Made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, October has taken on newsreel status: its famously excerptable scenes of the storming of the Winter Palace are said to be more spectacular and better attended than the actual event. But to see the film now is to re-experience the shock with which its experimentation was met on its initial release. (That release was held up while Eisenstein was forced to excise footage of Trotsky, who was himself being excised from Party life.) Eisenstein’s theories of intellectual montage turned the objects and figures of recent history into metaphorical elements.