Ten Days That Shook the World

When he filmed Ten Days That Shook the World in 1927, ten years after the October Revolution that the movie recreated, Sergei Eisenstein had all Leningrad at his disposal. He took over the dead Tsar's Winter Palace, gleefully had himself photographed on the throne, and used the imperial bed for a director's seat. Restaging the revolution with the nightly help of 3000 citizens, Eisenstein broke more palace windows in 1927 than had the real revolutionaries ten years before.

Eisenstein's plans for the movie were as grand as the scale on which he worked. Intellectually, then, it is a tough movie. The events of the ten days in which Kerensky's Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks are subordinated to Eisenstein's own response to them: the pattern that he makes of the events and the opportunities he sees in them for experiments in film technique. Since the pattern is diffuse and the opportunities unlimited, it is not an easy movie and it does not always "entertain." The movie is no easier to follow for the cuts that have been made in it. For instance, just as the movie was about to be released, Trotsky fell from grace. The film was completely re-edited by the Soviet government.

No one character is at the center of the movie; and there is no music to help hold it together. Instead, the film's unity comes from the pattern that Eisenstein has imposed on it. The pattern is like a dialogue between the liberal Provisional Government and the revolutionary Bolsheviks. At first the pace is slow. Eisenstein shows Kerensky trotting up an endless flight of palace stairs while the titles ("Minister of Navy...and of Army...and Generalissimo...Dictator...")parody his rapid rise to power. With Kerensky in power, the camera darts back and forth from his face to that of a peacock and then to a bust of Napoleon, presenting Kerensky as unequal to his rapidly increasing duties. The revolutionaries are shown, some being taken to prison and others in small groups, slowly stamping their feet. The Government's pleas for compromise are under-cut by shots of hands playing at harps. Then the Bolsheviks appear again--the army goes over to them. At the end the pace is breath-taking. As the camera switches quickly from the rebels to the government-held palace, the first firing is shown only by the shaking of the chandeliers inside the palace.

Eisenstein's dialogue-pattern is held together mainly by his use of combinations of images. At one point, for instance, when Kerensky is calling for aid, his face interchanges on the screen with a picture of the buttocks of horses waiting in a stable nearby. Although they dramatize Eisenstein's plan, these montages sometimes make the movie hard to follow. At some moments the camera changes are too rapid to follow, and at other times Eisenstein's passionate interest in expressive faces and images--like the hair of a girl which lies across the split of a slowly separating drawbridge--breaks up the movement.

Although he does sometimes yield to the temptation to labor a fine shot, Eisenstein more often uses the quickening of the juxtaposition of scenes and of the Bolsheviks' stamping feet to give a sense of the mounting movement. Along with his highly imaginative use of experimental techniques is a lack, at times, of the continuity expected today of any movie. What Eisenstein has to say is more often implied through his images than stated on the screen. These things make Ten Days That Shook the World both a difficult and a great film.