Production
October was one of two films commissioned by the Soviet government to honour the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (the other was Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg). Eisenstein was chosen to head the project due to the international success he had achieved with The Battleship Potemkin in 1925 . Nikolai Podvoisky, one of the troika who led the storming of the Winter Palace was responsible for the commission. The scene of the storming was based more on the 1920 re-enactment involving Vladimir Lenin and thousands of Red Guards, witnessed by 100,000 spectators, than the original occasion, which was far less photogenic. This scene is notable because it became the legitimate, historical depiction of the storming of the Winter Palace owing to the lack of print or film documenting the actual event, which led historians and filmmakers to use Eisenstein's recreation. This illustrates October's success as a propaganda film.
Read more about this topic: October: Ten Days That Shook The World
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Perestroika basically is creating material incentives for the individual. Some of the comrades deny that, but I can’t see it any other way. In that sense human nature kinda goes backwards. It’s a step backwards. You have to realize the people weren’t quite ready for a socialist production system.”
—Gus Hall (b. 1910)