To watch October (Ten Days that Shook the World) today is like defusing a semiotic bomb almost a century after its detonation. This is not a film, but a piece of ordnance. Not a narrative, but a doctoral thesis on cinematic grammar written with dynamite. Sergei Eisenstein, commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, does not merely reconstruct events; he refounds them, dismantling and reassembling them into a clockwork mechanism designed to strike not the viewer's heart, but their very synapses. In his hands, cinema ceases to be a window onto the world and becomes a hammer to forge it, a scalpel to dissect its ideology.

The operation Eisenstein conducts is one of almost terrifying theoretical lucidity. Abandoning the more accessible epic structure of Battleship Potemkin, here he plunges without compromise into the icy waters of "intellectual montage." His thesis is that the juxtaposition of two shots, A and B, does not simply produce a sequence, but generates a third concept, C, in the viewer's mind. It is dialectical materialism applied to celluloid: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And the examples are legendary. Prime Minister Kerensky, hesitant and vainglorious, is cross-cut with a mechanical peacock fanning its tail. The abstract idea—the vacuous presumption of power—materializes without a single line of dialogue. In another lightning-fast sequence, a parade of religious idols from every culture, from a Baroque Christ to a tribal statue, is accelerated until it culminates in the image of a Tsarist uniform. The message is a visual syllogism: God is Power, Power is oppression. It is an iconoclastic assault reminiscent of the fury of the Futurist avant-gardes, an attempt to make a clean slate of the symbolic past in order to build a new language.

To understand the radicalism of October (Ten Days that Shook the World), one must place it in its primordial soup: the modernism of the 1920s. While in Dublin Joyce was shattering the syntax of the novel with Ulysses, and in Paris Picasso was deconstructing perspective with Cubism, in Moscow Eisenstein was doing the same to cinematic time and space. October (Ten Days that Shook the World) has no protagonist in the classical sense. Or rather, its protagonist is a collective entity: the Masses. The individual disappears, devoured by the tide of History. Eisenstein does not seek psychological identification; on the contrary, he shuns it. He employs the theory of "typage," choosing faces not for their acting ability, but for their capacity to embody an entire social class. The bourgeois has the flaccid, complacent face of the bourgeois; the worker has the hard, angular features of the worker. They are masks, archetypes in motion, pawns on a chessboard whose logic is not that of personal drama, but of the epochal clash between historical forces.

It is in this rejection of the single hero that the film achieves its greatest aesthetic rupture, anticipating forms of choral narrative that Western cinema would only explore decades later, and never with such ideological rigor. There is no Luke Skywalker to lead the Rebellion; there is the Rebellion itself, a teeming, polymorphous organism that topples the statues of the tsars like an awakened Golem. The sequence of the raising of the drawbridge, which separates the workers' districts from the city center, is emblematic: the corpse of a woman and a white horse are left dangling in the void, a harrowing image that transforms a mechanical action into a powerful metaphor for class division and the violence of power. This is a cinema that does not tell, but argues. Every cut is a statement, every composition a hypothesis.

The most dizzying, and meta-textually fascinating, anecdote concerns the celebrated sequence of the storming of the Winter Palace. Eisenstein's depiction, with thousands of extras pouring into the square and swarming through the gates, is so powerful, so cinematically "real," that it has supplanted the historical event itself. The actual seizure of the palace was a much less chaotic and spectacular affair. And yet, the image we have today of that night is the one Eisenstein created. Cinema did not just document the revolution; it wrote its mythology, forged its iconography. It is a frightening and sublime ontological short-circuit: fiction becoming truer than the truth, a simulacrum replacing reality. It is an exercise in creating consensus and historical memory that makes Hollywood's most blatant attempts pale in comparison, raising profound questions about the very nature of historical representation.

Of course, October (Ten Days that Shook the World) is a fiercely partisan film, a feverish fresco, not a historiographical essay. It is propaganda, in the noblest and yet most problematic sense of the term. Its very production was a political battlefield: commissioned when Trotsky was still a central figure of the revolution, the film had to be hastily re-edited after his fall from grace, purging him from every frame. These scars, these absences, are visible in the film's fabric, making it an archaeological artifact not only of an event, but also of the purges and power struggles that followed.

Yet, to judge it solely on these grounds would be like criticizing the Sistine Chapel for its adherence to Catholic doctrine. Its greatness lies elsewhere: in its linguistic audacity, in its unwavering faith in the power of cinema to shape thought. Sequences like the machine guns that "speak" juxtaposed with a balalaika are pure visual poetry, a language that Stanley Kubrick would rediscover almost forty years later in the astral montage of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Kubrick cuts from the bone thrown in the air by the ape-man to the orbiting spaceship, he is using the exact same logic of intellectual montage as Eisenstein: creating an idea (technological progress as a weapon) through the collision of two images distant in time and space.

October (Ten Days that Shook the World) is not an easy film. It is dense, at times intractable, and demands total attention. It does not offer the comfort of a linear plot or characters to grow fond of. It asks the viewer to become a collaborator, to actively complete the circuit of meaning that the director has triggered. It is a living fossil of a utopia, one in which cinema and revolution could march in step, in which a new art form could help create a new kind of human being. That utopia may have failed, but its cinematic echo still resonates with a formal power that is breathtaking. It is a manifesto shouted through a visual megaphone, a treatise on semiotics written with light and shadow. You don't "watch" October (Ten Days that Shook the World). You submit to its intellectual assault, and you emerge changed, with the awareness that cinema, sometimes, can truly be the most beautiful and the most dangerous of weapons.