Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

The 1924 silent movie "Strike" (Stachka) is sort of the Soviet "Citizen Kane" in that it shows the results of the first exuberance of a great film-maker who would have a difficult later careers within a film-production system that was hostile to creatively playing with the medium. Orson Welles was 24 with a recent history of provocative stagings behind him when he directed "Citizen Kane," Sergei Eisenstein was 26 years old with a recent history of provocative stagings behind him when he directed "Strike." Neither of their debut features could be accused of being proscenium-bound. Both are visually flamboyant with high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, though Welles was more concerned with narrative (and dialogue) than Eisenstein had been in 1924. Being an American sound film "Citizen Kane" is more accessible to audiences now, though it is hard to find anyone with whom to identify in Welles' (et al.'s) chilly portrait of the unsatisfied magnate.

No one is going to identify with the portrait of the magnates and managers in "Strike" either. It is possible to sympathize with one of the strikers who is tortured and turned into an informer for the police and there are some way-too-cute shots of kittens and toddlers, but there are not characters in "Strike" as there are in Eisenstein's sound films, especially his masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Not even the martyr whose suicide sets off the strike: a machinist who is held responsible for a tool that was stolen when the factory was idle and who hangs himself rather than live being unjustly labeled a thief has any individuality. The agents of capitalism and/or of the czarist police have faces metamorphosing from shots of animals through double exposures. The most often onscreen spy is called "Owl," and all are shown as despicable, while the bosses are gross in body and in greed, insensitivity, and conspicuous consumption.

Instead of following one worker or family or workers through the events, Eisenstein provided "relayed narration," cutting from group to group. I presume that before the apotheosis of Lenin (and then Stalin), the ideological orthodoxy called for showing social forces rather than great men advancing history. Thus, social roles rather than individual personalities are the focus. However, the young Eisenstein also obviously enjoyed moving crowds about (bigger ones than in his more widely screened second film, "The Battleship Potemkin" also released in 1925). He had many extras to deploy and pulled back to show them all. To film an even vaster crowd, he filmed inside a building with a huge crowd visible through the windows who were listening to exhortations from Leon Trotsky.

The plot is rudimentary. First there are workers and those who own the means of production (the factory) and love off the labor of others. Eisenstein opens by showing the levels of the hierarchy (and juxtaposes the literal "fat cats" and the workers throughout the film). Surveillance of those talking about organizing is intense (providing the occasion for several chase scenes and a totally ridiculous one of "Owl" unable to get disentangled from hoses while the workers are frolicking into and in the water), but a lone thief makes off with the tool. The worker is denounced and humiliated and hangs himself. His coworkers take down his corpse and battle with the keeper of the factory whistle (an occasion for some slapstick physical comedy). The whistle blows and all the workers leave.

The managers and directors are vexed, but keep drinking, while the police infiltrates and what seem to be Cossack cavalry are dispatched to attack a meeting held in the woods. The strike drags on, frustrating the owners who have orders piling up, and the families of the workers are going hungry before the final massacre, which begins with police arsonists setting fire to worker housing, protecting the fire alarm (reprsing the earlier defense of the factory whistle) and, when the fire wagons arrive, showing the police turning the water hoses on the workers instead of the burning buildings. (Although tank wagons are shown, the supply of water seems infinite. The workers are pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed some more by strong jets of water in artistic patterns.) Then horsemen chase workers in four-level shots of tenements with bridges between the buildings (Eisenstein loved bridges and steps—as building blocks of visual compositions, though he had trained as a civil engineer, too.) Finally, there is a field of fallen proletarian men and women.

The visual compositions and montages made from rapid cutting from one to another (that was revolutionary in 1924) remain impressive, but I find it easier to admire than to like Eisenstein's silent films (October as well as "Potemkin"). There are some jolting images in "Strike" (though none as memorable as the baby carriage going down the Odessa steps, or the dead infant being carried up, or the maggots in the meat in "Potemkin"). In particular, there are very arty compositions with many cylinders, including pipes and barrels.

Made by the young Soviet state (though in the New Economic Program time of greater latitude for artistic experimentation that also fostered Bulgakov plays and novels), "Strike" was supposed to be "revolutionary" in more than technical experimentation (what was later denounced as "formalism"). The capitalists and the lumpenproletariat enlisted to spy on the workers are portrayed as surface scum and bottom muck. The advocates of the strike are generally not shown very heroically. Indeed, the workers seem to be corrupted by leisure, drinking, gambling, and sleeping late into the day. And the eventual repression—the final massacre—is so total and so effective that it is hard to imagine the movie inspiring workers to go on strike or to hold on through the incomeless duration. The movie makes striking for better working conditions look hopeless to me ("The Battle of Algiers" provokes the same response in me).

The commentary track by Yuri Tsivian supplies useful guidance to the formal devices and some useful contextual information on Russian culture, but does not address the political intent of the movie (either Eisenstein's or the culture commissars'). With the "dictatorship of the proletariat" having taken over ownership and running the economy in the name of the proletariat (if not to its benefit...), perhaps striking for better conditions was supposed to be discouraged? Such resistance was already consigned to the past, perhaps.

The DVD print was generally good, though somewhat fuzzy on occasion. The new (1991?) music score by the Alloy Orchestra— a pastiche of Philip Glass, Shostakovich, and old-time silent-movie melodrama music—is obtrusive but generally fits with the visuals.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD