ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Russian Revolution of 1917, and, in particular, how film, which Vladimir Lenin, who moved the Revolution to its success, called its most important art. The philosophical and ideological force behind the Russian Revolution was the works of Karl Marx, who wrote at length about capitalism and its inevitable collapse not only under its own weight, but because of the pressure brought on it by an oppressed working class. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin film is based on a mutiny aboard a Tsarist ship in 1905, as the Revolution was catching fire. The story of the mutiny aboard the ship Potemkin is completely absorbed and refigured within a new entity called Battleship Potemkin in which the mutiny is successful. It is absorbed so thoroughly that history drops out and is largely forgotten, while Eisenstein’s film has become not only a monument in film history, but a lesson in political form.
