison cell and Lenin’s spartan hut. Kerensky sits on a throne chair. Unlike Lenin, who always consumes his setting and the screen, Kerensky appears tiny.
列宁与克伦斯基的构图的对比
Kerensky, at his oversized desk, signs the decree restoring “capital punishment at the front.” This decree allowed officers to shoot mutinous soldiers. It marked the Provisional Government’s irrevocable commitment to the war machine.
Kerensky trudges up more stairs, even slower and less sure of himself although he holds his hand in his coat à la Napoleon. A cut to a statue of Napoleon in the same pose. (Eisenstein did not create this analogy: as soon as Kerensky came on the scene in 1917, the Bolsheviks were calling him a “two bit Bonaparte.”) The statue of Napoleon dissolves into long lines of porcelain grand levé soldiers: Kerensky’s army is a collection of china dolls. Then Kerensky sits contemplating a chess board. He fiddles with a four piece crystal decanter and he fits the pieces together. He slides open a hidden panel in the chess board and pulls out a small jeweled crown. Kerensky, the self proclaimed revolutionary, secretly hopes to restore a monarchy. (It is not clear whether it is the Romanoffs or Kerensky himself. In 1917 wits were saying that Kerensky had come ... “to be crowned” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Ann Arbor. 1932, Vol. II, 150.) Kerensky places the crown on top of the crystal decanter, and in one of Eisenstein’s greatest montages, a jet of steam from a factory stack erupts. The workers’ revolution will not accept a monarchy. The montage flashes back and forth and the title proclaims: “The revolution is in danger.”
克伦斯基与拿破仑雕像
Then Tsarist “General Kornilov attacks.” The next sequence, cut from most U.S. prints because of its anti-religious symbolism, is best described by Eisenstein himself:
“Kornilov’s march on Petrograd was under the banner of In the Name of God and Country. Here we attempted to reveal the religious significance of this episode in a rationalistic way. A number of religious images, from a magnificent Baroque Christ to an Eskimo idol, were cut together. The conflict in this case was between the concept and the symbolization of God. While idea and image appear to accord completely in the first statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image. Maintaining the denotation of ‘God,’ the images increasingly disagree with our concept of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities. In this case, too, a chain of images attempted to achieve a purely intellectual resolution, resulting from a conflict between a preconception and a gradual discrediting of it in purposeful steps (Film Form, 62).
The titles read: “In the name of God and of the native land. In the name ... OF GOD.” Eisenstein plays upon the fact that Kornilov’s troops were the Wild Division from Asiatic Russia, composed mostly of Moslems. He then intercuts a baroque Christ with a huge mask of Uzume, Goddess of Mirth, and a ferocious Chinese dragon, a roly-poly Buddha. the Hindu god-goddess Shiva, an Eskimo carving, and a South Sea island mask.
宗教影像和含义（各宗教各民族的神并置，如论证一般引导观众意识到宗教的虚假）
“IN THE NAME OF THE NATIVE LAND.” To illustrate Kornilov’s attempt to restore the monarchy, Eisenstein returns to the opening shots of the statue of Tsar Alexander III beneath the Church of Christ the Savior. The statue begins to reassemble, and the dismantled throne pops back onto its pedestal. The Metropolitan of Novgorod blesses the scene.
雕像重组，暗示克伦斯基复辟
“General Kornilov.” The Russian General sits on a white horse. Cut to the famous statue of Napoleon on a white horse (the one in the Courvoisier Brandy ads). The man on the white horse will save the country. But Napoleon has additional meanings for Russians—a dictator and an invader of their country. Cut to Kerensky, arms crossed, in the Napoleonic pose; cut to the statue of Napoleon: “Two Bonapartes.” Eisenstein attempts to animate the Bolshevik 1917 position. Trotsky called this chapter, “Kerensky and Kornilov (Elements of Bonapartism in the Russian Revolution).” Shots of the various Napoleons are intercut with the religious statues, ending with a juxtaposition of Christ and Kornilov.
科尔尼洛夫与拿破仑
A huge tank rears up, consuming the screen. Kerensky tinto hundreds of pieces. The sequence constitutes both an historical flashback and a foreshadowing. Within the Bonapartist Invasion resides its own destruction—Napoleonic overreaching. Trains, tanks, and trucks move from all angles across the screen and seem to descend upon a spot in the center—Petrograd and the revolutionary proletariat. “And the government？” Kerensky cowers, then sleeps on his bed. “The government is impotent.”
Factory smoke: then a line of Bolsheviks move toward us brandishing red flags. “We will not let the General pass.” The revolutionary antithesis: long lines of workers, peasants, women, children, and soldiers. The people move across the screen from right to left—from apathy to revolution. The Bolsheviks free the political prisoners, some of whom we have seen earlier. Historical events are not isolated but connected and dynamic—the Government oppressors were foolish to think that padlocks could contain a revolution. But the Bolsheviks only free the political prisoners, for, as Eisenstein will underline in the Winter Palace cellars, common criminals are lumpenproletariat and cannot make a revolution.
布尔什维克释放政治囚犯（流氓无产者不是革命力量，因此没有体现）
Onto the screen comes the famous shot of the people dragging a cannon. (One of Tissé’s cameramen. Vladimir Nilsen, described in detail how this scene was shot: The Cinema as Graphic Art. tr. Stephen Garry, New York, 1959, 32.) The arsenal is opened and arms are distributed to the people: part of Eisenstein’s on-going lesson in how to make a revolution. Each worker takes two rifles; although the Russian people were supposedly, tired of fighting, this scene shows that they were ready for the just struggle.
分发枪火（爱森斯坦以此片为“如何革命”的一课）
Cut to Smolny Institute, Bolshevik headquarters, the center of the dejse. Kindly old working women giving out stacks of Bolshevik handbills show the crucial importance of the written word in making a revolution. Ironic titles—“Traitors” “Felons”—punctuate the Bolshevik defense of Petrograd.
Equal forces, the political Right and Left, are moving toward mortal struggle. A railroad yard at night. This is the most dramatic scene in OCTOBER. The Reaction: the train carrying Korniby’s Wild Division moves across the screen. From the left of the screen come the Bolshevik representatives: one, an honest, middle-aged man in civilian clothes, another, a soldier in Red Guard uniform. We are not certain what they are doing so close to the enemy. Out of this suspense and tension comes a telescoping of the confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the Wild Division troops.
戏剧冲突最强的一幕：野军团（Wild Division，我看的英译版本里面写的是Savage Division，历史知识欠缺也不知道中文翻译是什么，还请指教）与布尔什维克代表
Kornilov’s soldiers move from right to left. Their Tartar faces fill the screen. Eisenstein choreographs the movements of the Wild Division from right to left. The Bolsheviks advance in the opposite direction, their profiles left to right.
Quick cut to Smolny: Bolshevik tracts and newspapers are carted out. In the railroad yard, the Bolshevik soldier on the left side of the screen argues with a Tartar leader on the right. Unlike the bourgeois ministers, they argue without theatrics or self-dramatization. For the Bolsheviks, ideas are more important than the individual speakers. The Bolshevik civilian takes out a handbill hidden in his boot: “Bolshevik tracts spoke a language understood by all.” (the counterpoint to the scenes in Smolny). Slowly the Bolsheviks convince the Tartars: montage of Asian faces and growing awareness with the titles, “For bread,” “For peace,” “For land.” A soldier wearing a Moslem head shawl nods in agreement. “For brotherhood”—a Kronstadt sailor, moving from left to center, begins to make friends. Swords are sheathed.
布尔什维克说服他们
The synthesis. Dancing Tartar feet, first the Bolsheviks watch and then join in the rhythmic clapping. A Bolshevik soldier joins the dance. The Tartars, through their national dances, are celebrating the revolution. The rhythmic montage quickens the dance pace. Eisenstein shoots at boot level and soon we cannot tell which boots are Bolshevik or Tartar. He then cuts with such speed that the boots begin to blend together into one continuous pair. Then the dancers, Bolshevik and Tartar, become one. This visual synthesis seals the revolution—the army comes over to the Bolsheviks. The scene ends with a cut of a broken statue of Buddha (the Tartars no longer follow false gods), the title, “General Kornilov is arrested,” and the broken statue of Napoleon.
合题：跳舞。靴子与脚的象征
ACT III
第三幕
Out of this synthesis immediately comes the thesis for Act III: “Proletarians, learn to use the gun.” This is Lenin’s post-Kornilov thesis that the revolution must take the offensive. (This is also part of Eisenstein’s world propaganda message: In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks believed that worldwide revolution was possible, if not imminent.) Shots of the red guards being trained: young, old, workers and peasants, all have rifles on their shoulders and their worn boots march in step.
At this point in the film. Eisenstein departs radically from his original shooting ｓｃｒｉｐｔ. He had planned a series of shots showing Lenin in hiding and the effect of Lenin’s underground tracts, with the sequence building to Lenin’s dictum: “It is necessary to seize power.” Then, with the title, “For the Soviets,” intercut between scenes, Eisenstein planned shots of massive rallies of Kronstadt sailors, tank corps soldiers, and munitions factory workers voting “For the Soviets.” In “80 Provinces ... the flame of insurrection spreads.” Then, key dramatic scenes in Petrograd when the Provisional Government orders the Petrograd garrison “to leave the city immediately.” The Bolsheviks agitate in the garrison and the soldiers mutiny and announce, “The Petrograd garrison does not recognize the Provisional Government ... We will only obey orders from the revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.”
从这里开始，爱森斯坦大幅改动了自己的原拍摄计划（原计划是更加符合辩证逻辑的）。
Almost none of this is in the film (possibly Eisenstein lacked the time to shoot it). The result is a short and truncated Act III which renders the film somewhat lopsided and less dramatic. The key to the revolution was the army coming over to the Soviets. Although Eisenstein had suggested as much with the Wild Division-Bolshevik understanding, his elimination of the scenes of the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison places too great a dramatic emphasis upon the earlier dance sequence. In the film, the climax occurs too soon and undercuts the drama of the final acts. In dialectical terms, the film becomes a struggle between the old, decayed order—and Eisenstein lumps the monarchy and bourgeoisie together here—and the people, led by the Bolsheviks. The synthesis occurs when Kornilov’s Army comes over to the people. The final three acts, therefore, instead of presenting the ongoing dialectic of history, merely illustrate the synthesis of Act II.
Eisenstein violates his own “Dialectical Approach to Film Form.” As his ｓｃｒｉｐｔ indicates, he believed that winning over the army was the key to the revolution and that the revolution was decided before the storming of the Winter Palace (purely a symbolic event). For this reason, he needed to find and depict the dialectic of these events. Instead, he tries to infuse other events, especially the siege of the Winter Palace, with tension and drama. The result is contradiction and confusion.
他认为争取军队是革命获胜的关键，攻打冬宫相比之下更多的是象征意义。因此争取军队的段落有更多冲突。
What we see of Act III is perfunctory and unsatisfactory. The one scene that remains from the original ｓｃｒｉｐｔ occurs when a speaker addresses a huge crowd of uniformed red guards. The camera points down at them and suddenly, in unison, they look up and lift their rifles, bayonets fixed, skyward. (This is juxtaposed to the opening scenes of bayonets in snow and unwillingness to fight for the old order.) Next, titles tell us:
“On October 10th, the Bolshevik Central Committee decided upon armed insurrection. The Second Soviet Congress was scheduled for October 25th. At this Congress, the question of seizing power will be discussed. The 24th is too soon (for insurrection).”
Lenin, arguing across a table, consumes the screen, “The 25th (will be the date for insurrection).” Lenin’s colleagues applaud.
The third act ends with the Bolsheviks planning the insurrection. A map of Petrograd fills the screen and a hand with a crayon marks certain key points and circles the Winter Palace and the Admiralty Building. The map is a clever device for conveying in visual, silent language the plan of action. Unfortunately, the effect depends upon the viewer’s familiarity with Petrograd—a Russian audience would follow the crosses and circles as easily as Americans would understand a marked map of Washington, D.C.
With his revised Act III and his emphasis upon the date and plan of insurrection, Eisenstein begins to construct a new dramatic movement—the seizure of power. Unfortunately, the premises for drama are not present and when we see what opposes the Bolsheviks—windbags and cowards and women and children—we smile rather than tense. In the first two acts, we experienced the fight for power: a thesis protagonist, the people, in mortal and equal struggle with their antithesis antagonist, the old order. But with Act III, the tension evaporates. As a result, in the final acts, the director will use every visual trick of humor, showmanship, and sensation in his magician’s storehouse merely to keep his viewers’ interest.
ACT IV
第四幕
“During the night of the 24th, they prepared ...” the insurrection. The Cruiser Aurora rests at anchor in the winter dawn: the fortuitously named ship symbolizes the dawn of a new era. Aurora marines land and government soldiers scuttle away without firing a shot. Their haste is almost comic.
The draw bridges close: now the machines are controlled by the revolution and work for, not against, the people. A bridge falls into place and the boots of ordinary citizens run across it toward the city center, toward the symbolic center of power.
吊桥再次出现。靴子走过吊桥。
In the Ministers’ Council Chanter, Konovalov slams down his ornate telephone: his symbol of power no longer works. Cut to a red guard, rifle over shoulder, and the Aurora in the background: the objects of real power. The dialectic here is between the red guards, rifles and action, versus Konovalov’s frustration with his ornate telephone, speech and inaction. The film cuts back and forth, but each time the red guards advance.
科诺瓦洛夫和他的电话
Kerensky, nervous, telephones from the Tsar’s office to the Cossack stable. (The Cossacks, traditionally, were the most conservative and dependable of government troops.) In the stable, one lone Cossack on duty, answers. Kerensky announces, “This is the Minister of War.” The Minister of War is speaking very close to the telephone’s mouthpiece and cowering alongside his desk. “Where are the Cossacks？” The stable keeper looks over the horses in their stalls—“We are in the midst of saddling the horses.” When he hangs up he makes a contemptuous gesture of thumb to lips. (This title seems based on the famous message of the Cossack assembly to Kerensky’s plea for aid: “He was told that the regiments would soon ... ‘begin to saddle their horses.’” (Trotsky, Vol. III, p. 243.) A montage of Kerensky slamming down his phone, the Cossack shrugging his shoulders, Kerensky’s jewel-encrusted telephone, and a long line of horses’ rear-ends: Kerensky is a horse’s ass. In dialectical and dramatic terms, the horse business, although amusing, flattens out the action and renders Kerensky an unworthy opponent, a fool outwitted by a stable keeper.
克伦斯基与哥萨克骑兵，克伦斯基的脸与马屁股的蒙太奇
The red guards take, in an orderly and almost peaceful way, various key points in Petrograd. Cut to the Winter Palace courtyard, a huge, plush, open touring car with the U.S. Embassy’s pennant on it stands ready (the U.S. ambassador had loaned Kerensky the car). Cut to the red guards advancing; they encounter no Government resistance. “And at the head of the betrayed armies ...” Kerensky grabs his hat, the chauffeur waits. Kerensky enters the car. Eisenstein first shoots him from overhead—Kerensky appears as a tiny figure standing in a huge open car, making operatic gestures. Then at ground level perspective: Kerensky’s upraised arm in a Napoleonic gesture and, then, behind him, a pillar with the Tsarist eagle and a cross on top—the ongoing and relentless connection of Kerensky and the old order.
克伦斯基借用美国大使馆车辆逃出，镜头语言尽力表示他的无能
art of the grotesquerie of Kerensky’s farewell speech is that he delivers it as if addressing a huge crowd. In fact, his audience consists of a handful of sinister-looking officials and frightened flunkies. When the car starts with a jerk, Kerensky falls down into his seat and is whisked off the stage of history. It all happens quickly and comically as in the old stage routine in which the comedian is jerked into the wings.
The car roars off and the Winter Palace gates close behind it. Dominating the upper center of the picture, on top of the gates, is a fierce bronze Romanoff double eagle, wings spread, with vicious heads and beaks. When the gates shut, the imperial bird of prey moves uneasily (like Yeats’ falcon in “The Second Coming”—a poem partly prompted by these events). The car speeds through the city. With the camera on the hood and the scenery flying by, Kerensky’s flight is accentuated, and the comic fluttering of the stiff little U.S. flag contrasts with the rich waving of the Bolshevik banners in other scenes.
对比：车头的美国国旗颤抖，布尔什维克的旗帜飞扬
Eisenstein’s unyielding portrayal of Kerensky’s farewell can be seen in a number of ways. It is a reasonably accurate representation of the event (although historians argue about whether Kerensky was cowardly or clever in leaving the city under a diplomatic flag). It is a propaganda portrait—for Soviet consumption as a reminder of the past, for export as an example of the present, for both to show that bourgeois leaders and governments are cowardly, corrupt, and ineffectual. Or it may be Eisenstein’s personal comment on his own bourgeois father’s flight from revolutionary Russia. The personal element probably explains the relentlessness of the attack.
爱森斯坦对于克伦斯基的逃离的不遗余力的表现：可能有个人原因
The scene moves to the Winter Palace. Student cadets, with well fed, chubby faces, arrive to defend it—they are like sleek piglets. The Women’s Battalion of Death marches in. They go up a short flight of stairs; their short climb signals how brief their power over the Winter Palace will be. A Provisional Government official, Stankevich, hails the women as he stands beneath the massive, beautiful head of a statue of Adonis. Weasel-faced Stankevich is no Adonis, his greeting the Women’s Battalion of Death is a parody of authentic sexual greeting and love, and the Provisional Government is self-absorbed and narcissistic to thtrik itself beautiful like Adonis. As with all false gods—a reference to the breaking idols sequence—it will soon be shattered.
临时政府的女兵敢死队
The women bed down in Nicholas II’s private billiard hall. Some, shirts removed, admire themselves and strike Adonis-like poses. One woman is trying to make, out of a magnificent piece of silk and lacework, some stockings (the popular name for these were “Russians”). The camera lingers upon ample bosoms, but it renders them more grotesque than sexually attractive. The Women’s Battalion of Death, like the effeminate cadets, have been sexually perverted by Tsarism. This scene is amusing within itself and connects to Eisenstein’s portrait of the decadent old order, but rather than intensify the struggle between the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks, the grotesquerie diffuses potential conflict.
Cut to Kerensky’s car on the outskirts of Petrograd. The camera is on the hood and the aide-de-camp in the front seat consumes most of the picture. The little man in the rear, even more hunched up in his coat than before, occupies almost no space on the screen. This sequence again violates Eisenstein’s rule of dialectical montage: “Art is always conflict.” Here, the dialectical movement is away from conflict. Instead of Kerensky, the embodiment of the Provisional Government, moving toward a final collision with the Bolsheviks and the proletariat, he is fleeing. Immediately after, titles announce, “At the call of the Revolutionary Military Committee, the people were assembling at Smolny.” At that point we doubt that a real fight will be necessary. The revolution has been won, and only a few symbolic events, like the storming of the Winter Palace, need to take place.
斯莫尔尼宫的布尔什维克党军事委员会
Cut to the Bolsheviks’ victory in the Second Soviet Congress. (It was called by the Provisional Government and scheduled for October 25th—thus Lenin’s desire for a successful coup on the eve of its convocation in order to have it legally ratify his new government.) Again the dialectical structure is undercut by the lack of real collision. At the Second Congress, a struggle occurred between the Bolsheviks and their main opponents on the left, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But Eisenstein so stacks his portrayal in favor of the Bolsheviks that once again (as he himself later admitted) he undercuts his drama (Film Form, 38 and 245).
The final events of OCTOBER become more a pageant than a dialectical struggle. First, we see nighttime activity at the Smolny Institute, the Bolshevik headquarters (this follows John Reed’s eyewitness account). Bolshevik delegates rush upstairs to get instructions; red guards rush out to go to the Winter Palace and up those stairs. The activity is fused with Eisenstein’s humor: a sign on a door announces “Guardian.” Since the Smolny Institute had been a boarding school for wealthy girls, it is implied the Bolsheviks are watching over haut-bourgeois virginity.
Groups of delegates come and go; among one group Trotsky appears. In the entrance corridor stands a huge sword—the Bolsheviks are about to seize power. Outside, trucks filled with red guards and armored cars roar off, as the camera focuses on these moving wheels of history. The massiveness of the red guard buildup, its size and organization, which does not balance with what we have seen of the Provisional Government defenders, convinces the viewer of its inexorability.
At the Second Soviet Congress delegates present their credentials: workers and peasants are Bolsheviks; bourgeois citizens and regular army officers are Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. In one of the corridors outside the meeting hall, a man in an overcoat sits on a bench, cap pulled low and face wrapped as if suffering from a toothache. Two rat-faced bourgeois look at him carefully. A superimposed image reveals Lenin, whose bald head appears through the cap and bandage. Lenin turns to his companion, either Trotsky or Eino Rakhia, and says, “They have recognized me, the bastards!” Lenin takes out his watch and taps his foot—it’s only a matter of time now. His heavy working man’s boots, in marked contrast with Kerensky’s polished shoes, signal his impatience.
The Winter Palace: all seems quiet. In the Council of Minister’s chambers, around an ornate table, sit the ministers of the Provisional Government-later. Antonov-Ovseenko will leap upon this same table when he seizes power on behalf of the Revolutionary Military Coffnittee. A montage with the title, “The Head,” an empty chair at the head of the table, the final shots of Kerensky leaving the city. The ministers “direct an appeal to the people.” Cut to Lenin beating out his foot signal. This dialectic will soon resolve in a Bolshevik majority at the Congress and in the country.
A hand ringing a bell fills the screen: it is both tolling the demise of the Provisional Government and ringing for the Bolshevik triumph. A rat-faced Menshevik, in Provisional Government officer’s uniform—the one who had recognized Lenin—speaks first. Historically, this speaker was the famous Menshevik leader, Dan. Eisenstein sharpens Dan’s features in the service of typage (Reed described him as “a mild-faced, baldish figure in a shapeless military surgeon’s uniform” (Ten Days That Shook the World, New York. 1960, 132). As Dan speaks, the secretaries sit at their table, but they do not take down the Menshevik’s words. Their inattention contrasts with the end of OCTOBER when Lenin speaks, and they fall upon their dictation. Dan claims, “The Provisional Government alone represents the popular power.”
Cut to the red guards in the corridors outside; to a single soldier in front of the Ministers’ Council chamber; finally, Smolny, huge in the night sky. The title: “The question of power was envisioned otherwise by the Military Revolutionary Committee.” Then the office of the committee: Antonov-Ovseenko. Podvoisky, and Chudnovsky discuss their plans. A map of Petrograd fills the screen. The Committee members trace out their plan on the map, cutting through the verbal questions with decisive action. (Eisenstein here suggests the superiority of visual imagination to word games.) As the crayon marks each point in the plan, the film cuts to the action: marines land from the Aurora, red guards take their battle stations around the Winter Palace, and
《十月》观后感(四)：蒙太奇
俄国早期的蒙太奇是电影史上极出名的，蒙太奇分为故事形式的蒙太奇和剪辑的蒙太奇。其中做得最好与最出名的莫过于爱森斯坦，他的代表作“战舰波将金号”和“十月”就是极好的例子。
作为电影人，爱森斯坦是极其讨厌传统那些剧情片的叙事模式，他的观念是让镜头组接以达到视觉的震撼，所以他的片子大多数剪辑都是非逻辑性的。在我看来，爱森斯坦的电影可以概括为“宏观的逻辑性与剪辑的非逻辑性”。基于个人偏好原因，我也是很喜欢这样的概念，而不喜欢泛滥的连续性的剧情片。
“十月”运用非逻辑性剪辑非常精妙，把不相关的两个画面剪接在一处，目的是想形成对比、类比或者象征。像影片中用拿破仑的雕像来象征临时政府的独裁，用沙皇的雕像来象征人心涣散以及不得人心等等。影片把几个片段组接在一起，形成了宏观的叙事性，推动影片往最后革命的结果前进。这样的剪辑方式可以很震撼，也很有趣，但需要推敲，不适合普通的人看。
在看这样类型的电影时必须放下成见，不能因为主题的缘故而忽视了它其他方面的艺术成就。飞逻辑性剪辑是脱离传统连续性剪辑的一种新的电影模式，很多艺术片都有这个特点。在剧情片泛滥的年代，所有人都在寻找叙事方式的新颖，却不曾像爱森斯坦那样脱离传统开辟自己的新途。
总的来说，十月的突出之处在于剪辑，要想很好的了解爱森斯坦的片子，一定要注意每个连接的画面，可以暂停去想象它们之间的联系。
《十月》观后感(五)：Anna Chen 1998 & Olga Romanova 2012 on Eisenstein's October
IN PERSPECTIVE: SERGEI EISENSTEIN:
Issue 79 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) Published July 1998 Copyright International Socialism
ummer 1998
A review of the special centenary edition of The Eisenstein Collection (Tartan Video, Faber & Faber)
y Anna Chen
The movies directed by Sergei Eisenstein during the 1920s provided much of the defining imagery of the Russian Revolution. Described as the father of film montage, he was certainly the first major theorist of cinema. The year 1998 marks the centenary of his birth. It is also 50 years since he died, leaving behind an invaluable legacy of writings but with very few of his ｓｃｒｉｐｔs actually produced. A boxed set of videos of his 'Revolution' trilogy - Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October,1 which includes his first collection of essays and articles, The Film Sense, published in 1943 - has been released to commemorate Eisenstein's centenary.
A prolific writer yet an underproduced film maker with only eight mostly monochrome epics completed, why is this director considered so important even today？ What power was unleashed in The Battleship Potemkin which led UK authorities to ban it until 1954？ Why do mainstream Hollywood directors pay him homage through direct reference, pastiche and even parody？ In Spielberg's black and white feature film Schindler's List a small girl is picked out in red as she tries to escape her Nazi persecutors, the same device also finding its way into a TV ad for Peugeot. It was first seen, however, in The Battleship Potemkin, wherein the the director himself painstakingly hand tinted the flag, frame by frame, a flaming revolutionary red. Coppola's powerful use in Apocalypse Now, of the bull's slaughter from the end of Strike signifies, not the victim's pain - as with the 1,800 strikers killed at the end of the Russian film - but the horror that has fed the megalomania of Brando's Kurtz, extinguished only when he is hacked to death by Martin Sheen's Marlow.
Ken Russell filches Alexander Nevsky's knights on ice battle spectacular for Billion Dollar Brain, whilst De Palma shamelessly and thoroughly pastiches the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables. Naked Gun is by no means the silliest of many other screen references: the clich of the baby carriage careering down the Odessa Steps (of which there were only 120, not the hundreds of the cinematic illusion Eisenstein created through rapid repetitive intercutting) is now instantly recognisable even to people who have never watched an Eisenstein movie.
When reading Eisenstein's own words, what strikes you is how driven he was as an artist. Possessed of a dazzling intellect that drew from sources as diverse as da Vinci, Dickens, Disney, Shakespeare, Goethe and Haiku poetry, Eisenstein's eclectic interests fuelled his search for a definitive theory of cinema. Pursuing his obsession in the early years of the Russian Revolution, when cinema was barely crawling from the womb and the creative possibilities of the first generation of Russian artists were seemingly without limit, Eisenstein turned pioneer and hunted down evidence for his theories, trawling western and eastern culture for clues. He called on Marx for support, quoting his 'definition of the course of genuine investigation'2 in The Film Sense: 'Not only the result, but the road to it also, is a part of truth. The investigation of truth must itself be true, true investigation is unfolded truth, the disjuncted members of which unite in the result'.3
Eisenstein was born in Riga in 1898 to 'a tyrannical Papa', the architect and civil engineer Mikhail Osipovich, who fought for the White Russians during the civil war and died in Berlin in 1920. In the latest attempt to reclaim Eisenstein for liberals everywhere, his biographer, Ronald Bergan, attempts to rescue him from his claim 'to be a Marxist all his life'4 by seizing on the oedipal nature of Sergei's relationship with this small minded philistine. Bergan's psychologism denies Eisenstein's capacity to transcend his own personal interests. His case seems to be sustained by Eisenstein's own account of his conflict with his father: 'The reason why I came to support social protest had little to do with the real miseries of social injustice, or material privations, or the zigzags of the struggle for life, but directly and completely from what is surely the prototype of every social tyranny - the father's despotism in a family, which is also a survival of the basic despotism of the head of the "tribe" in every primitive society'.5
ut, as for many people from a similar background who joined the international revolutionary movement, claustrophobia and rebellion against the middle class family were only the beginning of a profound transformation. Eisenstein had, after all, witnessed government troops brutally clearing demonstrators from Nevsky Prospect in 1917. Even Bergan himself produces evidence which contradicts his case, quoting Eisenstein's foreword to his 1946 memoirs, Beyond the Stars:
The revolution gave me the most precious thing in life - it made an artist out of me. If it had not been for the revolution I would never have broken the tradition, handed down from father to son, of becoming an engineer... The revolution introduced me to art, and art, in its own turn, brought me to the revolution...6
It was Yulia Ivanovna, his mother, who grounded Sergei in bourgeois culture. She surrounded him with books, bought him a camera, took him to the theatre and, in 1907, treated him to a memorable trip to Paris. But, according to Peter Wollen, it was the extraordinary upheavals of the 1917 revolution, when Sergei was 19, that brought his interest in art to fruition. At a time when 'authentic intelligentsia' was ousting 'academic hierarchy':
He was not prepared for the overthrow of the existing order of society, the collapse of his ideology and the dissolution of his family... The revolution destroyed him, smashed the co-ordinates of his life, but it also gave him the opportunity to produce himself anew...he was compelled to become an intellectual, to construct for himself a new world-view, a new ideological conception both of society and art...we cannot separate the ideas which he developed from the matrix in which they were formed, the matrix of the Bolshevik Revolution.7
Eisenstein was steeped in accounts of the 1905 Revolution, and in particular 'Bloody Sunday', when troops opened fire upon a peaceful demonstration at the Tsar's Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Because of 'the wild outburst of reaction and repression...the brutality in my pictures is indissolubly tied up with the theme of social injustice, and revolt against it...'8 His early working years included stints with the Petrograd militia, as a cartoonist for the Petersburgskaya Gazeta, decorating the agitprop trains leaving for the front, and as an engineer in the Red Army during the civil war, serving on the Eastern Front. 'The melting pot of the civil war and military engineering work at the front...' gave him '...a fascinating sense of history in the making, which had made a deep impression with the broad canvas of the fates of nations and epic ambitions, and was then realised in the thematics of future films of monumental scale'.9
Eisenstein's studies at the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd were disrupted by the 1917 revolution. Any thoughts of renewing them were rapidly eclipsed by his fascination with theatre, especially that of his future mentor, the actor and theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who ran the Proletkult Theatre in Moscow. Along with the poet Mayakovsky, and the artists Malevich and Tatlin, Meyerhold reassessed the Futurist and Symbolist movements in the pre-revolution years and came up with Constructivism, which would 'be a branch of production, in the service of the revolution' rather than 'pure' art.10 Meyerhold had rejected the naturalism of Stanislavsky's acting methods at the 'monolithic' Moscow Arts Theatre, which would later be 'enshrined as the apogee of Stalinist art'.11 He sought instead to prove the 'primacy of physiological gesture over psychological emotion'12 (as Pavlov was attempting to establish through his experiments concerning reflex conditioning at the time). Subscribing to William James's dictum that 'we weep not because we are sad; we are sad because we weep,' Meyerhold used circus spectacular and body mechanics and drew from commedia dell'arte in order to produce a 'non-verbal, stylised, conventional theatre'. Even F W Taylor, whose time and motion studies in American factories led directly to the deepening of workers' exploitation, exerted an influence. Theoretical faultlines cracked wide open as Stanislavsky sank deeper into mysticism, exploring the Hindu concept of 'prana' and trying to get people to feel radiation rays emitted from his actors' fingertips, provoking an attack by Meyerhold for being 'out of key with the epoch of the machine, the mass, urbanism and Americanism'.13
However, the Proletkult movement was hardly beyond criticism itself. Tony Cliff points out that one of the chief aims of the revolution according to Trotsky was the 'awakening of human personality in the masses - who were supposed to possess no personality'.14 The passionate cultural debates in post-war revolutionary Russia centred around raising the masses out of the quagmire of illiteracy, giving them the confidence that would prevent the growth of a cultured bureaucracy. Otherwise 'this would push the masses back into passivity and and lead to the degeneration of the revolution'.15 The adherents of Proletkult wanted to cut free from the existing culture, rather than bring it to the masses, because they thought it 'was the last refuge of the bourgeoisie in retreat'.16 (The Italian Formalists had similarly cast off their cultural roots, but were absorbed into the ideology of fascism.) In 1919 Lenin was scathing:
roletarian culture is something that suddenly springs from nobody knows where, and is not invented by people who set up as specialists in proletarian culture. Proletarian culture is the regular development of those stores of knowledge which mankind has worked out for itself under the yoke of capitalist society, of feudal society, of bureaucratic society.17
Trotsky acknowledged that because the bourgeoisie 'owned both physical and mental means of production...they possessed the comfort and abundance necessary for art to grow and become subtle'.18 But Proletkult's ideology demanded both the rejection of this wellspring and the fetishisation of an imagined proletarian culture that would replace it. Trotsky also asserted that 'the proletarian regime is temporary and transient,' and not a permanent edifice, its purpose being to lay 'the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human'.19 Besides, there was little point in cutting the umbilical cord to a bourgeois culture to which the tiny Russian proletariat was not even attached in the first place.
Against the background of this controversy and attracted by the freeing up of artistic experimentation, the young Eisenstein set out to join Meyerhold's avant-garde group. Starting work as a set designer for the Proletkult Theatre in 1920, he rapidly progressed to directing stage productions, which gave him the preparation he needed for his first foray into film.
Early development of film art
Although Eisenstein is widely credited as the 'father of montage' - a form of editing technique - he wasn't strictly the first director to cut film in order to construct scenes. Early film makers such as George Meir and the Lumiere brothers had lifted existing theatrical methods for the screen wholesale, with little or no adaptation to the new medium. A stationary camera, the equivalent of a static audience, was placed at a fixed distance from the actors, where it passively recorded the basic mise-en-scene (literally, 'putting into the scene',20 the composition of all the elements within the individual frame). Scenes were shot in their entirety with no zooming or tracking of camera and no close ups of the actors, rendering them completely self contained in time and space.
One of Thomas Edison's cameramen, Edwin S Porter, then revolutionised film narrative by constructing a story film, The Life of an American Fireman, from previously shot material in 1902. By cutting from one scene of incomplete action to another - from the firemen arriving at an actual burning building to the studio scene of the mother and child trapped inside - Porter was able to create the illusion of continuous story development. 'It implied that the meaning of a shot was not necessarily self-contained but could be modified by joining the shot to others'.21 Eisenstein insisted that the shot was the basic unit of montage and not, as director Lev Kuleshov had insisted, merely an element of it. Because these units were small and manageable, directors were freed from the tyranny of theatricality.
However, Porter still filmed everything in long shot, maintaining a constant distance from the object. The American director D W Griffith, considered by Eisenstein to be (despite his politics) the first great storyteller in film, took Porter's parallel montage technique and introduced different camera lengths, giving us the close up and the extreme long shot. Instead of Porter's objective distancing from the action, Griffith pulled the spectator into the scene through the subjective close up and different viewpoints, controlling what the spectator saw and manipulating their emotional and intellectual response. In his seminal films, Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation, Griffith not only utilised close ups for emotional emphasis, he also used flashbacks and dissolves, maximising tension and excitement by increasing the pace of cutting towards the climax. Eisenstein traced the origins of montage back to literature. Parallel montage - cutting away to simultaneous action - can be summed up simply by the literary device, 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch...' As for the close up, Eisenstein cites Dickens, who opened The Cricket on the Hearth with a Griffith-esque close up: 'The kettle began it...'22
However, Eisenstein's appreciation of Griffith was not uncritical. Eisenstein took him to task for political and ideological reasons. The notorious racist depiction of the blacks and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation made Griffith 'an open apologist for racism'.23 Neither did Griffith's support for the Dry Law (alcohol prohibition) in The Struggle or 'the metaphysical philosophy of the eternal origins of Good and Evil'24 in Intolerance go down well. Eisenstein detected:
...the inseparable link between the cinema and the industrial development of America. We know how production, art and literature reflect the capitalist breadth and construction of the United States of America. And we also know that American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.25
Meanwhile, back in Russia, the young revolutionary directors - including V I Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov and Eisenstein - studied the old masters and then resolved to step up the director's degree of control over his material:
They planned, by means of new editing methods, not only to tell stories but to interpret and draw intellectual conclusions from them...[they] saw themselves as propagandists and teachers rather than as conventional entertainers. As such, their task was twofold: to use the film medium as a means of instructing the masses in the history and theory of their political movement; and to train a young generation of film-makers to fulfil this task.26
udovkin rationalised Griffith's practical work and then developed his theoretical explanation further. The close ups of significant details that Griffith used to heighten the drama were, to Pudovkin, the very stuff of the film story. His contention, that each new shot must make a new and specific point rather than merely punctuating long shots of actors acting, was supported by Kuleshov whose experiments found that juxtaposition gave meaning to hitherto neutral shots. Depending on whether the same neutral close up of the actor Mosjukhin was joined with shots of a plate of soup, a shot of a dead woman in a coffin, or a child playing, the audience:
...raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.27
The Russians had discovered that emotions and ideas could be stimulated simply through the juxtaposition of pieces of film. Pudovkin wrote that 'Kuleshov maintained that the material in filmwork consists of pieces of film, and that the composition method is their joining together in a particular, creatively discovered order'.28
Eisenstein took the process a crucial stage further so that conventional narrative was all but abandoned, and individual characters and their motivation left undeveloped. He wanted to lead 'towards a purely intellectual film, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems and concepts, without any need for transitions and paraphrases'.29 But whereas Pudovkin argued that the most effective scene is made through linkage - smoothly linking a series of selected details from the scene's action - Eisenstein insisted that film continuity should progress through collision - a series of shocks arising out of conflict between spliced shots: '...the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another - as it does a creation'.30
In his essay, 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form', Eisenstein sets out his stall with a quote from Goethe: 'In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it'.31 Eisenstein cites Marx and Engels, for whom the dialectical method was only the conscious reproduction of the dialectic of the external events of the world. He then explains that existence is in a state of constant evolution resulting from the interaction of two contradictory opposites. For Eisenstein, the basis of every art is this sort of dialectical conflict, 'an "imagist" transformation of the dialectical principle',32 dynamically yielding new concepts in the form of a constantly developing argument of opposites. 'In the realm of art this dialectic principle of dynamics is embodied in CONFLICT as the fundamental principle for the existence of every work and art form'.33
Eisenstein developed his cinematographic theory which he would put into practice in making his films. Not only should there be conflict between shots, there should also be conflict within the frame at every level: conflict of graphic directions (lines - either static or dynamic: eg calming horizons broken by energised verticals of trees or walls; the dead boy lying 90 degrees against the strong diagonals of the steps in The Battleship Potemkin Odessa Steps sequence), scales (large and small), volumes (eg the full sails of the Odessa flotilla greeting the Potemkin), masses (volumes filled with various intensities of light) and depths. Also necessary was conflict of close and long shots; conflict of tempo (activity within the frame); light conflict (pieces of darkness and pieces of lightness). And 'conflicts between an object and its dimension - and conflicts between an event and its duration',34 and so on. Eisenstein was building a cinematic art with a painter's eye and the method of an engineer. In him, music, literature, painting and science all converged.
The Revolution trilogy
Eisenstein's three great films about the Russian Revolution - Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October - were all made between 1924 and 1928, before Stalin had consolidated his power and gained an iron grip on the arts. During this period the Communist Party initially favoured Proletkult artists. Strike, made in 1924, Eisenstein's second film and the first of the trilogy, was originally planned as the first of a series of films documenting the pre-revolutionary working class. It turned out to be an artistic success as well as an educational aid and it won an award at the 1925 'Exposition des Arts D閏oratifs' in Paris, as well as being commercially exhibited in Germany.
In this fictionalised account of a factory strike, a highly stylised collection of capitalist exploiters do battle with the striking workers of a factory in a surreal series of set pieces. Midget bourgeoisie tango on table tops amid the detritus of excessive consumption; three identical top-hatted bosses make up a single composite capitalist; spies metamorphose into animals; a panorama of barrels sunk into the ground spews out troglodyte lumpenproletarians. Against this backdrop, the film presents the workers as a single group protagonist instead of as individual heroes. Eisenstein maintained that this was the first time collective and mass action had been seen on the screen in contrast to individualism and the 'triangle' drama of bourgeois cinema (which distils down to boy meets girl and then has to overcome obstacles - invariably in the form of a rival - in order to keep girl and resolve drama). Years later he criticised his 'beginner's piece' for its tricksiness and overuse of effects such as the cross-dissolve which proved 'the "infant malady of leftism" existing in these first steps of cinema',35 and also because the development of the individual within the collective, 'a conception irreconcilably opposed to bourgeois individualism', had been neglected.36
On its release in 1925, Strike was poorly received by the Russian public, whose imagination had already been gripped by American films and the comfy folkloric familiarity of their conventional questing heroes and tightly developed narratives. The Battleship Potemkin, however, proved more successful. David O Selznick, then an MGM associate producer, wrote to one of his executives in 1926:
It was my privilege a few months ago to be present at two private screenings of what is unquestionably one of the greatest of motion pictures ever made, The Armoured Cruiser Potemkin... the film is a superb piece of craftsmanship. It possesses a technique entirely new to the screen... The film has no characters in an individual sense; it has not one studio set; yet it is gripping beyond words - its vivid and realistic reproduction of a bit of history being far more interesting than any film of fiction... Notable, incidentally, are its types and their lack of make-up, and the exquisite pieces of photography.37
Running one of the major Hollywood studios, Selznick might also have been impressed that The Battleship Potemkin was made for a fraction of the hit German movie Metropolis's budget of five million marks. A domestic flop in the Soviet Union, Potemkin was loved by German audiences, although the armed forces were forbidden to see it for fear of mutiny, as were Pennsylvanian audiences on the grounds that it gave American sailors 'a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny'.38 When it was eventually screened in the US in 1926, Chaplin declared it to be 'the best film in the world'. In France the authorities burnt all copies they could find - it received only a limited art house screening at Paris film clubs. Despite being banned in the UK until 1954, The Battleship Potemkin has rarely been out of the annual BFI critics' top ten list, and only then when another Eisenstein film has been voted in.
It is easy to see why. The Odessa Steps sequence has even now the power to move and excite: '...Eisenstein, in forcing the spectator to create the image by putting together all the relationships between attractions (relationships existing because of the interpenetrating theme), gives to the spectator not a completed image, but the "experience of completing an image".'39 All Eisenstein's elements come together in this perfect piece of cinema and the audience participates in the process of producing meaning.
The film documents an event that helped precipitate the 1905 Revolution which shook the Tsarist regime. The battleship Potemkin is a microcosm of Russian society. The ship's officers, doctor and priest - all representing the ruling power structure - pile abuse on top of abuse until maggot infested meat and a threatened mass execution push the sailors to mutiny. The mutineers eventually find sanctuary at the Black Sea port of Odessa, the setting for the film's penultimate sequence, showing Odessa's population supporting the Potemkin mutineers anchored in the bay. The sudden appearance of Tsarist soldiers abruptly reverses the joyous mood as the troops mercilessly advance, shooting everything that moves. Rhythm (cutting) builds with tempo (the pace of action within the frame) as the soldiers descend the steps in relentless solid formation behind the chaotically scattering crowd. This descending action travels left to right across the screen for rapidity (because we read left to right, top to bottom in English, our brains process screen information better in this direction, enabling us to read the images faster).40
Furthermore, Eisenstein plays with the planes of the shot so that we are not simply looking through a window at staged action, but also at a flat surface where the picture is composed, like a painting on a canvas. The film is not so much a substitute for the real world as 'an image existing for significant perception'.41 Every visual and musical element is an aspect of a composition specifically designed to elicit the audience's participation in the construction of the scene in their minds. When the mother carries her murdered son towards the troops, she travels right to left against graphic lines formed by the edges of the steps and the fleeing crowd. Trudging up the steps and against the descending mass, she occupies her own distinct emotional space. At the point where she stands in front of the rank of anonymous soldiers, her figure is caged in by the diagonal lines of the steps; the prison bar like shadows of the soldiers and their rifles below her; and, foregrounded nearest the camera, the actual figures of the soldiers pointing their rifles straight at her.
Eisenstein increases the illusion of depth in this shot by clothing the many small far off dead bodies in dark shadings which recede into the distance; and foregrounding three soldiers and their officer in brightly lit white uniform, utilising conflict of mass and volume to locate the power in this scene. This is where this sequence's central idea reaches its peak, expressed in the graphic representation. With the corpses of the townsfolk behind her, the agents of death in front of her and their shadows falling across her, the mother is now the sole point of humanity within the frame. In the shot, she occupies the point of maximum tension - about two thirds towards the right and a little above centre, conforming to the proportions of the classical composition: compelling evidence of the virtuosity with which Eisenstein applied lessons learned from the study of centuries of classical painting to the new medium.
The full exploitation of suspense and tension highlights Hitchcock's artistic debt to Eisenstein. Will the nanny be shot？ For how long can the baby carriage teeter on the top step before it begins its fall？ The tracking camera shot which introduces the runaway pram increases the scene's tempo so that the pram runs at double time against the march of the soldiers, also raising the dramatic stakes. The final climactic destruction of innocence - the death of the baby and the attack on the conciliatory, bespectacled old woman by the sabre wielding cossack to whose better nature she vainly appeals - puts paid to any notion that verbal persuasion in powerless isolation can ever be an effective part of any revolutionary's armoury against monstrous reactionary forces.
Eisenstein's next film, October, was based on Ten Days that Shook the World, journalist John Reed's eyewitness account of the period leading up to the 1917 revolution. Released in 1928, the film takes the director's experiments in juxtaposition to new heights. October reconstructs the critical period between the revolutions of February and October 1917, when prime minister Kerensky's Provisional Government clung to power. (Incidentally, Bergan quotes Grigori Alexandrov, the assistant director on October, as saying, '...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.' He attributed this to enthusiastic extras who had served at the front bringing along their ancient live cartridges. The original storming had ended in a peaceful surrender.)42 Influenced by the climate of the rising bureaucracy and its conflict with Trotsky, the film shows Trotsky arguing for postponement of an armed uprising, finally voting reluctantly with Lenin on 10 October for immediate action. Once the counter-revolutionary forces are repelled, Kerensky escapes. At the election of the Second Congress presidium, the Bolsheviks win an overwhelming vote against the Mensheviks on the eve of the storming of the Winter Palace. As a result of their victory, the new revolutionary government under Lenin wins peace and grants bread and land to the masses.
ome critics have observed that in making October Eisenstein displayed a 'lack of interest in the simple mechanics of storytelling and... ruthless suppression of any footage not directly relevant to his thesis'.43 The lack of a conventional bourgeois hero means that there is no emotional door into the story; the group protagonist - the revolutionaries and working class - is fragmented across the film. However, the mostly episodic narrative still contains a few vestigial plot points such as the entrance of the Tsarist general Kornilov, which presents a major moment of crisis: a short lived turning point maximising both jeopardy and opportunity for the revolutionaries before the resolution.
Trotsky's role in these events - head of the Military Revolutionary Committee based in Petrograd - is reduced to a single appearance as a craven weakling pitted against Lenin, warning against immediate action and nearly wrecking the revolution. Yet, according to John Reed's absorbing account, Trotsky was operating at full revolutionary throttle, urging the Bolsheviks to yield no ground to their detractors: 'All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Bund - let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept away into the garbage heap of history!'44 Foreshadowing Stalin's infamous predilection for rewriting history, all other scenes featuring Trotsky were cut from the film. At the time there was a major power struggle surrounding Trotsky's opposition to, among other matters, Stalin's directive that the Chinese communists should unite with the Kuomintang nationalists against Japanese imperialist invaders. Although this led the communists to their slaughter, the Stalinist bureaucracy was still able to grab total power in the Soviet Union. Bergan notes that after Stalin's interference with October, 'Eisenstein did confide to his diary his disgust at "the barbarism of Stalin".'45
Technically, October was Eisenstein's most ambitious project. It places excessive reliance on cross-cutting between the story and shots of details commenting on and shaping the main action. However, Eisenstein uses these details chiefly within the realm of symbol - where an image is juxtaposed with another, unconnected, image which has no subtext and therefore can sustain only a single interpretation. For example, relatively lengthy screen time is given up to crosscut shots of Kornilov and Kerensky with plaster busts of Napoleon, '...a juxtaposition of purely symbolic significance',46 which draws obvious parallels and underlines their ambition. Elsewhere shots of Kerensky enjoying the opulence of the Tsar's Winter Palace are matched with shots of a gilded mechanical peacock, suggesting his vanity. Such heavy handed symbolism would not work for a modern cinema literate audience, who would get the point way ahead of the film. Even Eisenstein was aware of potential pitfalls: 'As soon as the film-maker loses sight of this essence [emotional dynamism of the subject] the means ossifies into lifeless literary symbolism and stylistic mannerism'.47 He is critical of his own work:
...the sugary chants of the Mensheviki at the Second Congress of Soviets - during the storming of the Winter Palace - are intercut with hands playing harps. This was a purely literary parallelism that by no means dynamised the subject matter.48
Eisenstein has been taken to task for frequent obscurity. In the scene that introduces Kornilov:
In illustrating the monarchist putsch attempted by General Kornilov, it occurred to me that his militarist tendency could be shown in a montage that would employ religious details for its material... So we intercut shots of a Baroque Christ (apparently exploding in the radiant beams of his halo) with shots of an egg-shaped mask of Uzume, Goddess of Mirth, completely self-contained. The temporal conflict between the closed egg-form and the graphic star-form produced the effect of an instananeous burst - of a bomb or shrapnel.49
It is unlikely that many viewers would follow Eisenstein's exact line of logic, making the connection between Kornilov's militarism and what the film maker reads as an explosion.
When Eisenstein went to Hollywood in 1928 he was feted by movie moguls and powerbrokers like Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin and Paramount's Jesse Lasky, all hailing him as the genius who would teach the philistines who populated this commercial hell how to make film. Eistenstein churned out ｓｃｒｉｐｔs by the cartload, but Paramount failed to green light any of them for actual production. Eventually Eisenstein accepted the financial backing of novelist Upton Sinclair and commenced filming Que Viva Mexico! but Sinclair pulled the plug following one too many interventions by Stalin. Eisenstein's near complete work was sold to studios for use as stock footage.
He returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, finding a vastly different climate to the one he had left. Proletkult had petered out. Few of his friends remained active. Many of them had been purged. The 1932 edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia accused him, regarding October and The General Line, of giving 'no deep analysis of the decisive stages of the Socialist Revolution' and stated that he 'made a diversion to formal experiments. Eisenstein is a representative of the ideology of the revolutionary section of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia which is following in the path of the proletariat.'
o, years after making October, Eisenstein was denounced as a Formalist. The Formalism movement used the method of defamiliarisation - making objects strange in order to make them seem more real. Eisenstein's technique expressed their idea that mere reproduction is never valid unless it is a deviation from the norm, a risky thing to do under Stalin. Subsequently he directed Old And New, which advanced the arguments of Stalin's collectivisation policy. Toeing Stalin's nationalistic line with Alexander Nevsky (1938) at a time when the Soviet state was gearing up for war with Germany, Eisenstein portrayed medieval Russian knights as heroic defenders of the motherland. Ivan The Terrible I (1944) depicts a tough but misunderstood tyrant battling single handed against the evil Boyar conspiracy, the enemy within. Eisenstein's brilliant earlier technique has congealed: the storytelling is stolid and turgid; the performances verge on self parody. The 1,376 editing cuts of The Battleship Potemkin, double that of the average film, give way to long, repetitive shots of actors mugging to camera. In 1946, with Eisenstein recovering from a near fatal heart attack, his work print of Ivan the Terrible II was screened and critically mauled. Finally released in 1958, during Khrushchev's 'thaw' and ten years after Eisenstein's death, its antiquated style rendered it an ill received dinosaur.
Eisenstein threw in the towel shortly before he died in 1948, weakened by poor health and the stultifying political climate in which he was trying to work. Bergan quotes a magazine article published in 1947 in which he wrote:
In the light of the resolutions of the Central Committee, all workers in art must...fully subordinate our creative work to the interests of the education of the Soviet people. From this aim we must not take one step aside nor deviate a single iota. We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perceiving reality and history... This is a guarantee that our cinematography will be able to surmount all the ideological and artistic failures...and will again begin to create pictures of high quality, worthy of the Stalinist epoch.50
What, then, remains of Eisenstein's legacy？ Without the Russian Revolution we might never have heard of him at all. He was at his most inventive and innovative during the initial throes of the revolution, in unprecedented conditions of mass creative liberation. In the early days state finance allowed him to pursue his ideas to their limits, whereas even Griffith encountered great difficulty in securing backing for his films in the US. Griffith and his successors eventually defined the art of film for the mass market, if not for the masses; but whilst little of Eisenstein's work transcended brilliant experimentation, it was nevertheless Eisenstein who embodied the promise of the fulfilment of human potential under socialism.
otes
1 As there is no definite article in the Russian language, Strike and Battleship Potemkin are sometimes translated with definite articles attached. I have used the Tartan Video titles as stated on the box throughout this piece.
2 S Eisenstein, 'Word and Image', The Film Sense (Faber, 1943), p35.
3 K Marx, Werke und Schriften (quoted in The Film Sense, op cit, p35). Bis Anfang 1844, nebst Briefen und Dokumenten (Berlin, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, section 1, vol 1, semi-volume 1). Bemerkungen ver die neueste preussische Zensurinstruktion, von ein Rheinlander.
4 Eisenstein quoted in R Bergan, Eisenstein: A Life In Conflict, (Little, Brown & Company, 1997), p28.
5 Ibid, p28.
6 S Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein (BFI Publishing, 1995), p45.
7 P Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Secker & Warburg, 1969), p19.
8 Eisenstein Archives at TsGALI (State Archives of Literature and Arts), Moscow. Quoted in R Bergan, op cit, p27.
9 P Wollen, op cit, p21.
10 Ibid, p21.
11 Ibid, p21.
12 Ibid, p28.
13 Ibid, p27.
14 T Cliff, Trotsky 1923-1927: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy (Bookmarks, 1991), p98.
15 Ibid, p99.
16 Ibid, p113.
17 Quoted ibid, p115.
18 Ibid, p115.
19 Quoted ibid, p115.
20 I Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 1988), p213.
21 K Reisz and G Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (Focal Press, 1953), p19.
22 S Eisenstein, 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today', Film Form (Dennis Dobson, 1951), p195.
23 Ibid, p234.
24 Ibid, p234.
25 Ibid, p196.
26 K Reisz and G Millar, op cit, pp27-28.
27 V I Pudovkin, Film Technique (Newnes, 1929), p140.
28 Ibid, pp138-139.
29 S Eisenstein, Film Form (Dobson, 1951), p63
30 S Eisenstein, The Film Sense (Faber & Faber, 1943), p17.
31 Goethe in Conversations with Eckermann (5 June 1825) translated by John Oxenford, quoted in S Eisenstein, Film Form, op cit, p45.
32 S Eisenstein, Film Form, op cit, p38.
33 Ibid, p46.
34 Ibid, p39.
35 Ibid, p15.
36 Ibid, p16.
37 Memo from David O Selznick (Viking Press, 1972) quoted in R Bergan, op cit, p118.
38 Ibid, p117.
39 J D Andrew, The Major Film Theories (Oxford, 1976), p73.
40 More on the subject of the physiology of perception can be read in 'The Language of Film: Signs and Syntax' in James Monaco's How To Read A Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media (Oxford University Press, 1981).
41 J D Andrew, op cit, p81.
42 R Bergan, op cit, p131.
43 K Reisz and G Millar, op cit, p36
44 J Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World: The Illustrated Edition (Sutton Publishing, 1997), p78.
45 R Bergan, op cit, p21.
46 S Eisenstein, 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form', Film Form, op cit, p59.
47 Ibid, p58.
48 Ibid, p58.
49 Ibid, p56.
50 R Bergan, op cit, p347.
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Eisenstein’s "October":
etween Artistic Invention and the Myth of the Revolution
Jan 13, 2012
Olga Romanova in Russian
Translated by Adrianne Jacobs
October is the final installment in Sergei Eisenstein’s historical-revolutionary film epic, which began with the films Strike (Stachka, 1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925). The trilogy uses a new film language to portray the events of the revolution as a painful and unavoidable “tectonic shift” in history, and it does so without the support of traditional plotting, psychological insights, or individual characters. Today Eisenstein’s films can be understood as an ingenious and politically oriented mythologization of historical events, and also as a work of artistic discovery, a parable about the nature of power and social violence.
October was created at the behest of the October Anniversary Commission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Only a small group of directors were trusted with the creation of celebratory artistic films about the revolution. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (Konets Sankt-Peterburga) and Boris Barnet’s Moscow in October (Moskva v Oktiabre) also appeared on Soviet movie screens in 1927. Yet Eisenstein’s October stands out as the most ambitious Soviet film project of the 1920s, even though less than a year was allotted for the film’s creation. Having received the commission, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov suspended work on The General Line, a film about collectivization, and quickly began gathering materials about the “Ten Days that Shook the World” (the original title of both the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ and John Reed’s book, one of the sources used in preparing the film).
“A Hundred-Thousand-Strong Army before the Movie Cameras”
Filming for the anniversary film epic began only in April 1927. The style of the film’s organization, which can be described as “revolutionary art in action,” still fires the imagination no less than the film itself does. The filmmakers had at their disposal an array of resources and privileges unprecedented for that time. As Eisenstein wrote, they achieved the “penetration of cinematography into everyday life.”
“For that half-year we worked in Leningrad. In my opinion, that city has every reason to be displeased with us. We fought against its present habits and its present life… We struggled with the people, forcing them back ten years into the past.”
(Citation here and below from: Sergei Eisenstein, “V boiakh za “Oktiabr’” [In the Battles of October],” Komsomolskaya pravda, March 2, 1927).
earching for “character types,” the “assistants caught people who had the right appearance, who suited the part, and demanded unquestioning submission.”
During the daytime throughout the city bridges were drawn, trams were stopped, and in certain areas the electricity was cut off. A double load of ammo was used in filming the historic shot fired by the Aurora (to ensure that the flame would be visible on screen) and the windows of many buildings on the Neva embankment were shattered. Believing a salvo from the battery of the Peter and Paul Fortress to be a flood warning, city residents rushed to secure their possessions. Some say that filming the storming of the Winter Palace caused more damage to the building than had the original events of November 7, 1917…
Although the picture was completed in half a year, Eisenstein believed that the process should have taken a year and a half; this is, Eisenstein’s words, the “most modest estimate.” He remembered the filming as six months of sleepless nights, as “life in the fourth dimension.”
“Sometimes we filmed for sixty hours without respite . . . We slept on cannon carriages, on the pedestals of monuments, . . . in the assembly hall at Smolny, by the gates of the Winter Palace, on the steps of the palace’s Jordan Staircase, in automobiles (the best sleep!) . . . The rest of the time we filmed. Altogether, we shot about a thousand scenes. I don’t remember precisely how many.”
All told, 49,000 meters of film were used to capture a massive quantity of material, but only 2,000 meters made the final cut. The original plan had been even more grandiose: the film was meant to depict the entire period from the February Revolution to the end of the Civil War. The completed version included only scenes of the February Revolution, Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station, the shootings at the July 4th demonstration, the Kornilov affair in Petrograd and General Krymov’s Savage Division, the storming of the Winter Palace, and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
“Cut out Trotsky!”
The premiere of October was scheduled for November 7, 1927. Grigori Aleksandrov recalled that on that very day Stalin appeared in the editing room and ordered the immediate removal of all scenes featuring Trotsky (Epokha i kino [Era and Film], 1983). As it turned out, that morning during the anniversary demonstration, detachments of the State Political Directorate (GPU) suppressed an attempted “uprising” by the “Trotskyite opposition.”
Thus, the anniversary film presented that day in the Bolshoi Theatre was fragmentary, as it could not be shown in its entirety. It took another several months to reedit and finish the film. Finally, in March 1928, Sergei Eisenstein announced:
“October—a film difficult both in mission and realization, a film that must communicate to the viewer the powerful pathos of the days that shook the world, that establishes our new approach to filming objects and events, that influences the viewer with filmic art’s difficult new methods, that demands sharp and breathless attention—is completed. Now the viewer will be the judge!” (“In the Battles for October”).
The newspaper Pravda grandly announced: “100 cinemas in the RSFSR are simultaneously presenting the revolutionary war film October.”
After 1933, the film vanished from cinemas, although it was still lauded a classic of Soviet cinematography. Evidently, there was no place to insert Stalin’s image into October, and the film’s depiction of Lenin was unsuccessful (the role was played by a worker named Nikandrov, who Eisenstein selected solely on account of his physical similarity to Lenin). Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October (Lenin v Oktiabre, 1937) was released in time for the twentieth anniversary of the revolution. This film established a new model for Soviet historiography: the revolution succeeded not on account of the “revolutionary masses,” but thanks to two leaders, Lenin and Stalin.
“A Catalogue of Inventions”
Eisenstein believed that his films (and new, revolutionary Soviet cinema in general) should “plough up” the viewer’s psyche like a tractor. Throughout the 1920s he worked on developing a theory of film that would break new ground by directly influencing the viewer’s consciousness.
trike and Battleship Potemkin embodied the “montage of attractions” theory, aggressively emotional shots that shock the viewer and evoke the director’s chosen emotion. The classic example of this method appears in Battleship Potemkin with the cruel execution of unarmed people on the Odessa Steps. For Eisenstein, the scene of the bridges being raised during the dispersal of the July demonstrations represented October’s “Odessa Steps.” This episode also features a series of images that show violence against unarmed demonstrators (the corpses on the square, civilians mocking an injured Bolshevik, ladies stabbing him with their umbrellas, the murdered woman, and the dead horse hanging over the water).
In October, an “intellectual montage” complements the “montage of attractions.” This meant using a succession of images that would call up certain associations and concepts in the viewer’s mind. For example, in the Congress of Soviets scene, Eisenstein placed the Menshevik’s speech alongside shots of a musician strumming the harp, and after the Socialist Revolutionary’s speech, a balalaika appears on screen (alluding to this group’s claim to being the “peasant” party). The musical instruments were intended to serve as metaphors for the orators’ palliative or empty-headed speeches (although, as the Soviet critic and film expert Nikolai Lebedev noted, these images would confuse the average viewer: why were musical instruments popping up at the Congress of Soviets？). In contrast, the Bolshevik who appeared next on the rostrum had his words validated through their juxtaposition with gunfire.
The classical example of “intellectual montage” is the toppling of a series of Gods, from Christ to ritual masks and pagan deities, which takes place during Kornilov’s march on revolutionary Petrograd. Subsequent shots show epaulettes and cross-shaped medals, intended to symbolize the notion of the “homeland.” According to Eisenstein, these figurative sequences were meant to diminish the pathos of the monarchical slogan, “for God, for faith, for the Fatherland.”
The film October was ripe with innovations in the sphere of film language. The director made the screen pulse and explode in the viewer’s consciousness, as the images on the screen conflicted with, yet paradoxically complemented, one another. For many more years, Eisenstein used his theoretical works and lectures for student cinematographers to convey detailed explanations of the innovations in editing and montage he accomplished during the making of October.
“Crude Tricks”
These experiments evoked a wide variety of reactions from critics, party workers, and “colleagues in the film studio.” After the premiere of October at the Bolshoi Theater, Vsevolod Pudovkin, according to Viktor Shklovsky, stated:
“How I would have loved to have such a forceful failure at some point. From this day forward we shall work differently.”
The fundamental complaint revolved around the film’s “artificiality” and its “superfluous effects,” which were unacceptable in a film dealing with such a meaningful topic and which proved incomprehensible to the average viewer. For example, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who served as a consultant on October, fully acknowledged the film as a “piece of the art of the future,” but also remarked on the depiction of the shootings at the July demonstration:
“Crude tricks will not do. The dead horse suspended over the water, hanging from the shafts of the opening bridge; the murdered woman’s hair spreading out, covering the bridge’s slats. It’s too much like an advertisement, it’s theatrical.”
Theorists at the journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts) mounted the most extreme attack on October, as they remained firmly committed to the “literature of facts” and the “montage of facts” in film. In his articles, Osip Brik called attention to Eisenstein’s numerous departures from reality. For example, he considered the satirical over-dramatization of the activities of the Women’s Battalion of Death to be deliberate and even tactless, all the more because these female shock troops, abandoned to defend of the Winter Palace, actually played a rather small role in the October events. The scene in which sailors smash a pile of wine bottles and prevent the population from pilfering the royal wine cellar, Brik called poster-like and deceitful, stating that the sailors’ battle in the wine cellar after the revolution was one of “October’s murkiest episodes.”
Esfir Shub, director of The Great Way (Velikii put’, 1927), a newsreel documentary about the revolution, wrote an article about October with the telling title, “This Work Shouts”:
“Do not dramatize historical fact, because dramatization distorts fact.
Do not replace Vladimir Ilyich with an actor whose face appears similar to Vladimir Ilyich’s.
Do not allow either the millions of peasants and workers who have not participated in battles, or our next generation—the Komsomol members and the Pioneers—to think that the events of those great days followed the course of Eisenstein and Aleksandrov’s October.
In such matters we need historical truth, fact, documents, and a great strictness in realization—we need a chronicle.”
Viktor Shklovsky gave the most balanced evaluation of the film. In his 1927 article, “Errors and Inventions [Oshibki i izobreteniia],” he suggested that one should not compare this film to a chronicle, because each represents a different creative mode. Eisenstein’s October is distinguished by its “perfectly ingenious freedom in reference to things,” and, regardless of the incorrect manner in which the task was completed, the “catalogue of inventions” remains the film’s primary accomplishment. He also noted with irony that if it had not been for the revolution, Eisenstein and Pudovkin would have both been “wild aesthetes.” Their attraction to experimentation demanded precisely that moment in history, which afforded them the opportunity to create uncompromising and authentically “Bolshevik” works.
The German film expert and critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote the most notable Western reviews on Eisenstein. He spoke rapturously about Battleship Potemkin, calling it “true art” and a film breakthrough that moves toward “real history.” Kracauer saw Eisenstein’s next film, October, as Soviet propaganda:
“Eisenstein’s Ten Days that Shook the World is an official picture about the revolution. Obviously, it was filmed on the order of the Soviet government, to disseminate the history of those memorable days throughout the cities and the population. It presents the officially approved history lesson: Kerensky was like this, Kornilov was like that, and this is how we are. The citizens walked there, and ours stood at that post. It should be said that, in some places the illustrators treated history too freely for our taste. Why was it necessary to portray Kerensky as such a coward？ Did the film really require the episode in which the Junkers steal spoons？ From our point of view, with these details the pictures’ makers only discredited their own creation.” (S. Kracauer, “Articles about Soviet Film” [in Russian]).
uch suspicions about Eisenstein’s political commitments have come up again in the course of the post-Soviet revision of the legacy of the Soviet period. The director is increasingly seen as a “totalitarian artist” and a falsifier of history, whose relationship to the viewer embodies all of the cruelty of Soviet rule, which used an iron fist to create a population of “new people.”
From Metaphor to Mythology
October begins with shots of the destruction of a statue of Alexander III (in one of his notes, Eisenstein wrote that he had long been dreaming up a “widow” for this monument, and could not resist the temptation; after all, he thought, “what is history without the guillotine？”). In reality, the monument, unveiled in a grand and public manner near the Church of Christ the Savior in 1912, was torn down in 1918 in accordance with the new government’s decree, “On the Destruction of Monuments Erected in Honor of the Tsar and his Servants.” Many viewers would have remembered this, and therefore the shots of the destruction of the unwieldy memorial were obviously symbolic, not “historical” (in the “Kornilov revolt” sequence, it emerged from the wreckage before the viewer’s very eyes). In fact, at the very beginning of this film about the revolution Eisenstein asserts his right to relate freely to the material at hand. His main task was in itself artistic: to create a “100% emotionally gripping” film, such as Battleship Potemkin.
oviet history, however, dealt with October in its own way, granting many of its episodes and images a documentary character. For example, still shots of sailors at the Winter Palace’s iron gates appeared as illustrations in Soviet history books (later these images were repeated in Romm’s Lenin in October and this strengthened their “documentary” nature). In reality, the gate had been open, but Eisenstein believed in the importance of the symbolism inherent in the images of the sailors stepping on the imperial crest.
Today’s historians have demonstrated that the Winter Palace was taken with considerably less force than is shown in October (it is no accident that in the 1920s the events of November 6-7 were legitimately called “revolutionary”). For Eisenstein the mass character of the storming of the Palace in October was a meaningful part of his social epic and represented the trilogy’s artistic finale. The cruel episodes depicting the dispersal of demonstrators in Strike and October, as well as the shooting of peaceful citizens in Battleship Potemkin, embodied the sacrifice and despair of the lower classes, who the regime treated like “cannon fodder” (Strike provides a direct allegory, as the dispersal of the demonstration is juxtaposed with the slaughter of cattle). In October, the crowd is transformed into a “revolutionary mass,” which alters the course of history.
Taken together, this all creates the impression that the “old world,” with its pomp and pathos, sickened Eisenstein stylistically. In the spirit of the times and as an avant-garde artist, it did not sadden him to destroy this “dead world.” Shklovsky, as a man of the same artistic era, understood Eisenstein’s moods well. In his novel Eisenstein, he wrote:
“October is a reel about the end of things, about another world, and at the same time it depicts the old world through its trappings…”
The imperial family’s personal belongings play a role in a series of scenes in October, and the director brings down all of his irony and sarcasm upon these objects (for example, in the “Tsarina’s Bedroom” sequence, the sailor watches as icons, Easter eggs, clay pots, a bidet, an erotic sculpture, and a china pig “exchange glances”; Eisenstein identified revulsion as this episode’s main emotion).
Eisenstein thus interprets the beginning of the march on the Palace as the beginning of a new age, one that arrived at midnight, during the zero hour (and it is not so important that he “adjusted the clock,” as the historical storming began after 1:00 am). In the film’s finale, all the world’s clocks herald the birth of a new world.
October in the History Classroom
roving the following thesis could become a central task in working with materials about the 1917 revolution as part of a history lesson:
The sequence of revolutionary events was established long ago, but facts themselves do not make up our knowledge of the past. They are superseded by interpretation and choices made in the language of their deｓｃｒｉｐｔion. This problem remains important today. What happened on October 25 (November 7) 1917: a coup d’état, a Great Socialist Revolution, a popular uprising, or was it the chaos of a power vacuum, which the Bolsheviks exploited？
Historical reality exists only as an aggregate of perspectives, and memoirs about that period demonstrate that these points of view do differ (during a lesson, for example, a comparison could be made between excerpts from John Reed, Leon Trotsky, the memoirs Defense of the Winter Palace (Zashchita Zimnego dvortsa) by White officer Aleksandr Sinegub, and others).
ergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October is just one version of historical events. In the classroom, this film raises many “problematic” themes and timely questions (also, thanks to its complexity, October can serve as the basis for an elective course in which students develop their research skills).
1. Revolution and Violence
Violence is an integral part of every uprising and coup (in the canonical Soviet version, it was the “heroic” and “historically justified” violence of the oppressed majority). History shows that revolutions are accompanied by a surge of elemental violence. Maxim Gorky described this side of the 1917 revolution in a cycle of essays titled Untimely Thoughts.
The theme of violence provided one of the deepest foundations of Eisenstein’s artistic creativity (see his article, “How I Became a Director (Kak ia stal rezhisserom)”). The film October is shot through with violence, but this theme is dealt with in a very specific way, partly under the influence of social control, partly in alignment the director’s artistic and personal convictions.
Which varieties of violence do we see in October and what has called them forth？ The violence of power (the Provisional Government), the violence and cruelty of the city’s inhabitants, the violence of the trappings of the “old world,” violence against the viewer… How do violence and authorial irony work together in the film？ What violence does Eisenstein pass over in silence？ Which of these types of violence intensified, rather than disappearing, during the Stalin period？
Work on this topic can be conducted through group analysis of relevant excerpts from the film.
2. Reflections on the Nature of the “Dead Regime”
Eisenstein’s film offers a satirical depiction of the Provisional Government, with amateurs playing Kerensky, as well as Lenin. The actor portraying Kerensky, a student who vaguely resembled the politician, overplayed his role, not once changing the dull expression on his face. This did not, however, trouble Eisenstein in the least (we can compare this satirical depiction with various first-hand accounts of Kerensky as a statesman).The segments of the film featuring Kerensky’s “ascent” up the royal staircase and his recreation in the library of Nicholas II aim to expose Kerensky’s “imperial” lust for power. We find the antithesis of these moments in the final image of the adolescent waif dozing on the tsar’s throne (this shot’s meaning is not as clear-cut as it may seem at first glance).
Yet the elements of the palace’s interior that help to diminish Kerensky’s image could become metaphors for any regime consumed by narcissism. The staircase, “democratic” handshakes with a series of ministers, the comparisons between Napoleon and a peacock—each image is a carefully chosen symbol that could be applied to any dictator or ambitious official.
In working on this theme, the task at hand might be the identification and clarification of the nature of these symbols (metaphorical (peacock), cultural-historical (Napoleon), etc.).
3. October and Soviet Historiography
October laid the foundation for the canonical Soviet version of the history of the revolution. Yet in the process of Stalin’s consolidation of power, the story changed, as theses about Kamenev and Zinoviev’s “treachery” appeared, Trotsky’s role was diminished while Stalin’s grew, and Lenin’s image evolved.
How did October influence Soviet historiography？ (Consider heroic pathos, the mass character of the storming of the Winter Palace, the first identification of meaningful events). How does the next anniversary film, Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, differ from Eisenstein’s October？ (Consider artistic and ideological differences).
These questions could become topics for independent research.
4. The Mechanisms of Agitation and Propaganda
October
《十月》观后感(六)：尼克·布朗眼中的《十月》
对“大桥升起”段落的详解：
在我看来，这个段落表现了一种非同寻常的时间延伸，尤其是大桥开启的顷刻。这个段落是以重复和在时间上的拉长这一特定时刻为主要内容的。它的构成原则是把两个微型事件交叉剪辑在一起，中间插入一个比喻作为过渡。
两个事件是大桥升起和一位布尔什维克为抢救红旗而牺牲。大桥升起时，我们看到一个戏剧性的比喻：一个女人，更确切的说是这个女人的头发耷拉在桥缝上，同时还有一匹马在靠近大桥分开处的地方坠入河中。这样，爱森斯坦便在马和妇女之间造成一种象征的同一性，从而分解了叙事的刻板结构。
另一条叙事线索——抢救共产党的旗帜和那位布尔什维克死于一群妇女和老人之手——的插入，使大桥升起的象征意义和拯救发生了联系。这种攻击性的结构描写了资产阶级与无产阶级的阶级关系，证明资产阶级是衰老的和娇弱的。
该段落的高潮——坠马、抛旗和《真理报》的“淹没”的交叉剪辑——集中出现在一组将两条处于虽不同但相近的空间中的叙事线索穿插在一起的镜头里。在战马坠下和它溅起的浪花之后，紧接着切入淹没那位布尔什维克的水浪。形成一种交叉剪辑造成的深一层联系。但剪辑点不是动作的相似，而是两者的对比所暗示的涵义。这一意识形态性的比喻意味着什么？
——尼克·布朗《电影理论史评》