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Enthused by the Bolshevik seizure of power, Eisenstein joined the Red Army as an engineer on the northern front, near Petrograd. He was involved in the civil war against the White Army of General Yudenich which reached the city's gates in the autumn of 1919. Eisen-stein's own father was serving with the Whites as an engineer. Looking back on these events through his films, Eisenstein saw the Revolution as a struggle of the young against the old. His films are imbued with the spirit of a young proletariat rising up against the patriarchal discipline of the capitalist order. The bourgeois characters in all his films, from the factory bosses in his first film Strike (1924) to the well-groomed figure of the Premier Kerensky in October, bear a close resemblance to his own father. 'Papa had 40 pairs of patent leather shoes', Eisenstein recalled. 'He did not acknowledge any other sort. And he had a huge collection of them "for every occasion". He even listed them in a register, with any distinguishing feature indicated: "new", "old", "a scratch". From time to time he held an inspection and roll-call.'⁵⁶ Eisenstein once wrote that the reason he came to support the Revolution 'had little to do with the real miseries of

social injustice… but directly and completely with what is surely the prototype of every social tyranny - the father's despotism in a family'.⁵⁷ But his commitment to the Revolution was equally connected with his own artistic vision of a new society. In a chapter of his memoirs, 'Why I Became a Director', he locates the source of his artistic inspiration in the collective movement of the Red Army engineers building a bridge near Petrograd:

An ant hill of raw fresh-faced recruits moved along measured-out paths with precision and discipline and worked in harmony to build a steadily growing bridge which reached across the river. Somewhere in this ant hill I moved as well. Square pads of leather on my shoulders supporting a plank, resting edgeways. Like the parts of a clockwork contraption, the figures moved quickly, driving up to the pontoons and throwing girders and handrails festooned with cabling to one another - it was an easy and harmonious model of perpetuum mobile, reaching out from the bank in an ever-lengthening road to the constantly receding edge of the bridge… All this fused into a marvellous, orchestral, polyphonic experience of something being done… Hell, it was good!… No: it was not patterns from classical productions, nor recordings of outstanding performances, nor complex orchestral scores, nor elaborate evolutions of the corps de ballet in which I first experienced that rapture, the delight in the movement of bodies racing at different speeds and in different directions across the graph of an open expanse: it was in the play of intersecting orbits, the ever-changing dynamic form that the combination of these paths took and their collisions in momentary patterns of intricacy, before flying apart for ever. The pontoon bridge… opened my eyes for the first time to the delight of this fascination that was never to leave me.⁵⁸

Eisenstein would try to re-create this sense of poetry in the crowd scenes which dominate his films, from Strike to October.

In 1920, on his return to Moscow, Eisenstein joined Proletkult as a theatre director and became involved in the Kuleshov workshop. Both led him to the idea of typage - the use of untrained actors or 'real types' taken (sometimes literally) from the street. The technique was used by Kuleshov in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1923) and, most famously, by Eisenstein himself in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October. Proletkult

would exert a lasting influence on Eisenstein, particularly on his treatment of the masses in his history films. But the biggest influence on Eisenstein was the director Meyerhold, whose theatre school he joined in 1921.