October: Ten Days That Shook The World
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October (Ten Days That Shook The World), (Russian language title: “Октябрь” (“Десять дней, которые потрясли мир”), which translierated is "Oktyabry (Desyaty dney kotorie potrasli mir)") is a silent film filmed in the Soviet Union in 1928 under the direction of Sergei Eisenstein. The title alludes to the book of John Reed under the same title, Ten Days That Shook The World.
October was commissioned by the Soviet government to honour the tenth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. Eisenstein was chosen to head the project due to the international success he had achieved with The Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Eisenstein used the film to advance what he saw as the further development of his theories of montage, using a concept he described as "intellectual montage." The film's most celebrated examples of the technique include a baroque figure of Jesus reduced, through a series of successive images, to a primitive idol, and Kerensky, head of the pre-revolutionary Provisional Government, compared to a preening mechanical peacock.
Unfortunately, the film was not as successful and influential as Potemkin was. Such metaphorical experiments met with official disapproval; the authorities complained that October was unintelligible to the masses, and Eisenstein was attacked—for neither the first time nor the last—for "formalism." He was also required to re-edit the work to expurgate references to Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Stalin.
In spite of the film's lack of popular acceptance, it is considered by film historians to be an immensely rich experience—a sweeping historical epic of vast scale, and a powerful testament to Eisenstein's genius and artistry.