STRIKE (1925)

A.K.A.: Stachka

Country: U.S.S.R.

Genre(s): Drama / Propaganda

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Cast: Mikhail Gomorov / Ivan Klyukvin / Grigori Aleksandrov

Plot

In part of the failed 1905 Bolshevik revolution, Russian factory workers react to the abuses of their employers with a work stoppage.  When the industrialists and politicians retaliate, chaos and bloodshed ensue.

What I Liked

I first saw director Sergei Eisenstein’s most revered film, “Battleship Potemkin,” back in college.  Before that time, I had never heard of the man but I have since become more familiar with his importance to film history.  Thus I was intrigued to watch his first important movie, “Strike,” a Soviet-financed depiction of class conflict in turn-of-the-century Russia.  Watching it, I found all the hallmarks of the Eisenstein trademark style.  Stylistically, he is perhaps best known for his editing techniques, using fast cuts to emphasize the drama or excitement of key moments.  These techniques also often featured the splicing in of shocking images that may not be directly related to the story line but convey the emotion of the scene, an unsubtle kind of montage.  No other director of his age did this so effectively.  Eisenstein was also never one to shy away from using what I’ll call cheap gimmicks, for lack of a better word, at the climaxes of his movies.  In “Strike,” as in “Potemkin,” he does this by putting very young children in deadly peril… more than once.

Eisenstein undoubtedly preferred an in-your-face approach, but no one can doubt its effectiveness.  Even today, “Strike” moves with a noticeably quick rhythm.  His movies have a unique pace all their own, the same kind of speed that makes Buster Keaton’s comedies still work as well, yet Eisenstein’s films are no comedies.  Once the montages get going in particular, the senses are bombarded so quickly that the eye barely takes it all in and the mind struggles to keep up.  Scenes like those must have been where Hitchcock got the inspiration for the way he filmed the shower scene in “Psycho.”

What I Didn’t Like

Where Eisenstein’s stylistic strengths lie in his lack of subtlety, this proves a weakness in his storytelling, but no more so than with any film of its kind and age.  As one might expect from a silent-era propaganda film, this movie is not very complex in its analysis of social ills and, as one would expect from a silent-era Soviet propaganda film in particular, ham-fisted in its martyrdom of the workers and vilification of pretty much everyone else.  If we’re to believe Eisenstein’s portrayal of the classes, every wealthy person lounges around all day in a three-piece suit, smoking cigars with his fat cut buddies, joking about the miseries of the poor.  And every crime ever blamed on a member of the working class was either a heroic act of protest or a complete frame-up.  As is the case with a great deal of revolutionary work, there’s no moral middle ground in Eisenstein, only the villainous oppressors, their sniveling cronies, and their honest victims.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert!*

The final defeat of the strike occurs after the authorities call in a military attack on the strikers.  Here Eisenstein’s frenetic style works its magic perfectly to capture the ensuing chaos.  Beginning with the panicked retreat of the strikers, continuing through some marvelously stylized scenes featuring water hoses, proceeding through a horrifying depiction of wholesale slaughter, and finally ending with a morbid depiction of mowed-down corpses, we’re treated for the last quarter of so of the film to what really set Eisenstein apart from his contemporaries.  Griffith and DeMille might have had more scale, Chaplin more poetry, and Dreyer more subtlety, but Eisenstein’s movies are simply more visceral than anything else being made at the time.

My Rating: 4 out of 5