Customer Reviews

Strike

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Eisenstein captures extraordinarily the struggle between labor and capital, displaying brilliant cinematic innovation in the process. The factory workers are not individualized, with certain leaders representing the whole, but shown as a collective whole; both powerful and creative. The factory owner is not one particular boss, but a collage of multiple personalities, to express the impersonal nature of capital and the profit system. The film shows the organizing drive from early meetings of workers, to job actions, to the boss planting spies (innovatively shown both as humans and as devious animals), to the resulting strike and its conclusion. A raw, riveting film that set the stage for Eisenstein's later films, especially "Battleship Potemkin" and "October." A must see for those interested in the labor movement, cinematic and artistic brilliance, or the combination of the two.

If the quick and easy label is to call Sergei Eisenstein the Orson Welles of Soviet cinema, chronology notwithstanding, then "Strike" ("Stachka") is the great director's "Citizen Kane." This comparison would be dictated not by the greatness of this 1924 silent film, but rather by the fact "Strike" was Eisenstein's debut film. What the young Eisenstein clearly has in common with the young Welles is the reckless creativity of a kid with a brand new toy. The story is about the strike of factory workers in Czarist Russia in 1912, which ends with the rebellious comrades being brutally beaten down.

Eisenstein might be consumed with exploring the boundaries of cinematic technique, but he does evince some basic storytelling skills here. The climatic tragedy is set up initial comic element, which gain our sympathy for the workers on a human rather than an ideological level. Certainly a management that brings in spies and agents to infiltrate the oppressed workers cannot be supported. The strike begins after a factory worker, falsely accused of being a thief, hangs himself. The initial excitement over the prospects of success faded as the strike goes on and on. When the provocateurs hired by management finally bring things to a head, the tired and hungry workers are no match for the military troops that come to crush them. "Strike" features Grigori Aleksandrov as the Factory Foreman, Aleksandr Antonov as a Member of Strike Committee, Yudif Glizer as the Queen of Thieves, and I. Ivanov as the Chief of Police.

The more you know about Eisenstein's later works, the more you will recognize the raw cinematic techniques he displays in his first film as being refined in his later masterpieces. I know the obvious comparison is to look at "Battleship Potemkin" after screening "Strike," but I think the most profitable analog is with Alexander Dovzhenko's 1929 "Arsenal," which deals with a similar subject, namely a 1918 strike by Bolshevik works in Kiev. "Strike" runs 75 minutes and this Kino on Video edition has been digitally mastered from a mint 35mm print taken from the original negative. The presentation of this silent film is enhanced by a new score by the Alloy Orchestra.

The most noticeable thing about this film is the extremely fast editing. This is fast compared with modern films, but by its contemporaries, it's lightning fast. Eisenstein advocated what he called 'montage', meaning more the juxtaposition of two different or similar images by intercutting or fading between the two to allow the viewer to draw comparisons between the two images. This is sometimes subtle, and at other times blunt (such as the scene with the crowd being slaughtered being intercut with cattle being slaughtered). Nevertheless it allows Eisenstein to make a point that we are treating humans as cattle and also avoids visceral depiction of the killing of the humans, whilst giving us a shocking image that tells us what we need to know. The film is somewhat difficult to follow, even with subtitles, and I felt there were no real points of identification. The humour in the depiction of the Bourgeoisie lightened the tone in places, but the film still seems more like a political manifesto for the Bolsheviks than representation of reality. Years ahead of its time technically, but dated in content.

I've been watching and enjoying Eisenstein for ages, but watched "Strike" only recently (at the recommendation of my SEIU union president, no less). Strike is a truly revolutionary film -- as art and entertainment, as well as politics. While Eisenstein could always succeed at these three levels, his films became more and more "conservative" over time, more ponderous, more conventional, more obsessed with power. This first film is full of energy and surprises -- company spies you can't help liking for their comical antics; agents-provocateurs you admire for their theatricality; dream sequences on a par with Twin Peaks. But it also tells the story of a strike with all the power and clarity of the best labor movies (e.g. Norma Rae), yet on a bigger, more brutal scale. The Alloy Orchestra provides a score that equals the epic panoramas of the factories, tenements, and intense conflict. They cover Eisenstein's emotional range from the hilarious to the devastating. One of my top ten.

Every Sergei Eisenstein film is essential viewing for students of world cinema. "Strike" is no exception. But this version of "Strike"--with a wonderful score by the Alloy Orchestra and a beautifully restored print--is a fantastic purchase for anyone interested in cinema. Yes, "Strike" is not the epic that "Battleship Potempkin" is. But it's got an energy, a pulsing sense of excitement that has rarely been matched since. It is a real treasure.

The Bottom Line:

Eisenstein's directorial flourishes are in full display in Strike, but it's slow and lacking the intensity that makes Battleship Potemkin so watchable; as a historical artifact Strike is valuable but as a film it's forgettable.

This title is bad. It should be THE strike, but they translated word for word and in Russian they do not have articles. It gives to the title an abstract look or feel that is not at all what the film is about. In fact the film is just the contrary. It is purely concrete, pragmatic, in no way reflexive or trying to analyze and understand that brutality in the repression of a strike that started before even having an objective or a reason.

This brutality is in many ways typical of some periods in the history of the industrialization of our countries, Russia, the USA or Western Europe. It stopped or became more limited when the leaders and managers, both politicians and economic bosses, understood that this violence was menacing the establishment in the long run far more than some compromises along the way.

What is surprising is how Eisenstein in 1924, at the end of the war communism of the civil war and at the beginning of the New Economic Policy of Lenin who was on the brink of dying, some kind of delayed assassination, painted a world that was cut in two, and nothing else but these two. And far away from Mayakovski or the other poets of that time, all of them militants and committed to the revolution, he depicts a situation in which there is no culture, no mind, no humanism, no nothing, especially not any thinking. All is shown as being primary, physical, at the simple level of instincts and senses, on both sides.

The workers go on strike because they feel dissatisfied but they don't know why. It is an urge in them to do it and any reason is good enough to start and then to force everyone, and I insist on this "force", to get into the strike with violence of course and that working class violence is natural, isn't it? On the side of the bosses it is not better, but it is not worse either. It is just pure refusal because their instinct is to say no. They are in no way different from their workers. The police and army are even worse because they enjoy using violence.

They have no humaneness, no sense that they are from the people, no patriotism that would mean some feeling, some sentiment, or some recollection that they were born from the people, among the people, in the people, as members of the people. That vision is so extreme that we do not feel any sympathy or compassion for that kind of discourse. But yet, and the first part seems to go that way, I just wonder if Eisenstein did not make it all a charade, a grotesque farce, or even a monstrous carnival. He uses his camera so well that he is able to concentrate on masses of people instead of individuals or faces.

Few close-up shots but a lot of moving, running crowds, his specialty, and it is that focusing on these movements that make the discourse funny, unreal, surreal, surrealistic even. Was Eisenstein already seeing the new master of the USSR coming up to take over? Was Stalin a haunting ghost in this film? Was Eisenstein making that caricature of history in order to make people think? I doubt it very much. He used all his genial art and competence with a camera and an editing bench to fascinate the crowds who were discovering the cinema, the magic of electricity and the new media in order to make them politically supportive of the revolution.

He could not even be considered as naïve since he shows very well that all starts from a minority that manages to push along or force the working class into action. Then the rest is nothing but stubbornness and there is only one resistance to the hardships of such a period and it comes from women, and men are obliged to force them down into obedience to their will. All I say there is going against the grain of that Soviet revolution, and that is why I say Eisenstein was doing what he had to do but at the same time was keeping a tongue in his cheek. What happen to that tongue had to come later, but he did not forget to put one of his Solomon's numbers in the film with six geese strutting around in that factory.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

I agree with everyone who has seen this version of "Strike" Striking! Would there were a version of "Potemkin" as clear, cranked properly and with Meisel's score intact with the film.

Of all the Eisenstein films, "Strike" is easily the weakest. He attempts far too much in order to be eclectic and achieves far too little in the process. But it was his first movie, and it does feature some good examples of montage (which would be perfected with "Potemkin" and "October", two truly great works); it's just the humor that really kills this movie for me. If it hadn't been for his attempts at being amusing, and had he toned down a bit of the symbolism, "Strike" would rate much higher. As it is, it's a historically important, pompous bore. Image does have a nice quality dvd though.

This is a brilliant early film by Eisenstein. It has the marks of a propaganda piece, but the photography is stunning and it is dramatically effective. The new musical accompaniment is very fitting.

There seems to be some problem with the encoding of this disk which makes its play very erratic, at least on a Macintosh DVD drive under OS 9. I have had two disks from Borders and two from Amazon, all of which had the same problem on two different Macs. Sometimes (rarely) the disk would play through. Most of the time, the DVD player would report "Scratched or damaged, or incorrect encoding" More rarely, the DVD player would report that it was missing a file it needed. I haven't had problems with other DVD's, including many from Image Entertainment, so this problem is frustrating and puzzling. I'd be interested to know if others have had problems with this disk. (Post experiences as reviews here)