October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928)

Best movie of this year hands down!

How sad is this?

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD is a documentary-style retelling of the Russian Revolution that saw the rise of Lenin and his Bolsheviks and the overthrow of the royal family. It comes across as a piece of propaganda and was directed by Russia's most famous director, no less than Sergei Eisenstein. The situation was a complex one and that complexity comes across well in this fast-paced silent film which is packed with memorable imagery and epic-feeling crowd scenes.

October is another technically perfect masterpiece of Sergei Eistenstein that is though a little bit more radical and propaganda orientated than his previous works as the censorship and state control in Soviet Union heavily increased during that period. Note that Eisenstein would later be censored for other movies and that there would be way more radical propaganda movies than this one which can still be categorized as part of the early Soviet Union's revolutionary cinema. If you collect some background information and know about the historical context, you can watch this movie without problems as you won't get brainwashed by it in the end. Nevertheless, this is not an entertainment movie as there are lot of scenes and many different characters and events that need your full attention. The topic of revolution and violent rebellion hasn't changed though and is once again a main topic of one of Eisenstein's movies.From the artistic point of view, Eisenstein has improved his philosophy of cinema and introduces the intellectual montage to one of his full length features. You have a sequence of many short and fast cuts where you can seen images of religious symbols and after this or in alternation with this the statue of a tsar. This means that Eisenstein compares the numerous gods of different cultures in a profoundly atheist Soviet Union to the megalomania of the repressive tsars in a period of tyranny. The movie does the same thing when it compares the wasteful shine of tsarist dishes to a dumb and indoctrinated army in the next moment. Another good example is the fact that a tsarist officer is compared to Napoleon.Visually, there are many impressive images and scenes in this movie even if is not a intense as Battleship Potemkin was. The scene where a helpless horse falls down a bridge is pretty emotional for example.The movie is longer than Battleship Potemkin but very detailed and includes many historical details, crowds scenes and diversified characters. That's why the movie doesn't get too boring and is still enjoyable to watch nowadays.In the end, this movie is not as essential as Battleship Potemkin was but if you liked the style of Eisenstein's first international success, you can't go wrong with this one and learn a lot about Russian history, culture and ideology.

The film Oktyabr tells the story of the overthrow of the provisional government by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Being a history enthusiast I was excited to see this film in film class, but by the end of the movie I was extremely disappointed. The movie was far from being historically accurate and showed more like a recruitment film for the Bolshevik cause. Every group other than the Bolsheviks in the film are depicted as cowardly, stupid, ugly, incompetent ,evil or a mixture of all five . I would go as far to say that the provisional government and the bourgeoisie was depicted as comically evil, grinning fiendishly while killing the herculean exemplar Bolshevik man with umbrellas or gunning down idyllic peaceful protesters. In contrast every Bolshevik man, woman and child is shown as the summit of human purity and self sacrifice working only to better the Bolshevik cause. The film is on its most basic level propaganda, produced during the height of Stalin's Russia.While the accuracy of the historical account is questionable at best and outright revisionist at worst the film can be praised for its advanced film editing techniques. The director of the film Eisenstein was a genius film editor and the movie is riddled with complex film tricks. Eisenstein famously used montages throughout the film in order to get across highly sophisticated symbols. In fact the film was criticized at the time of its release for using too much symbolism which was seen as too difficult for the average Russian peasant to understand.To sum up my opinion of the movie if you enjoy historically accurate movies look somewhere else but if you are interested in the origin of complex film editing you have come to the right place.

I had to watch October in my film history class and I hate to say this but I just really did not enjoy it at all. It was super long, like three hours, and I honestly did not understand it. Our professor told us that there was so much symbolism and stuff in it that at the time it came out the people did not even really fully understand it. I definitely do not recommend seeing this movie unless you are just super into this kind of stuff and have a great interest for it. On top of being able to grasp a hold of what is going on this film is also silent making it even harder to get an understanding of everything that's going on. There is not really any main characters to keep up with and with all the shot of different people it is very easy to get mixed up. This film is so chaotic and fast paced, jumping from one thing to the next for a solid three hours. If you like getting headaches try keeping up with this movie. I expected this movie to be pretty good and at the very least somewhat interesting, but I kept finding myself fidgeting in my seat and checking the time till it would end. I wish I had more positive things to say about it because it is apparently quite a masterpiece. Maybe I just don't have the appreciation for films history like I should but I can't help that. Maybe if I had had some more study in the Russian revolution I would not have been quite so lost. Anyways for my personal opinion I would not recommend this movie to anyone and would advise if you are going to show it to your class explain it and the time in Russia very well before actually showing it so maybe the students can follow along with it better.