Iconoclasm and Festival

Abstract

Sergey Eisenstein’s film October (1928) opens with a shot from the street below of a gigantic statue of Tsar Alexander III silhouetted in imperturbable majesty against the sky. Suddenly, however, ladders are propped against the statue, people scramble up them, and, like Lilliputians swarming over a dead cast-iron Gulliver, begin wrapping ropes around the figure of the tsar. The lines are drawn taut, and finally this ponderous idol of the autocracy comes crashing to the ground. The February Revolution of 1917 has arrived.¹