ten days of intense dreaming and desire
by Douglas Messerli
Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori
Aleksandrov (screenplay), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Oktyabr': Desyat' dney kotorye potryasli (October: Ten Days That Shook the World) / 1927, USA 1928
When an American journalist
asked who had authored the screenplay, Eisenstein sarcastically answered, “the
Party.” The deletions of Trotsky came at the very last moment, in fact on the
very day it was to be shown at the Bolshoi Theatre, with Stalin himself
visiting Eisenstein’s editing room to view the scenes concerning Trotsky.
Presumably Trotskyist opposition protests in Moscow and Leningrad that morning,
November 7, 1927, had resulted in this decision.
In many respects the film
is a brilliant example of Eisenstein’s famed use of photo montage, as well his
use of unforgettable images to convey the power of events. Early in the film,
the government’s horrific decision to raise the bridges after several striking
workers had been shot and others were attempting to escape to their homes,
underscores the cruelty and insensitivity of the Tsar and his
counterrevolutionary toadies. A horse, previously shot by the military, hangs
high in the air before finally falling into the Neva river below. A dead
woman’s hair slowly slides into the crack where the parts of the bridge once
met. Well-dressed, obviously wealthy patricians and members of the bourgeoisie
mock arrested Bolsheviks and throw hundreds of copies of Pravda into the
waters below. These beautifully filmed moments justify comments such as
Pudovkin’s: “How I should like to make such a powerful failure.”
But even if one generally admires Eisenstein’s more formal collaging of images such as his quick shifts from a baroque Jesus to a Buddha, Hindu deities, Aztec gods, and African idols—suggesting that all religions are equally meaningless—there is something too heavy-handed and simple-minded about many such scenes that fill this film with many slightly embarrassing moments.
In short, these comic
riffs, appearing throughout the film, pull against the more somber subject of
the revolution itself, as if Eisenstein were attempting to balance the
mechanizations that lead to the dramatically powerful storming of the Winter
Palace, with which the film closes, with music hall humor—occasionally shifting
in a single scene, as when, after introducing the terrifying Women’s Death
Battalion, the director suddenly turns their bedding down for the night upon
the Tsar’s billiard tables into a comic shtick.
Yet for all these flaws,
Eisenstein’s film is filled with so many remarkable images that even if we
occasionally might cringe at the silliness of the worst of them, we can only be
in awe of
By that time, however,
Stalin had so squelched creative endeavors that the very next day after the
film’s delayed showing, authorities called for a panel, “Questions Arising from
the Film,” which, as film critic Bernd Reinhardt notes, marked a campaign
against Soviet formalism.
Today we perhaps can enjoy
this film less because of its thematic focus than its evocation of the 10 days
of intense dreaming and desire of the Soviet people—of which the work is itself
is further evidence.
Los Angeles,
August 1, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2016).
No comments:
Post a Comment