About

"The film doesn't take a direct line; it's simpler than that, its didacticism is ironic, the problem is no longer one of opposition, but the fiendishly complicated dynamic of the post-industrial state. Both systems are coping with the problems, problems of inheritance."
Derek Jarman, Kicking The Pricks (1996)

Imagining October explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein's propaganda filmOctober: Ten Days That Shook the World 1928. The project began during a trip to the Soviet Union sponsored by the British Film Institute in October 1984. Jarman was invited to present The Tempest in Moscow and Baku with fellow filmmaker Sally Potter and film theorist Peter Wollen and asked in return to make a short film for the London Film Festival in November.

Jarman's film cuts between Super-8 footage shot in Moscow of Stalinist architecture and people on the streets, with scenes shot in London of John Watkiss painting five young men dressed as British soldiers carrying a red flag in the manner paralleling Soviet Realism. In Eisenstein's former residence, Jarman shows Woollen turning the pages of Eisenstein's personal copy of John Reed's book "Ten Days That Shook the World" (1919) that would inspire Eisenstein's film on the October Revolution. Jarman draws attention to the way the name of Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky has been redacted from the book – a signifier of state censorship and collective amnesia he relates to contemporary Britain. The footage is disrupted by constructivist-inspired intertitles that critique the politics and culture of Thatcher's Britain (e.g. CRIMES AGAINST GENIUS AND HUMANITY / HISTORY RANSACKED / PROMOTING POVERTY OF INTELLECT AND EMOTION)

Imagining October is accompanied by a score written by Genesis P-Orridge and David Ball and includes a musical piece by Benjamin Britten based on William Blake's poem 'The Sick Rose' (1794).

Ages 18+