“By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.”   Walter Benjamin[1]

[1] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (NY: Schoken Books, 1968) p. 236, my emphasis.

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In 1927 Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned a piece that was supposed to provide a historical basis for the Bolshevik Revolution, commemorate its tenth anniversary, and validate it as a legacy for the future. In other words, Eisenstein sought to create a film that served as documentary of the Soviet history, functioned as propaganda for the State, and legitimised itself as art. However, words such as “propaganda,” “documentary,” and (specially) “art” can be said to be empty signs due to their ability to shift significations not only across time, but also across contexts. Therefore, the analysis of Eisenstein’s October, orbiting around these three words, complicates what might come to be a simple conclusion, i.e. “a combination of the three.”

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The film can be said to be propaganda for the very fact that it was commissioned by the State. The goal was to keep the momentum of revolutionary enthusiasm after years of civil war that succeeded the 1917 Revolution. On the contrary, it is not propaganda if the word is conceived in Toby Clark’s terms, “a word that has a sinister ring, suggesting strategies of manipulative persuasion, intimidation and deception.”[1] For, as it will be argued, October incites thought process, which is the realm of political action. By means of projecting the idea of process through “intellectual montage”, the viewer is engaged in a participative mode. Meaning is not passively conveyed, but construed in the viewer’s mind. Action is demanded as recognition that humans are involved in the process of history in their own present.

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 The art and documentary aspects of the film are less easy to sever.  The art of October inhabits the space and time of the avant-garde, namely, the Hegelian dialectics of the Aufhebung; and the documentary aspect of the film, paralleled as it was with the avant-garde context, manifests itself through contemporary perceptions of history, that is, the Marxist theory of Historical Materialism.[2] Here, it is time and space of  abstract concepts that conflate, which then affords a more tuned reading of October with its socio-cultural context. 

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According to Hegel, dialectic is a process of Aufhebung, which means that every concept is to be negated, lifted up to a higher degree in which it is thereby conserved.[3] The double meaning of the word, negating and conserving in a higher degree, is at the heart of the avant-garde. The dichotomy system inherent to the avant-garde – tradition/innovation, radical/bourgeois, etc – never stood out of the rhetoric of universalism. The value of art as utopia was always contained within this universalisng system but aiming to surpass its horizons. That is to say that the present in the time and space of the avant-garde was compressed between the great achievements of the past only to be lifted up and serve as the origin for a great future. The time of the present, enveloped by an atemporal universalising utopia, was constantly being deferred to the past and referred to the future through thought (or theory, from the Greek thereon, meaning “to see” through the intellect). The present of the avant-garde, and, moreover, history in the present of Soviet Russian culture, were experienced as a process.

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Eisenstein incorporated this choreography in his film. He was not interested in portraying a sequential chain of historical events leading up to the Storm of the Winter Palace. Rather, his technique – namely, montage as well as the overlapping of image, sound, and text in order to amplify or downplay both symbolic and “real” meaning – reflects his attempt to make the audience think the Revolution. The film is filled with symbolism that dives into the meaning of historical construction, and goes beyond the surface of its mere stated facts. In fact, it is only through exposing facticity, and moreover, contrasting it with fiction or emblem or symbol, that thought process can occur. Thought process allows the viewer to move beyond the verisimilitude of arranged historical facts into how history is conceived in the reality of the present.  One of the most powerful instances of such strategy is the rising of the bridge that cuts off the seat of government from the workers’ quarters, in an attempt by the Provisional Government to secure its power and avoid a second Bolshevik attack.

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Apart from the drama added by the musical effect, text, and the figure of the dead girl and horse, the rising of the bridge symbolises the interruption the historical process. The Marxist conception of the logic of history was denied. His belief that history could be grasped by the intellect, and it was thus capable of modification as long as humans understood the nature of the historical process in which they were involved.[4] The workers were denied access to the future, but more importantly, they were denied this understanding of their involvement in the historical process. At the same time, then, the importance of the recent revolutionary past’s achievements that dethroned the Tsar was erased. Thus, from this account one can conclude that, as Rosalind Kraus has suggested, the documentary or “real” space of the Bolshevik Revolution portrayed in October is one of negation of reality. This antithetic reality is presented only to be negated, lifted up and sustained through the understanding of the process that the Soviet State was undergoing. Moreover, the film indicates that the Soviet people are the active participants of this process and the ones in charge of securing its progression.  

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Art and documentary were not separate entities in Soviet Russian. The rhetoric of the machine technology, here in particular meaning the motion picture, rendered art and veracity one and the same. Propaganda was not separated either. Art as a medium through which “truth” was spread was at the service of the Soviet State. But, as it has been argued, there needs to be a moratorium on the term propaganda: October struggled to reach at and engage with the collective thought, and not, as the regimes of Stalin later on, Hitler, and Mussolini did, to deceive it. 

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[1] Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997) p. 7

[2] Rosalind Kraus, “Montage “October”: Dialectic of the Shot” Artforum, vol.11, no.5 (January 1973): 61-5

[3] David Allison footnoting Jacques Derrida, “Differance” in Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1973) reproduced in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Evaston: North Weston University Press, 1973) p. 23

[4] Marx’s historical materialism derived greatly from Hegel’s Phenomenology. “The great thing about [it]”, wrote Marx, “is that Hegel conceives the self creation of man as a process, regards objectification as alienation and as a transcendence of this alienation; and that he therefore grasps the nature of labour and comprehends objective man as a result of his own labour.” Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, quoted in Kraus, p. 62. This statement is particularly significant for the present discussion. The same process of Aufhebung can be noted here: objectification as something to be negated, for it creates alienation, but also something to be lifted up, which will transcend alienation. This is at the hub of Marxist thought as summarised in thesis, antithesis and synthesis analysis of History, and particularly of Capitalism (i.e. where capitalist wealth produces its own poverty). Eisenstein was familiar with Marxist thought and the thesis/antithesis/synthesis formulae is at the heart of his intellectual montage.