Lenin in October

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Movie
German title Lenin in October
Original title Lenin w Oktjabre / Ленин в Октябре
Country of production Soviet Union
original language Russian
Publishing year 1937
length 108 minutes
Rod
Director Mikhail Romm
script Alexei Kapler
production Mosfilm
music Anatoly Alexandrov
camera Boris Volchek
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Lenin 1918

Film "Lenin in October", 1937

Lenin in October ( Russian : Lenin w Oktjabre / Cyrillic Ленин в Октябре) is a Soviet propaganda film by Mikhail Romm , which was produced in 1937 on the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution and was intended to replace Eisenstein's silent film October as a carrier of the culture of remembrance of the revolution. The production was already in the context of the chistka . Therefore, Leon Trotsky as a central actor in the uprising in the sense of the damnatio memoriae is not represented as a character in the film. Lenin in October marked the beginning of a series of Lenin films that were eventually superseded by the Stalin films. For decades he shaped the image of the October Revolution and Lenin in the Soviet Union . In 1956 and 1963, as part of the de-Stalinization, the film was re-cut or reworked in such a way that the character of Stalin was omitted. In 1941 the work received the Stalin Prize, 1st class, together with its successor production Lenin . The Soviet premiere took place on November 7, 1937, the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution, the German on November 2, 1945.

action

Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution . In order to prepare for the revolution, Lenin was forced to take the train to Petrograd incognito . He is "smuggled" on the train by the railroad worker Vasily, also a Bolshevik . At the last moment, Lenin managed to escape the hijackers of the Provisional Government by disconnecting the locomotive from Vasily in the station and dropping his guest on a remote part of the station. Lenin is quartered in Wassili's apartment, where the railroad worker and his wife Natascha take care of him.

But Lenin's enemies are not only Kerensky's security organs, but also the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries . Lenin is thus forced to continue to be active in conspiratorial activity. The other side even set up an assassin on him, but thanks to the attention of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, these activities are now in vain. One day when Stalin visits Lenin and finds him sleeping, he carefully covers him with a blanket, worried that the leader of the revolution might catch a cold. Lenin escapes an arrest squad because the driver of the squad is sabotaging the arrest and is ready to be martyred in order to protect Lenin.

Lenin (Boris Schukin) in the film

After much resistance, Lenin, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky were able to prepare the revolution with general staff at the Smolny Institute . An elite military unit with armored vehicles joins the Bolsheviks. The revolution is finally triggered by the cruiser Aurora , which bombarded government positions. The Winter Palace is stormed with heavy casualties. After the victory of the revolution, Lenin gave a fiery speech at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets . Stalin stands behind him.

Production notes

The idea for the film came from Stalin. Apparently the production was shot almost entirely in the studio. What is striking is the still extensive use of subtitles , as they were used in the silent film era.

According to Engel, the film premiered on November 7, 1937, but at Stalin's request, scenes relating to the fighting over the Winter Palace were re-shot. In this production, in contrast to later films, Lenin still has a popular character, is a "Lenin of the annual markets " (Engel, p. 72). The Russian film scholar Naum Kleiman even discovered elements of a detective story ( Stalin - Eine Mosfilmproduktion ) in the production . The newsreel recordings with Lenin, known to the Soviet public, served as a model for the production of Lenin.

From 1979 onwards, hundreds of old films, including Lenin in October , were restored in the USSR and large numbers of new copies made, which in turn were also broadcast on television. (Engel, p. 189).

The elimination of Stalin in the film took place in a first step from 1956 through a simple new montage, in which all shots and scenes with Stalin were omitted, as far as this was dramaturgically justifiable. In a second step in 1963, the shots and scenes in which Stalin could still be seen were re-shot using rear projection , in which an actor such as B. a revolutionary sailor stood up in front of the rear projection and covered Stalin.

criticism

The US premiere took place in two New York cinemas on April 1, 1938 . The film was on April 2, in the New York Times by Frank S. Nugent , later known by screenplays for John Ford's works She Wore and The Searchers , extremely positive:

... And "Lenin in October," to get around to it finally, was worth waiting for. Not in any colossal sense. Not as the flaming flower of all revolutionary films, nor as the clinching argument of the Soviet. Nor is it, to praise it again for the things it is not, the sanctified, worshipful, self-conscious portrait we had feared it would be. And that is its most incredible quality when we consider Lenin's place in the average Russian's mind. They still preserve his body in a glass coffin in a Red Square tomb, you know, and they are still filing past it in unending tribute to a man they regard as having been a composite of all virtues, including the divine. Yet Hollywood would not treat one of our vice presidents or one of its own producers with the humor, the informality and the comradely affection which shine through this Soviet biography and make it one of the most human as well as significant films to come from the USSR If at its end Lenin remains an ikon, he is an amiable one, as friendly as a Billiken, and he has our liking as well as our respect. We gain the notion, from looking at him in the busy days of October, that he might have been a really pleasant chap to know in the Spring ...

... We believe it is all authentic, factual and true — except that we do not believe Stalin bulked as importantly in 1917 as he does in this 1937 film of 1917. And Trotsky, of course, doesn't appear at all and is only mentioned once — to be called a traitor. (Further they give a Trotskyite make-up to a government spy, so there Leon!) These exceptions noted, "Lenin in October" is good history, good biography and, above all, good cinema ...

Lore

The Soviet versions are apparently completely preserved and posted on youtube.com . It is not known whether the German version from 1945 still exists; also whether it was edited later like the Soviet version.

See also

literature

Documentation

Web links