A strong contender for Sergei Eisenstien's best film, October 1917 is a masterful account of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Lenin to power. Created as a piece of political propaganda, the filmmaking is powerful that it transcends it ideas and becomes a marvelous film regardless of your political persusaion. What a stirring movie.
Like Eisenstien's other silents, the movie has a unique aestheic heavilly reliant on editing- extensive use of montage (duh), the concept of kinofist, metaphorical cutting. Strucurally, the film has no protagonist and the audince is given an omnicint veiw of the conflict and forced to identifiy with society in general. I found this to be a major flaw of Eisenstien's first film, Strike, making the story needlessly confusing and somewhat cold, but here the sweeping, epic story makes it work.
The Image Entertainment DVD that I saw featured sound effects and music by famed Soviet composer Dmitri Shostokovitch, which goes along with the film perfectly, so I highly reccamend it. This is a film so innovative, so visually complex and so ambitious that it deserves to be seen over and over again. Thinking back on the film afterwards, however, I found myself regretting that the Russian Revoluton was not as simple as found here, and that it would result in death untold misery for millions. Unfortantley, a great movie is not worth that price.
October (1927)