TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD Movie Review

October

The book of the same name by American reporter John Reed (who in turn was the subject of Warren Beatty's Reds) was the basis for Sergei Eisenstein's incredibly ambitious, government-commissioned, 10th-anniversary commemoration of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Eisenstein turned what had been recent history into a sweeping, spectacular epic of mythological proportions, complete with an evil villain (the Czar), a traitorous, self-aggrandizing, false hero (Kerensky, head of the first provisional government), and a shining knight (Lenin). In sheer technique, and in his bold experimentation with the possibilities of film editing, Eisenstein's achievement here is frequently astonishing. To show us the imperial designs fulminating in Kerensky's head, Eisenstein cuts between his face and mechanical peacocks, yet the cuts in sequences like this are so swift as to be nearly subliminal (if you look at a copy of the film that's projected at too high a speed such images may not even register).The big action sequences, like a massacre in a public square and the storming of the Winter Palace, are masterful and frighteningly realistic. (The director might have been dispirited, however, if he knew that modern audiences react more vocally to the smashing of the Czar's wine cellar than to the slaughtering of civilians.) After the film's completion, Eisenstein was informed that Leon Trotsky had just been declared an enemy of the people. He had no choice but to remove every one of the heroic images of Trotsky scattered throughout the finished film, as if he were plucking raisins out a huge, perfectly baked muffin without disturbing its shape.

NEXT STOP … Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, The Battle of Algiers

1927 104m/B RU Nikandrov, N. Popov, Boris Livanov; D: Grigori Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein; M: Dimitri Shostakovich. VHS, LV VYY, IHF, WFV