Strike (1925)

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There's hardly a thrill for a film buff greater than to stumble onto a truly great film. That is the feeling I had when I finished watching Sergei Eisenstein's first motion picture, Strike. Once one gets past the polemics, the film takes hold of the viewer and never lets go until the wrenching finale.

Unlike Eisenstein's other masterpiece of 1925, Battleship Potemkin, this film is not based upon a real-life situation. Rather, Eisenstein and his compatriots, the Proletkult, are creating out of whole cloth events under czarist rule. They take no prisoners whatsoever; everything is directed toward sympathy with the plight of the workers, and no opportunity to blast the police and the capitalists is spared.

The story is fairly straightforward; workers at a factory in an unnamed city in czarist Russia are discontented. However, it's not until management cruelly humiliates a worker, accusing him of stealing a micrometer and pushing him into suicide, that the pretext for a strike arises. And when the Russians strike, there's no namby-pamby picketing involved: windows are broken, foremen are dumped into muddy ditches and the goings-on are generally riotous.

As the strike wears on, the workers begin to starve, but they refuse to give in to the terms of capital. The police conspire with the factory bosses to set up a ring of informers and spies, and hire agents provocateurs to cause trouble and to give the state an excuse to crush the strikers. While the leaders of the strike vainly attempt to encourage the workers to go home and stay out of trouble, the police first turn fire hoses on the strikers and then their rifles.

Neither the plot nor the politics make this film great; it is Eisenstein's vision and technique which from the very outset is absolutely dazzling. He uses double exposure and juxtaposition to make ironic comments of all kinds; the montage technique which is so justly famous from Potemkin is used here on several occasions during the riots and the harrowing finale to brutal effect. As Eisenstein observed some years later, nothing affects the viewer like the spilling of blood. He inserts explicit footage of cattle being slaughtered amongst the many shots of the surging throng at the mercy of the police' guns. PETA members will not want to watch the end of this movie, which has a certain Faces of Death quality to it.

The film is a veritable catalog of interesting shots. We start off with reflections of workers in a puddle, and then the film runs backwards. The mug shot of one of the strike leaders from front and side suddenly comes to life in a split-screen effect. The camera also heightens the paranoid aspect of the film, where everyone may be an informer. One of the spies in a James Bond moment uses a pocket watch camera to take photos of one of the strikers taking down a police poster.

Eisenstein also dips into surrealism at one point; when the police are attempting to get one of the workers to act as an informer, a pair of midgets are dancing the tango on a dinner table behind them; when the two in the foreground leave, the midgets hungrily devour the food on the table. Eisenstein doesn't pull a single punch. When the police seize one of the strikers, suddenly we're seeing Rodney King all over again, as they punch and kick him into unconsciousness.

The new musical score by the Alloy Orchestra takes a little while to get used to, but it forms a terrific counterpoint to the film. Heavily percussive during the factory sequences, the score is alternately slapstick and full of tension. The music has a vaguely Slavic character, with overtones of klezmer music, with intermittent clarinet and sax choirs.

From www.digitallyobsessed.com

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