SOURCE: "October" and "Alexander Nevsky" in his Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Croom Helm, 1979, pp. 92-102, 116-30.

In the following excerpt, Taylor analyzes the content and structure of Eisenstein's October and examines Alexander Nevsky as a study in film technique and Soviet propaganda.

After Battleship Potemkin, October is bad.

Soviet critics, 1928

October is without doubt a film of great revolutionary and artistic importance. It is good in its revolutionary content, good in its execution.

Krupskaya, 1928

These two comments are typical of the reception that greeted Eisenstein's third film and typical of the arguments that surrounded the film maker's career as a whole. Eisenstein was commissioned to make a film of the revolutionary events of 1917 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution: similarly Pudovkin was commissioned to make The End of St Petersburg and Shub made The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and The Great Way...