Montage October: Dialectic of the Shot

In “Montage October,” which appeared in Artforum in January 1973, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film was not only a celebration of a Marxist victory but also a demonstration of Marxist dialectical reasoning through montage. Krauss contends that rather than passively reconstructing the chain of circumstances that culminated in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, Eisenstein hoped to draw a filmic equivalence between the leap of revolutionary consciousness, which opens up access to the future by transcending the real, and the leap of visual consciousness, which goes beyond the normal bounds of filmic space.