Kathrin Rote, 1917 – The Real October (2017)
Special Screening of “The Spectrum of Communism” Symposium
“1917 – The Real October” is an animated retelling of the Russian Revolution. The award-winning filmmaker, Katrin Rothe conducts a multi-perspective research based on previously unknown diaries, reports, and literary works into the event known nowadays as the “October Revolution”. For the very first time the Russian Revolution is seen solely through the eyes of the artists who experienced the days of that revolutionary year of 1917.
What was going on in Saint Petersburg between the uprisings in February, which forced the Tsar to abdicate, and the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in October? The Provisional Government was a diarchy of the parliament, Duma and the workers’ council, the Soviets. World War One persisted as Russia drowned in chaos and anarchy with no civil parliamentary democracy yet to be formed. How did the situation change after the return of Lenin and Trotsky in the spring? A pointed differentiation of the two revolutions of the year 1917 emerges out of the reflections of five artist eyewitness accounts, put together with a cheerful earnestness.
In the framework of the “The Traces of the Revolution” program series that is part of the one-year program series “What's Left?”.