A Conversation about October: 10 Days that Shook the World

With Jerry Carlson for CUNY TV

Dec 29, 2024

Last month I had a fantastic conversation with CUNY Grad Center professor Jerry Carlson, who invited me to discuss Sergei Eisenstein’s October on CUNY TV’s City Cinematheque programming. I had last been on City Cinematheque with Jerry in 2016, discussing Ozu’s Tokyo Story. I had such a fun time then, and was so excited to return to the CUNY TV set. I’m including the transcript of our conversation below in case of interest. Our discussion gets going in a particularly interesting direction around 9 minutes in. I hope you enjoy, and, in the spirit of the Soviet avant-garde, I hope you have a wonderful, revolutionary, beautifully disorienting, and affectively engaging new year.

Jerry Carlson

[ 00:00:38 ] Welcome to City Cinematheque, where the art and pleasure of the movies are the subject of serious discussion. I'm your host, Jerry Carlson, and I teach film studies at the City College of the City University of New York. Today we continue our series, 'Soviet Montage of the 1920s', a new cinema for a new society. Today's film, the 1927 Sergei Eisenstein masterpiece, October: Ten Days That Shook the World. This film is famous for its epic scope, for its editing, and for its radical form. We'll be talking about that and much more after today's screening. Joining us will be Professor Julia Alekseyeva from the University of Pennsylvania, a noted expert on the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s. Now, join the revolution with Sergei Eisenstein in October.

Welcome back to the City of New York’s City Cinematheque. You just had an opportunity to see a film that's really made a huge mark in film history, and for quite diverse reasons. Certainly, it's a deeply political film, it's a nationalistic film made to celebrate the Soviet Union, but it's also a film that's been studied for many, many years for its film technique, some of which is applied in ways that are non-political in all kinds of contexts. There's a lot to talk about here, and it's a pleasure to welcome back to City Cinematheque, Julia Alekseyeva. Julia is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of two books: one, which has to do with her own thoughts about her childhood and heritage, which is Soviet Daughter, a Graphic Revolution, an autobiographical work in graphic style; and most recently, a very important scholarly study, Anti-fascism and the Avant-garde, which is a study actually of the later revolutionary period of the 1960s from a comparative point of view. Welcome back, Julia.

Julia Alekseyeva

[ 00:02:43 ] Great. Thank you so much for having me back.

[ 00:02:45 ] Great. So let's talk about the fact that this is a film made in 1927. It's a good thing to just review what the occasion of the film is and why this is a film that has extraordinary resources.

[ 00:03:00 ] So this film was made in 1927, which was, of course, the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. So a lot of films were coming out around this period that were meant to celebrate this great feat. The other film that I think is a part of the series as well, by Pudovkin, The End of St. Petersburg, was the other film along with October to be funded by the Soviet government as a revolutionary celebration of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

[ 00:03:33 ] Yes, so the film says this explicitly up front, but it's good to remember that this is a film that makes a very large claim to really being a recreation of what happened. What kind of resources did Eisenstein get to do that that most filmmakers don't have?

[ 00:03:53 ] Well, he did get the recreated storming of the Winter Palace, not the actual event itself. But the Winter Palace moment in the film, which was perhaps one of the most iconic moments of this film, came from a film that was itself a reenactment that was made shortly after the revolution actually occurred. However, in a lot of archival films nowadays or documentaries nowadays, the storming of the Winter Palace from Eisenstein film is used as if it were real fact, which I think is a really interesting little detail that, oh, actually, there was no real filmic evidence of the Winter Palace storming. So it only came from reenactments, and the October scene is just extremely iconic in that regard.

[ 00:04:51 ] Right, I think that's true. And it also raises this whole, you know, a large ethical debate that goes on in media studies across that is the debate of capturing something, and making a truth claim because you actually captured something on film, as opposed to making the truth claim that you have recreated what it was, and perhaps there's even more truth in that recreation. Now, there are people who will obviously argue very strongly against that, and this is, as you just pointed out, this is a kind of key case for that because people like to use this as historical footage, even though it's not.

[ 00:05:27 ] Yeah, and something that I recently learned through an article by the scholar Vincent Bollinger, is actually that, perhaps surprisingly, when a survey was distributed to audiences shortly after the release of October, many of the people in the audience—about, I think the article claimed 40% of the audience—claimed to be participants in the revolution itself, in the storming of the Winter Palace, and in the revolutionary activities otherwise. And many of those people, the majority of them, said that it was true to their own experience. Which for me is actually a little bit surprising to learn.

[ 00:06:06 ] But you also bring up this point that he's using real locations, this is not MGM's backlot recreating anything, this is shooting on location, and they had recruited people, you know, because again, it was ten years later, so people could still, you know, could age match in a kind of way, so some of the people we would call extras, but would actually become the masses, the protagonists here, were actually a person, not everybody is not authentic in that way. But it's a very interesting instance of you don't have a direct capture record, but you have a succession of recreations, but each one of those recreations is making its own kind of truth claim, in different ways, like we have real participants, we're using real locations, it's based upon testimony, so it's got to be true.

[ 00:07:03 ] Right, and every successive retelling of the October Revolution is cementing a new, perhaps slightly changed image of that revolution in people's minds as well, so it also kind of begs the question of whether the people watching it that claimed it to be very connected to their own experience, whether they were also remembering other recreations of their own experiences. And of course the title, October: Ten Days That Shook the World, it comes from the John Reed book, rather than from the original Soviet title, which was just October. So the Reed book also created such a hubbub in the United States, at least in other places around the world, about the revolution. So all of these different mythologies of the revolution had already been, had become so powerful since 1917.

[ 00:07:54 ] Right, so there really is this layering effect of all of these mixtures. So this is, sound is coming. Sound is already on its way around the world. There are also political changes that are going on. So this is a film that is going to be near the end of what we film historians consider to be the classic period of Soviet montage and the particular aesthetic effects of Soviet montage. So I think it's very, I think it's important for us to recreate that. Because this is a kind of peak moment of that, to the degree that some people thought it went too far. Okay. But so what's behind this? What is Eisenstein, he's the chief man here, but others, what are they thinking about what cinema can do for political art?

[ 00:08:49 ] Yeah, I love this question. It is perhaps the heart of why I became interested in this period in the first place. Most of my personal research, you know, is about Dziga Vertov, who is a competitor of sorts to Eisenstein, although one could also argue that they are, of course, they're both practitioners of the Soviet avant-garde, that in these days we might call them frenemies. But they're working for a lot of the same things, but have their own unique way of thinking about things. But something that brings them together with other figures, like Pudovkin, like Lev Kuleshov, so many other members of other artistic practices, Viktor Shklovsky, who is now considered a formalist, but was a literary scholar, and a screenwriter, and a poet, and a writer, and all of these people are thinking about the ways that art can fundamentally change the human sensorium. How can art change the way people feel and act? And for a very, very, very new country, so a 10-year-old country, right, at the time of October, but at the time that Vertov and Eisenstein were making their first films, the revolution was, it was just after the Civil War that ended in 1921, 22. There was a lot of new interest in how to create a new kind of person, a person that isn't subsumed under what was called bourgeois morality, or bourgeois ways of living life. The old capitalist system also affected the way people lived their lives and how they behaved around other people, how they thought about things. So a lot of artists were competing to create what is called the new Soviet man. And the man isn't necessarily gendered. It probably has a gender-neutral term, like chelovek, which is kind of more gender-neutral. But the idea of the creation of a new type of person, a new subject in communism that would be freer, more liberated, different, that would be able to see things in a more refreshed way than previously. And so for Eisenstein and Vertov and Pudovkin and Kuleshov and Protazanov and these different folks, film was capable of having that kind of transformation for the viewer. So a lot of these artists considered themselves, and the Soviet government also considered them, not necessarily artists, but engineers of the mind. So October is meant to have this transformation of the mind, and which is why he uses these very unique montage effects. And I won't go into all of the different types of montage; it would take too long, but of course there's metric and rhythmic and tonal, and the most important is, of course, intellectual, which is what makes it possible to have these different juxtapositions. Like the most famous one is, of course, the mechanical peacock with Kerensky. So can you put two seemingly different or contradictory or unrelated images together to create new meanings? So can the use of these montage effects, can they refresh the mind, make a new, more enlightened, liberated person who can then use their new way of thinking to be a revolutionary in the world, to be a good political person, to not be a member of bourgeois society but a liberated communist society?

[ 00:12:15 ] Right. And I think it's important to point out that, first of all, thank you for mentioning of these different sets of different kinds of montage that the one, the one that's most abstract is actually the intellectual montage because it asks the spectator to do that kind of work, and of course the criticism that he received was that, guess what, not everybody can do that work. Okay. Fine. But you're also saying something I think is also very important which has to do not with intellect but actually has to do with affect.

Yeah.

And so what's, what's behind that in terms of their thinking and how does that link with how Soviet society is adopting and thinking about science?

[ 00:13:08 ] Yeah. That's such an interesting question because this is, again, one of the reasons that I find this period so fascinating is that it's looking at feeling but not necessarily a feeling that is connected to maybe a romantic view of psychology, you know, like with melodrama where you have a lot of representations of extreme emotion and romance and things like that. And to contextualize the period a little bit, before this time in Soviet history, generally in Eastern Europe, in film history, the way that feelings or emotion is talked, was talked about was usually in a kind of perhaps kitschy or cliché way. On the other hand, you had in the new Soviet era, this turn towards science, you know, science above all else. You had to electrify an entire country. Over 80% of the country by the time of the revolution was illiterate. There weren't enough resources. It was quite backwards compared to other countries. So the Soviet Union needed to literally develop itself and to build infrastructures that would allow them to compete with the West and to allow communism to flourish. And so there was a lot of interest and real devotion to science. But Eisenstein, he found something in the middle of the two, actually, which is really, really fascinating. And I think Vertov did too, and a lot of these figures did where they're not looking at kind of clichémelodramas and they're not looking at “we are strict scientists,” but they're thinking about a way in which they can be combined. Like how can we scientifically look at emotions? The way that a certain montage effect, for instance, in Eisenstein, a use of really quick cuts or use of superposition—how can some of these techniques relate to the way that the body and mind react to it? What reactions can it do? What feelings can we make in the viewer? And for agitational propaganda, which all of these films were, how to inculcate the feeling of excitement for the revolution.

[ 00:15:22 ] Right. You also, I want to just underline a point that on the one hand, you know, yes, there is an audience, which would include the international audience for all of these Soviet films, which was all of those people sympathetic with the left, people curious about the new Soviet Union, but also included large swaths of the intelligentsia of the world. So they would see the immediate connection between this kind of aesthetics and the things that are going on in, not always harmonized with what's going on in the Soviet films, but that are all part of the international avant-gardes, that are all trying to make it new in some sense, on the one hand. But on the other hand, and I'm so happy you brought it up—there's the 80% of this country who are illiterate. And so, to be able to address them, in a new medium that is not language-dependent and that can communicate that affect to generate that alliance, enthusiasm, dedication; that's a very important instrument because, those folks, you can't get to through the intellect and the literacy and all that. You have to get to them through the emotional argument in certain ways.

[ 00:16:52 ] Absolutely. Which is one of the reasons why the Bolsheviks considered film the most important of all of the arts, in that regard. And just really briefly to go back to the last comment about sensation and film, a very important term that I forgot to mention is kinooshchushchenie, which is something that Vertov talked about a lot, but was also brought up in Eisenstein. If anyone's interested, the Emma Widdis book Socialist Senses, I think talks about this in a really beautiful way. So this concept of kinooshchushchenie, combines the word film or Kino, like from Vertov’s Kino-Eye from 1924, with feeling or sensation, which is oshchushchenie. So there's a specific kind of feeling that is related specifically to film. And this kind of creation of this new film-oriented sensation is something I think unique to the Soviet avant-garde at this time.

[ 00:17:50 ] Okay. And so again, that also fits even with their competing avant-gardes because it is a shared concern over medium specificity. That lets them find out what this medium does the very best and how it would serve our purposes. And again, one should just remind everyone that of all the filmmakers that we're talking about, first of all, they're all very young. They're very enthusiastic members of this new society. No one at this moment-- things will change in coming years--they're enthusiastic fellow travelers with everything that is happening. They're creating this new society and they're being given, at this moment, at this chapter, they're being given incredible resources and a kind of open book on what you can do because nobody's done it before. That will change most conspicuously with the debates that come out of the coming of sound and then the meeting in 1934, the famous meeting of the party and of the coming official socialist realist dogma and doctrine. But right now, they have a free hand to experiment with this. So let's go back to some of the, you've mentioned some of these particular features, the particular form of October. What are some of the storytelling decisions that Eisenstein makes that might be quite alien to audiences whose daily experiences is the Hollywood cinema from 1915 until yesterday? There's a number of ways in which he conceives of, not just style, but form, very differently. What are some of the things and what are some of those?

[ 00:19:47 ] Well, of course, we already talked about intellectual montage or the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated elements to arrive at a new understanding of things. I think he uses this in October more than any film, I believe, up to this point, much more so than Battleship Potemkin. And he was quite criticized in the reception of October for using these formalist, what were called formalist methods. At this point, formalism is almost a curse word. It's an insult, unfortunately. I quite love formalism. But at this point, it was used as an insult. And so he was criticized for using too much of these kinds of overly intellectual forms of montage, in which, so for instance, I already mentioned the mechanical peacock. There's a mechanical owl. There are a variety of statues that people might have noticed that are juxtaposed with, usually the leaders of the provisional government, which are quite criticized. These techniques would then actually be used again and again later on. So even if they were criticized in, at certain points during the release of October, I just showed one of my classes at Penn Hour of the Furnaces by Solanas and Getino from 1969. And that film, which was also an agitational propagandist film, against the military coup in Argentina, very pro-communist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and the way that that film uses forms of montage is almost identical to what Eisenstein is doing and what many members of the Soviet avant-garde were doing. But just to return to these kind of montage experiments, you have, of course, the juxtaposition of these seemingly unrelated frames. And you have very, very, very quick cuts. They're so fast where they almost look like flickers. And one could imagine that those effects, while invigorating to people like me who love very weird film effects, might have been confusing or disorienting. But I always like to remind at least my students and my friends that don't like those techniques that perhaps the disorientation could have been the point of those techniques, but perhaps not to the extent that actually occurred. And Eisenstein did talk about how kind of surprised by some of the reactions he was.

[ 00:22:16 ] Well, you bring up this, you know, and again, he's a master of tempo. So you've mentioned the fact that he'll do something like the quick shots of the machine gun so that it's taken from different angles and it's almost, you can immediately say, oh, that's a cubist montage because he's doing that. But at the same time, it's imitating the throw of the bullets of a machine gun. But at the other kind of end of that spectrum is the way in which he will, he will elongate time because he, because that's, I think, one of the other disorienting things about the film is that he will go to any number of extreme points on the compass. And frequently, you know, films define themselves in a much more conservative stylistic system. Even if it's a little bit different, it's only different in one way or another. But again, I still remember the first time I saw the film and the cutting back and forth with the raising of the bridge and the falling of the carriage, the hair across the bridge. And that is another one of the techniques of affect, of allying ourselves with the victim and the injustice of this person being the victim, but making us, in this way, feel it in those ways. The other thing is, hmm, who's the protagonist of this film, Julia?

[ 00:23:43 ] Well, The Revolution is the protagonist, of course!

Thank you.

And so there is no central hero. There's a villain, although the villain isn't even Kerensky, although he is presented quite villainously with his head usually down and he's, and a lot of juxtapositions with Napoleon and things like that. But he's not the only villain. The entire capitalist and bourgeois class is the villain.

Right. But the heroes are all, all the masses, the people responsible for the revolution. And in fact, there are of course a few scenes with Lenin, but in this rewatching of the film was surprised by how little Lenin actually appears in the film despite the fact that for those appearances, Eisenstein was quite criticized because people did not like how, oh, no one could approach how charismatic and wonderful Lenin was. “This is just a shred of the tiniest bit of greatness that Lenin was.” Although of course, at this time, we are kind of already enmeshed in the kind of iconography, the great man that Lenin was. He had already passed away three years prior to the release of this film. But the masses are the heroes here, which could be a little bit disorienting for a lot of audiences used to the kind of more of the Great Man or other filmmakers at this time that created wonderful films that are a part of this series like Mother.

Right, exactly.

Mother does have a protagonist, but this film does not.

[ 00:25:12 ] Right. No, and Mother has a representative family and the effects of the revolution, but we're all, we're allowed to identify with those individuals and, you know, politics and ideology substitute for psychology. But nonetheless, it is a linear process of coming of age of those characters. And here, as you pointed out so well, we're seeing the masses. The masses come of age, not an individual.

[ 00:25:42 ] Yeah, yeah. And the way that the masses are presented are very connected to the body and how visceral all of these shots are. So going to go back to that bridge raising scene where there's, oh, the hair is really something that also sticks for me as well—so slowly as they're being raised and as this woman's hair is between these two different planes— but also the horse, and the various ways in which Eisenstein mobilizes the pain of animals actually, you know.

Absolutely, correct, yeah.

To create a very specific effect in the audience member of, of horror and of pain and of empathy. The famous scene from Strike that many people might have seen is, as at the same time that the workers who are striking are being kind of mowed down by policemen on horseback, Eisenstein famously juxtaposes the slicing of a cow's neck and the death of the cow. So that kind of visceral, the connection to the pain of one body, and not even a human body sometimes, with the destruction of the masses.

[ 00:26:54 ] Okay, we're gonna have to—

Oh no! we're ending with—

No but the point is that he would like us to end there, if not, or perhaps even better, the triumph of the revolution, but yes, with, with that kind of affectiveness. Okay, if you've enjoyed our conversation here today, there's more to be found both on City Cinematheque and on the other programming here at CUNY TV. How do you find out about it? Not a surprise. You go to our website, www.tv.cuny.edu, and there's some good news. You're also going to find there the way in which you can download our new app. So, you can take CUNY TV with you anywhere you wish with that app. So please visit www.tv.cuny.edu. Julia, thank you for a vibrant half hour of discussion. We covered a lot of ground. And it's always a pleasure to have you here.

[ 00:27:54 ] It's so wonderful to be back. Thank you so much for having me.

[ 00:27:56 ] Great! And thank you for joining us today. And I hope you'll join us in weeks to come as we continue to stroll through the archives of film history. For now, it's goodbye.