Revolution in our heads… October (1928), London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican

October is a remarkable film and tonight we heard its equally outstanding score for the first time in over eight decades. Rarely can music have played such an integral part in a film’s narrative force with Edmund Meisel’s reconstructed original score carrying so much interpretive sentiment for the visuals and propelling Eisenstein’s polyrhythmic editing forward with forceful themes and – spoilers! – the beat of irresistible change.

100 years on from the events themselves and 90 from the filming there’s a lot of hindsight that could be applied to both revolution and film. An IMDB user asked (genuinely) whether the audience of the twenties would have cheered the film less profoundly had they known about Stalin’s ensuing murderous  totalitarianism - Dekulakisation had only just begun when October was filmed and the first five-year plan started in its year of release. The whole idea of a revolution is now regarded by many as a bad idea given how it all turned out… but, the future only judges... it doesn't make revolutions, that is the past and, especially, the present.

Maybe I feel a little protective of the Russian revolutionary spirit after all those hours spent trying to understand the thing and then communicating conclusions that might impress some of the leading – and, as it turned out, patient - historians in the country. That study has left its mark, especially the need to contextualise without the rush to judgement... I hope! October 1917 may have been the beginning of full Bolshevik rule in Russia but it was also the final end of a regime that had routinely left the poor to starve and which had sent thousands of its people into war armed with pics and sickles to fight against the might of the Prussian military machine. Two wrongs don’t make a right nor do three or four but it happened and we need to understand why. Unfashionably, all this involves the study of detail…

In this context, October (Октябрь) provides invaluable contemporary documentation of how the new government wanted its achievements to be recognised ten years after the fact.

Tonight’s screening was of a restored version of the film featuring also a reconstruction of the Edmund Meisel’s lost original score by Bernard Thewes which was played with magnificent force by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the energetic Frank Strobe. Meisel’s music had been written for the shorter export version of the film, re-titled October: Ten Days That Shook the World, and so Thewes had to expend and flex the score in sympathy. Not an easy task given the excellence with which the original matched the narrative… but he achieved the perfect meld of action and emotion. The score featured repeated themes – foot-stomping musical dialectic - but also interpretive sounds matching bells ringing, sirens and guns: these were almost like a visual click-track and the band was always on time.

Vasili Nikandrov is Ulanov!

Scoring alongside Eisenstein’s swift cutting and "intellectual montage" is not easy and yet Meisel works so well on and around these moments; sometimes juxtaposing and at others signalling the broader point. Poor old Aleksandr Kerensky, the liberal heading up the provisional government between February and October 1917, is shown no mercy being heavy-handedly, and hilariously, compared first to a mechanical peacock and then to Napoleon. The victors not only write history they also get to set it to music.

The same approach is used for organised religion, the reactionary forces of army and government, the Cossacks, the Bourgeoisie and all the main factors eroding the gains made in February ’17 and thereby necessitating the eventual full Bolshevik revolution on 25^th October 2017. At the start of the film a statue in memory of Tsar Alexander II is torn down and half-way through is begins to re-assemble itself… funny, hammer and sickle over-the-head obvious but that’s the business of propaganda-show nyet

Kerenski under pressure...

Grigori Aleksandrov is co-writer and co-director but the style seems to fit with that used by Eisenstein in Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925). There is the same approach to casting, with the players mostly amateur and cast for looks, none more so than Vasili Nikandrov who looks like Vladimir Lenin and the direction is enough to make sure that he acts like him too. There are some ace faces playing Cossacks and the middle classes who turn on a loyal Bolshevik and beat him to death with their parasols… I also liked a scene in which the Cossacks dance balletically on a Persian rug whilst ordinary soldiers jig in a pool of mud: it’s a joyous improvisation which captures the directors’ ability to keep the rough edges even when his editing leaves him in perfect control of the visual end-product.

There’s a magnificent sequence when the authorities call for all the bridges around the centre of Moscow to be lifted so as to isolate the proletariat and prevent their access. It follows on from a riot and as the bridges lift a dead horse goes with one and another gently lifts the flowing locks of an unconscious woman… lives without consequence to an uncaring, conflicted, interim government which – the film says – still wore some of the Tsar’s clothes.

The revoilution was not filmed and so this recreation remains our "view" of the storming of the Winter Palace...

Certainly, the film is propagandist and "un-historical" but it is historic in of itself and this combined restoration of sound and vision cements its position in the cannon. Some compare it with Triumph of the Will but, firstly, whilst Eisenstein and this film are far more worthy and influential, the Soviet experiment was not pre-destined to turn into authoritarianism and mass-slaughter (seriously) whereas, the National Socialists’ had a clear agenda. Any viewing of both films shows the huge difference between the party forcing a single, rigid aesthetic and the other celebrating people power and the chance to build a fairer society for all the people.

“For Bread, For Peace, For the Brotherhood”.

At the end the packed main auditorium at the Barbican exploded with thunderous ovation for the orchestra, conductor, music and film. As so often, tonight was a mix of concert-goers and the cinephiles… no doubt there were differing interpretations of the film but I swear as I left the were the unmistakable vibrations of revolution in the air… When I wake up tomorrow the means of production make well have been seized… such as they remain.

The LSO take a bow.

My bust of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a present from Moscow in 1981, overlooks tonight's programme.

Revolutionary... Battleship Potemkin (1925)

OK, so this is one of those films you probably don’t need anyone else writing about - many hands click the return and continue on with Google - but it’s new to me at least. I’ve never consciously watched Battleship Potemkin all the way through (yes, I know…) but I’ve been aware of it as one of the great films since reading about a list of the best films in my parents’ copy of Purnell's New English Encyclopaedia – we didn’t have the internet in the seventies.  So, Sergei, no pressure then….

Battleship Potemkin impresses immediately as one of the most controlled of films with a precise rhythm that still carries force and which still catches the viewer off guard: this film makes you tense and the sequence on the Odessa Steps is, of course, still horrific – never more so than after recent events in Paris. Why are we so brutal?

The build up to the Russian Revolution in 1917 was a long one with anti-Tsarist political movements dating back well into the nineteenth century – see the Narodniks and their To the People Movement of the 1860-70s - as problems escalated across society and the economy. Karl Marx may have expected the mature industrial economies of Germany or Britain to provide the first communist states but Russia was a more desperate society with a higher proportion of people with nothing to lose…

She also lacked the great national projects of imperial expansion and commercial innovation that drove the other super powers…Rightly or wrongly she lacked this kind of success. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the disastrous war with Japan in 1904-5 which gave rise to much discontent at home and which contributed to the mutiny on the Potemkin which formed the basis of the film and which, twenty years later, was to be celebrated as an important precursor to the Revolution’s eventual victory.

Battleship Potemkin presents as one of the most  beguiling propaganda films in history with one sumptuous image following another as Sergei Eisenstein infuses his narrative with irresitable emotional and moral force. Joseph Goebbels later admiringly declared that no one with any pre-existing political leaning could watch it without wanting to become a Bolshevik (incidentally only newly formed after a split with the minority – Menshevik – element of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1903 although the sides didn’t dissolve that party until 1912…).

One of its successes may be that it doesn’t necessarily paint the naval commanders and the Cossacks as pantomime villains: they’re bad and brutal enough but believably so:only following the orders of a failing regime. But what really works is Eisenstein’s portrayal of the ordinary individuals caught up in these events`- people who had no option but to make a stance against intolerable conditions and a regime blind to the suffering of its own people.

The men of the Potemkin live in something akin to institutionalized poverty, cramped together in hanging bunks, exhausted from the war and fed maggot-ridden rations. The men are bullied and then told to swallow the meat they’re offered with the ship’s doctor declaring the meat fit for consumption. Tempers fray and the Captain calls his company to a meeting during which a line is drawn and he orders his troops to execute the ring-leaders. In a tense face-off, communicated through the rapid cuts and escalating tension that is Eisenstein’s trademark, the marines cannot fire on their comrades… the mutiny begins.

From order to chaos

The men run riot and soon gain the upper hand by throwing the officers over board. Soon the red flag flies over the ship but not long after their leader Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) is gunned down, shot from behind by one of the cruellest of the officers, Commander Golikov (Vladimir Barsky). His body hangs grotesquely from the rigging before falling limp into the murky waters: the revolt has its first martyr.

Vakulinchuk falls

Free of naval authority, the crew, now led by Chief Officer Giliarovsky (Grigori Aleksandrov), take the Potemkin to Odessa. They are welcomed  by the majority of the town who come to pay their respects to Vakulinchuk as he lies almost in state. There are strange lingering shots of the body holding a candle and the masses staring in awe at the dead man – every new system needs to celebrate the fallen.

Thousands of extras swarm towards the docks

The people grow in number and all snake their way down streets, along causeways, over bridges and down steps… There’s a joyous mood as they celebrate the start of their move to freedom but as one woman throws her head back in close up and another moves forward to obscure the camera-view with a parasol, there’s a sudden – startling –shift in mood: these people aren’t celebrating they’re running and in total fear as armed militia men stride down the top of the Odessa Steps bayonets drawn and guns pointed directly at the innocents.

The sequence is stunning, visceral and unflinchingly horrific as the rifles start to fire and no one, not women, children or babies is spared. The camera tracks alongside the steps following the soldiers’ relentless, murderous march placing the viewer in the centre of the tragedy hoping for the survival of each individual highlighted in the slaughter. The soldiers force the people down the steps and towards the welcoming blades of mounted Cossacks… there is no mercy.

In reality there was no massacre on the steps but there were plenty more elsewhere. Eisenstein’s film does not mislead, this is what happens when civil war erupts and change was increasingly inevitable once the social contract was ripped apart over the ensuing months of the revolution.

The Tsar regained control but Russian society was changed for ever after the 1905 Revolution and the lessons of solidarity in the face of state oppression were not forgotten. Here in the discipline of the country’s military were the hearts set and the minds open to the truth of the old regime. The film closes with a segment as poignant as the steps as the battleship heads to face the Russian fleet: will they be blown from the waters or will they find merciful solidarity? Whatever happens next is based on actual events…

There have been many versions of Potemkin over the years and I watched the BFI version which is as close to the original as you can get - I think? It's available direct - on sale! - or from Movie Mail.

Every home should have one... but then you probably already do.