ABSTRACT
This chapter represents yet another attempt at a textual analysis of Eisenstein’s October, a film which has been analysed over and over again at the risk of some sequences being over-interpreted. Nevertheless I have two good reasons for approaching the subject again. One is that almost all analyses of October tend to regard the film as a closed textual entity, with little or no attention being paid to whatever extra-textual connotation a particular sequence might have. Either October is totally impervious to its cultural milieu or we are not prepared to read its text in a broader cultural context. It seems that we are too used to thinking of Eisenstein as a Constructivist artist to admit that some of his constructions might be openended and susceptible to more traditional patterns of contemporary thought. In this respect Eisenstein’s contemporaries were occasionally more acute than modern film historians. In 1928, when the newspaper debates about October were at their peak, Eisenstein was routinely accused of being a ‘Symbolist in film’. Adrian Piotrovsky, Eisenstein’s fiercest critic and one of the most educated men of his time, wrote in an article entitled ‘October Must Be Re-Edited’ about what he called the ‘stylistic discord’ of the film:
When the statues, the crystal and the porcelain begin to fill the screen persistently we are reminded not just of the symbolism of the Tsar’s palace and of autocratic Petersburg that derives from Blok and Bryusov but also of the closely related line of Russian aestheticism that is associated with the World of Art group. Thus, beneath the Constructivist exterior of a materialistically conceived October, there lurk the vestiges of the decadent and outdated styles of our art.1
