OCTOBER U.S.S.R. 1927, 104 min. Director: Sergei Eisenstein                                                                                                                                                               After the success of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, Eisenstein was selected to direct one of the films celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. His gift for mounting large set pieces, in this case the storming of the Winter Palace, has never been more convincing than in this dramatic treatment of the overthrow of the Czarist regime in 1917. (In fact, many ‘documentaries’ about that moment in Russian history utilize considerable amounts of footage from Eisenstein’s fictional reconstruction.)

The film was not as successful or influential as Potemkin The film was not as successful or influential as Potemkin. Eisenstein's montage 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 excessive "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, film historians consider it to be an immensely rich experience—a sweeping historical epic of vast scale, and a powerful testament to Eisenstein's genius and artistry.

Intellectual Montage Eisenstein used the film to further develop his theories of film structure, using a concept he described as “intellectual montage", the editing together of shots of apparently unconnected objects in order to create and encourage intellectual comparisons between them. One of the film's most celebrated examples of this technique is a baroque image of Jesus that is compared, through a series of shots, to Hindu deities, the Buddha, Aztec gods, and finally a primitive idol in order to suggest the sameness of all religions; the idol is then compared with military regalia to suggest the linking of patriotism and religious fervour by the state. In another sequence Alexander Kerensky, head of the pre-revolutionary Provisional government, is compared to a preening mechanical peacock.