Hallucinating history: when Stalin and Eisenstein reinvented a revolution

Ten years after the storming of the Winter Palace, Sergei Eisenstein’s surreal and savage epic October reimagined Russia’s 1917 revolt – and parodied Stalin, who had commissioned it. We revisit its explosive unruliness

Coleridge said that seeing the fiery Edmund Kean act was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Watching Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film October is like watching the Russian revolution the same way. It’s surreally lit up by stark images that sear your retina; gone the next second, to be replaced by others just as mysterious and disorientating. October is not a historical document, more a remembered dream. I sometimes wish we could see it without music, with just a deafening thunderbolt on each of its 3,200 cuts. A violent electrical storm of strangeness.

The film was commissioned in Stalin’s Soviet Russia for the 10th anniversary of the 1917 October revolution, as a suitably fervent propagandist celebration. Eisenstein was the obvious candidate to direct, having won an international reputation for his brilliant Battleship Potemkin. Like Orson Welles, he had first made his mark in experimental theatre (And, like Welles, he later got bogged down in a big Latin American location shoot that resulted in a lost film – for Welles: It’s All True, for Eisenstein: ¡Que viva México!).

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2yM1vdT