Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/914212
31 Q4 2017 / CINEMONTAGE The Fall of St. Petersburg, the other movie produced for the occasion, in its entirety. Earlier that day, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (hence, dictator of the Soviet Union) Josef Stalin, had previewed the entire October in Eisenstein's cutting room. After watching it, he ordered over 3,500 of its 13,000 feet cut, more than a quarter of its length. Grigori Alexandrov, assistant director on Eisenstein's first two films, Strike and The Battleship Potemkin (both 1925), and credited as co-writer/co-director on October, told The New York Times in 1963, "When Eisenstein and I asked why the cuts had to be made, Stalin said evasively, 'You don't know what is going on. This is not the right time for Lenin's liberalism.'" Over the next four months, while Eisenstein, Alexandrov and editor Esther Tobak cut October from 142 to 103 minutes for its March 14, 1928 Soviet release, the power struggle within the party that motivated the General Secretary's cuts would become obvious, as will be related below. And Stalin's oppression would belie the idealistic Eisenstein's purpose in his work, as stated in the director's article for the Soviet film journal Kino, written while re-editing: "Posterity must have a photographic reproduction of the great Revolution, a living textbook for the inspiration of other inspirations." In October, more than in any other of his films, Eisenstein powerfully demonstrated scene-by-scene and sequence-by-sequence an extraordinary range of possibilities for evoking meaning through editing images. In retrospect, as applied to the movie's themes of political power, his "montage of attractions" — as the director called his approach to editing in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, published in 1949 — consistently underscores the suggestion that a change of government or ideology may only be a substitution of one authoritarian hierarchy for another. In October 1926, in preparation for the anniversary, the Central Committee commissioned the two leading Soviet film trusts to produce movies to commemorate the historic event. Eisenstein's trust, Sovkino, asked writer/ director/editor Esther Shub to create a documentary film using the official government film and photographic archives to depict the revolution. The second major trust, Mezhrabpom, assigned director Pudovkin — acclaimed for his first feature Mother (1926), an adaptation of Maxim Gorki's novel about the failed 1905 Revolution — to produce a dramatic feature. Working from a script by Nathan Zarkhi entitled Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad (the successive names of the title city over the time of the film's action), Pudovkin would create The Fall of St. Petersburg, already scheduled to premiere at the Bolshoi on the anniversary night itself, November 7. When Sovkino learned that Mezhrabpom's Pudovkin was making a film for the anniversary, the trust immediately told its star director Eisenstein to cease his prep for The General Line (about agricultural cooperatives) to create his own movie about the October Revolution. While Pudovkin's film followed one young man from 1914 on to tell the story of the revolution, Eisenstein chose to reconstruct the revolution in Petrograd by telling the story of a mass of individuals with no central character — as he had done in both Strike and Potemkin. Friendly rivals, the two most prominent Soviet directors argued about the essential function of film THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY October. Amkino Corporation/ Photofest CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28