The End of St. Petersburg

Vsevolod Pudovkin's sweeping companion piece to Eisenstein's October — both were commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution — follows a nameless peasant boy who travels to St. Petersburg seeking work and is gradually radicalized by the brutal exploitation he encounters. Where Eisenstein's approach was intellectual and abstract, Pudovkin's is intimate and emotional, grounding the enormous historical upheaval in one individual's transformation. The film's climactic sequences intercut the storming of the Winter Palace with the frenzy of the stock exchange, drawing a devastating parallel between political revolution and financial speculation. A deeply humanist epic that proves you can tell the story of a nation through a single pair of eyes.