Word: eisenstein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Brattle has some preferences, however, which seem strange to its audience--notably an affection for German pictures, for old Cary Grant films, for the early Eisenstein movies, and for period pieces like "Earrings of Madame De" which appeal to a rather specalized taste for the baroque and the leisurely in movie-making...
...Eisenstein's plans for the movie were as grand as the scale on which he worked. Intellectually, then, it is a tough movie. The events of the ten days in which Kerensky's Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks are subordinated to Eisenstein's own response to them: the pattern that he makes of the events and the opportunities he sees in them for experiments in film technique. Since the pattern is diffuse and the opportunities unlimited, it is not an easy movie and it does not always "entertain." The movie is no easier to follow for the cuts...
...character is at the center of the movie; and there is no music to help hold it together. Instead, the film's unity comes from the pattern that Eisenstein has imposed on it. The pattern is like a dialogue between the liberal Provisional Government and the revolutionary Bolsheviks. At first the pace is slow. Eisenstein shows Kerensky trotting up an endless flight of palace stairs while the titles ("Minister of Navy...and of Army...and Generalissimo...Dictator...")parody his rapid rise to power. With Kerensky in power, the camera darts back and forth from his face to that...
...Eisenstein's dialogue-pattern is held together mainly by his use of combinations of images. At one point, for instance, when Kerensky is calling for aid, his face interchanges on the screen with a picture of the buttocks of horses waiting in a stable nearby. Although they dramatize Eisenstein's plan, these montages sometimes make the movie hard to follow. At some moments the camera changes are too rapid to follow, and at other times Eisenstein's passionate interest in expressive faces and images--like the hair of a girl which lies across the split of a slowly separating drawbridge...
Although he does sometimes yield to the temptation to labor a fine shot, Eisenstein more often uses the quickening of the juxtaposition of scenes and of the Bolsheviks' stamping feet to give a sense of the mounting movement. Along with his highly imaginative use of experimental techniques is a lack, at times, of the continuity expected today of any movie. What Eisenstein has to say is more often implied through his images than stated on the screen. These things make Ten Days That Shook the World both a difficult and a great film...