October (Ten Days that Shook the World)

Eisenstein's ambitious, controversial, and visually overwhelming recreation of the October Revolution of 1917 — commissioned for the event's tenth anniversary and filmed partly in the actual Winter Palace. The film forgoes conventional storytelling in favor of what Eisenstein called "intellectual montage": rapid-fire juxtapositions of images designed to produce ideas rather than emotions. A sequence comparing Kerensky's ascent of a staircase with a mechanical peacock preening is cinema-as-essay decades before the form existed. The film was heavily re-edited under political pressure to erase Trotsky from history, and its radical formal experiments baffled contemporary audiences, but its influence on political cinema, music videos, and visual rhetoric is incalculable. A difficult, dazzling, endlessly debated landmark.