On this day, the October Revolution broke out, creating the impression that utopia was no longer something belonging to the future, but rather something that had already been realized through Russia’s leap into the heavens.
The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick observed that the October Revolution had two lives. In its first life, it became part of the present and shaped it through its proclamations, defining the political landscape of its time. In its second and much longer life, the revolution gradually receded from the foreground, becoming a myth that had little bearing on reality: a myth that had already fallen into decline long before the collapse of the USSR.
The most iconic cinematic representation undoubtedly belongs to the great Sergei Eisenstein and his October. The director stood alongside the Russian Revolution and approached Russian history, as he had done in Battleship Potemkin, as a sequence of events that paved the way for its arrival, anticipating its emancipatory spirit. His philosophy becomes particularly evident in October, which divides the country's history between a past in which the symbols of the old world, such as the statue of the Tsar, are torn down, and a utopian vision of the future, with the revolutionary masses as its protagonists.
The revolution is depicted as a popular tide that becomes the protagonist of History itself, advancing to seize the Winter Palace. In reality, the storming of the palace was neither a particularly massive nor a spectacular undertaking. Only a handful of shots were fired, in a scene that bore little resemblance to its cinematic portrayal. Yet the film captures Eisenstein's philosophy. Throughout his work, he consistently sought to present the masses as the protagonists of history, adopting a perspective fundamentally different from the Nazi conception of mass movements. The masses are not playthings in the hands of corrupt leaders; they become a historical subject claiming the future for themselves.
Through its extraordinary use of montage, October functions as a work that seeks to transform the consciousness of its viewers. By dissolving the distance between filmmaker and spectator, it aims to implant class consciousness, conveyed through the images on screen, directly into their minds, almost like a "surgical operation."
Enzo Traverso points to the contrast between the images of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eisenstein's film. While the latter inaugurated a century devoted to the communist future, the ruins of Berlin signalled the end of that very promise.
In Ulysses' Gaze, the statue of Lenin floats along the waters of the Danube, withdrawn from the history that had begun with the toppling of another statue, that of the Tsar, as depicted by Eisenstein. It returns to Germany, the homeland of Marx, perhaps in the hope of being reborn...