Sergei Eisenstein was given a free hand and a mammoth budget to re-create the October Revolution for its tenth anniversary (1927), but the results displeased the authorities—for reasons both political (Trotsky, suddenly banished from the Soviet Union, had to be hurriedly eliminated from the final cut) and aesthetic (Eisenstein’s extreme formalism, here at its most abstract and theoretical). Much of the montage plays better in analytical retrospect than it does on the screen, but much of the film is genuinely stirring—when he wasn’t theorizing, the man really could cut film.