October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  Honestly, no wonder Stalin was like "wut." Like tfw you're supposed to be making a film about 1917 but the form is from like 2057

  Like what did Stalin think when Sergei cuts to the peacock

• Review by The Voluptuous Horror of Sally Jane Black ★★★★ 25

  One hundred years ago, the Soviets marched into the Winter Palace and tore down the Provisional Government, and the proletariat, for the first time in history, completely controlled their own fate. Though others had tried before, each time, they were torn down, betrayed, or defeated; here, in this moment, a beacon of hope was lit for the whole world, one that would last 75 years, weathering imperialist corruption, revisionist decay, and fascist invasion. The Soviets inspired people around the world to follow their lead, and many of those who did remain bastions of proletarian power even today. One hundred years ago, we saw the truth of Lenin's words written in the blood and fire of revolution, and still today, the…

• Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 3

  That feel when even Stalin thought you went too far

  In all seriousness however, even regardless of politics this remains the benchmark of what can be done with montage in cinema, moreso than Frampton, even.

  October was probably too ahead of its time in 1928, and possibly remains so 91 years later - since today we literally see the world through a media saturation that never really got past Potemkin at best. And while I still am unable to parse the metallic peacock even after yearly winter viewings, one of the remarkable things about this movie is being able to break out of narrative form while retaining a linear structure. This is interesting in that it's also (even though he…

• Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  Because we know the Russian Revolution happened, we know what the films ultimate outcome is, so there is no need for suspense mechanics and Eisenstein is free - freer than ever - to push theoretical montage to its possibly unsurpassed limits. One of the most beautiful films ever made - pitting not just classes against each other but the history of civilization against a possible new world. Statues, jewelry and religious iconography everywhere, signifiers of the old world - so we can comprehend the gravity of the event taking place...and that it is possible that the world can change. That it was momentous and unparalleled in history, that monarchy and religion can collapse and that freedom is possible.

• Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 3

  the montage where you see the petrograd soldiers slowly assembling and loading their guns before embarking on the armed uprising is some of the hypest shit in any film -- reactionaries have never recovered from how eisenstein brutally demolishes their precious 'god and country' in this -- all power to the workers, absolutely electrifying ⚡⚡⚡

• Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  Woodrow Wilson was wrong - this is what writing history with lightning looks like.

• Review by Eliza ★★★★★

  checkmate Liberals

• Review by Sarah ★★★★½

  Imagine commissioning some guy to shoot a few war reenactments and he gives you an experimental montage contrasting revolutionary calls to action with lavish bourgeois symbols of excess. Proletariat power put to memory, not only is this crucial as historical document of class struggle, but as editing technique too. Scythes vs peacocks, and an endlessly swinging pendulum between capitalist squalor and utopia

• Review by Lee ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ ★★★★★ 2

  Lenin went to greet pains to elaborate the point that worker democracy needed different structures to express itself. The workers could not simply take over a bourgeois parliament and consider that the revolution was achieved; in fact, the whole apparatus serving the bourgeoisie state had to be destroyed and replaced by institutions which sprang from the working masses
  - Walter Rodney

  The capacity for synthesis and the penetration of the film image, the possibilities offered by the living document, and naked reality, and the power of enlightenment of audiovisual means make the film far more effective than any other tool of communication. It is hardly necessary to point out that those films which achieve an intelligent use of the possibilities…

• Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★

  The struggle of socialism over capitalism, the fall of the bourgeois power and ten days that shook the world, especially in the Soviet Union.Editing and directing at their maximum capacities, ranking among the top of any list of silent celluloid collaborations. Another propagandist masterpiece by extremely patriotic and genius Eisenstein.

  99/100

• Review by Redfern ★★★★★ 15

  A Few Tendentious, Tractarian Observations on Montage

  A moment in Potemkin bears the mark of what would later become for Eisenstein the so-called "intellectual montage", or what I will here call, for analytic purposes, the "speculative montage". Hair almost ablaze, the priest aboard the ship is the first character of the film who, in his universality, as far as he is the embodiment of the Church and orthodox theology, presents a 'picture' of the institution and ideology in its social form, which, importantly, figures as the manifestation of the authoritarian society only because it is placed in opposition to the possibility of the free society, i.e. the self-consciousness of the sailors—the proletariat. Yet, at this early stage, Eisenstein's technique and…

• Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 2

  Galileo, Da Vinci, Eisenstein

  
  Long live the world