Coleridge said that seeing the fiery Edmund Kean act was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Watching Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film October is like watching the Russian revolution the same way. It’s surreally lit up by stark images that sear your retina; gone the next second, to be replaced by others just as mysterious and disorientating. October is not a historical document, more a remembered dream. I sometimes wish we could see it without music, with just a deafening thunderbolt on each of its 3,200 cuts. A violent electrical storm of strangeness.

The film was commissioned in Stalin’s Soviet Russia for the 10th anniversary of the 1917 October revolution, as a suitably fervent propagandist celebration. Eisenstein was the obvious candidate to direct, having won an international reputation for his brilliant Battleship Potemkin. Like Orson Welles, he had first made his mark in experimental theatre (And, like Welles, he later got bogged down in a big Latin American location shoot that resulted in a lost film – for Welles: It’s All True, for Eisenstein: ¡Que viva México!).

Sergei Eisenstein. Photograph: Ronald Grant

October has fierce, declamatory intertitles with exclamation points, unforgettably intense closeups on faces, staggering crowd scenes with swarming masses, savage and ambiguous satiric digressions and epic set pieces for which Eisenstein was pretty much given licence to do what he liked in Leningrad (as it then was). He was recreating or reimagining historical events so soon afterwards, and with so many of the original participants, that the film is almost a docu-hallucination of what happened.

The action follows the historical record, in its way. The February revolution sees the pulling down of the statue of Alexander III; there is tension and frustration between the workers, peasants and soldiers. April sees the incendiary arrival of Lenin from exile, demanding an end to the Provisional government. The July Days are shown, with their riots, the Bolsheviks’ unwillingness to attack and the spectacular urban disorder. General Kornilov launches a Tsarist counter-revolutionary assault, which is foiled after a reverse-time vision of the Tsar statue being de-toppled; the Provisional government’s leader Kerensky is shown strutting pompously around, affecting his Napoleonic mannerisms; and finally there is the storming of the Winter Palace itself.

The film pioneered a number of things, quite apart from the montage – the audacious juxtaposition of images – for which Eisenstein became famous. Stalin himself interfered at an early stage, viewing an early rough assembly of material and demanding that scenes with Trotsky and even Lenin were removed. And so he became cinema’s first overbearing producer, in a nauseous parallel with his censorship, tyranny and mass murder. Eisenstein was never terrorised by Stalin in the way other artists were, and was arguably as complicit as any apparatchik, but he was certainly later compelled to abandon his experimentalism for Stalin’s favoured “socialist realism”. He was further forced to make humiliating public apologies when Stalin declared he had got it wrong and he underwent constant fear.

Eisenstein was forced to make humiliating public apologies for what Stalin said he got wrong… a still from October. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

October is of course very different from classic Hollywood film-making, as in, say, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (based on the Boris Pasternak novel), in which a conventional love story anchors the political events. Eisenstein doesn’t offer any characters for us to relate to. Lenin and Kerensky hardly count. My personal theory, moreover, is that the puffed-up, boastful figure of Kerensky is not only to be compared to Napoleon – apart from the lack of a moustache, he could be Marshal Stalin himself in his uniform and his stiff bearing.

The storming of the Winter Palace is a concept Eisenstein almost invented. It became the eternal trope for the revenge of the dispossessed: a simple, dual image. Power and wealth inside the luxurious palace; downtrodden poor outside. In reality, it was a chaotic and weirdly anticlimactic affair involving far fewer people. Eisenstein reimagined it for posterity as a sweeping battle scene, like the storming of the Bastille. He also added irresistible images, such as the Bolshevik jeering incredulously at the padded lavatory seat in the Empress’s bedroom.

Perhaps more astonishing is an earlier sequence, in which the government orders the raising of a drawbridge to prevent the Bolshevik masses from entering the city; in the melee, a dead white horse, attached to a carriage, is caught at the point where the bridge separates. It dangles high above the river: poignant, awe-inspiring and in some mysterious way sacrificial. It has a stranger-than-fiction reality. What a horribly undignified end for this noble beast. What on earth can it symbolise? In its pure unreadability it has a poetic power in excess of Eisenstein’s much-discussed montage pairing of the conceited Kerensky with shots of an imaginary mechanical peacock.

Above all else, October is about violence. The whole movie is shot through with an atmosphere of delirium. For all that it is a loyal and ideological tribute to the revolution, it also looks like a bacchanal of violent insurrection, or a panoramic portrait shattered into thousands of shard-like images. This is partly due to the unfinished first world war: Russia was in conflict within and without, and its own civil war – that great unmentioned subject that comes between the events of this film and the circumstances of its release – hovers over it. October is an intuition of what Pushkin called the merciless senselessness of the Pugachevshchina, the 18th-century peasant revolt from which the ruling classes learned secretly to fear and hate the lower orders. Lenin himself said the “proletarian state” is a “system of organised violence”. Eisenstein’s film could be said in its own way to have systematised it.

Yet there is always something more unquantifiable going on. When the all-female 1st Petrograd Women’s Battalion of Death is summoned to defend the Winter Palace, Eisenstein creates a very curious byway in which a soldier is shown in a sort of reverie triggered by a Rodin statue. That is partly to mock women’s alleged incapacity for martial service, but it is also just to knock things for a visual loop. The same is true, I think, for the grand ladies with their parasols attacking the worker during the July Days. Of course that is to satirise the bourgeoisie, yet Eisenstein appears in that instant on the women’s side, obscurely excited by the exotic flare-up of aggression.

October is a film which attaches itself to Russian history’s dark combustion, almost as if political reality was metaphorically subordinate to Eisenstein’s own radical formal upheaval as an artist. The events gave him the perfect pretext for explosive unruliness on a grand scale. His guiding spirit was not Lenin, but Bakunin. The film is pure anarchy.