October is the final installment in Sergei Eisenstein’s historical-revolutionary film epic, which began with the films Strike (Stachka, 1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925). The trilogy uses a new film language to portray the events of the revolution as a painful and unavoidable “tectonic shift” in history, and it does so without the support of traditional plotting, psychological insights, or individual characters. Today Eisenstein’s films can be understood as an ingenious and politically oriented mythologization of historical events, and also as a work of artistic discovery, a parable about the nature of power and social violence.