Strike (1925) launched the film career of Sergei Eisenstein and changed the face of cinema forever. Probably no other film ever introduced so many original ideas and techniques. Eisenstein was certainly an innovative genius, but even great innovators form from the fabric of their forerunners and their own personal experiences. Most of the characteristic of Eisenstein's film style can be seen as either reflections of his own early life or extensions of what earlier filmmakers had begun.

Historical Background: Sergei Milhailovich Eisenstein was born on January 23rd, 1898 in Riga, in the Balkan state of Latvia. His mother was a Russian Jew and his father a transplanted German Jew. Sergei was a very bright lad and had gained fluency in four languages (Russian, English, French, and German) by the age of ten. In early childhood, Sergei enjoyed reading and drawing. His parents separated when he was just eight, and Sergei lived, thereafter, mainly with his father. His father, who was an engineer and architect, pushed the boy to follow the same career path. Sergei dutifully enrolled in the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in 1915, but already harbored hopes for another kind of career – in the arts. His opportunity to break with his father arrived decisively in the form of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Early in 1918, the Institute was closed and Sergei, like most of the students, enlisted in the Red Army. Sergei's father joined the opposing counterrevolutionary White Army.

Eisenstein was assigned to a military construction unit in light of his partial training in civil engineering. One can easily see the residue of Eisenstein's experience in engineering, however limited, in his later work as a filmmaker. He is probably the most architectural of directors, evidenced by his fascination with steps, scaffolding, bridges, and factory machinery. Late in 1919, Eisenstein was stationed near a town that had a theater group and began hanging out with the actors and technicians during rehearsals and backstage. Soon, he was forming an amateur troupe among his fellow soldiers and began directing plays in 1920. This led to his transfer to a theatrical unit.

During his years in the army, Eisenstein also began teaching himself Japanese. As soon as the war ended, Sergei headed to Moscow for further study of Oriental Languages. Those plans took another turn when he encountered a childhood friend, Maxim Strauch, who was a fledging actor. Strauch encouraged Eisenstein to pursue his passion for theater and provided Sergei with enough guidance and financial support to allow him to find a start. Strauch and Eisenstein each took jobs with a newly established workers' theater. Eisenstein's assignment was scenic designer.

This was an extraordinary time for the arts in Russia because the advent of a revolutionary new political order seemed to beg for equally revolutionary approaches in theater and the other arts. Eisenstein answered the challenge by designing highly original and stylized sets for an adaptation of Jack London's The Mexican. He was soon elevated to the role of co-director, but, growing restive, he responded to a recruitment campaign for enrollment in a new School for State Direction, organized by one of the most radical voices in the theater revolution, Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold's philosophy combined precise discipline with daring innovations, which later became the hallmarks of Eisenstein's style as well. Eisenstein was made director of a newly formed branch of the workers' theater, called Peredvizhaniya Trupa. It was there that Eisenstein first began articulating a directorial theory that he called "montage of attractions," which would later evolve into his signature film editing technique. Eisenstein's ambitious experiments as a stage director increasingly challenged the confines of theater and gradually brought him closer and closer to cinema.

Eisenstein had long been an avid filmgoer and all that was required for his final career shift was a film workshop experience in 1923 together with some limited film editing experience during 1922/3. Chief among Eisenstein's film influences were the works of D.W. Griffith (e.g., The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)), who had gone the furthest, prior to Eisenstein, in the direction of quick cuts, though mainly using them only for the scenes of peak excitement.

Eisenstein's first film, Strike (1925), ranks as one of the greatest debuts made by a director, along with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). Strike was originally intended as the fifth part in an eight-part epic, covering the years 1903-1918, with each segment to be directed by a different Russian director. Eisenstein spent months researching the project and planning each shot in great detail. He envisioned the film as a "montage of shocks," thus extending his earlier theoretical construct from his theater days into a filmmaking philosophy.

Strike can be easily seen as the antecedent to The Battleship Potemkin, which Eisenstein made later in the same year. Although Strike received a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences, "Potemkin" firmly established Eisenstein's reputation both in Russia and abroad. Despite an auspicious beginning, with two great films in one year, Eisenstein would complete only five additional full-length film over the remainder of his career, largely because of relentless political, financial, and health pressures, both in Russia and in America. His other completed silent films included October (1928) and Old and New (1929). His magnificent films from the sound years were Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible, Pts. I and II (1945/6) (see Eisenstein: The Sound Years.)

The Story: The story of Strike is relatively simple. The workers at a factory, somewhere in Russia during the czarist era, are disgruntled, being subjected to long hours, poor wages, and mistreatment by management. There is talk of a strike, but the actual event is triggered when a humiliated worker hangs himself after being accused of stealing a micrometer by a cruel administrator. After cutting down the corpse, the incensed coworkers knock down the offending manager, smash some windows, toss the foreman and an administrator into a muddy ditch, and scuffle with the man in charge of the factory whistle in order to signal the workers to head home.

With the strike underway, the leaders of the strike and the workers meet wherever they can find some privacy in order to built their unity and draw up a list of demands. Meanwhile, news of the strike disseminates from the foreman to the plant manager, and on to the factory's owner. He calls the local police chief, who then informs the secret police (or gendarmes). The gendarmes organize a team of spies and informants, with such nicknames as The Monkey, The Fox, The Owl, Bulldog, and Fly-by-Night. The job of the spies is to infiltrate the union and ferret out the identities of the ringleaders. The managers gather together to review the list of demands, sneering at the impracticality of the list, as they wallow in the lap of such luxuries as a silver liquor service with a built in orange squeezer. As the strike drags on, it causes great hardships for the wives and children of the strikers.

All of the workers' demands are turned down flatly. One of the ringleaders is arrested and enticed, by a combination of threats and a bribe, to betray his associates. Provocateurs are sent in by management to stir up trouble, to provide a pretext for sending in police and Cossacks to crush the strike. Fire hoses are brought in and turned on the hapless crowd. Later, mounted Cossacks beat and disperse the strikers, pursuing them through the multistory tenements, and leaving a large number of the strikers massacred in a field.

Themes: The obvious theme of the film is exploitation of the working class by capitalists and their lackeys. Eisenstein hammers on the point so relentlessly and with such obvious fervor and unmitigated bias that the film becomes more indictment by farce and irony than by reason or logic, but it scores a few points. Class struggle remains among the foremost sociological issues, today, along with such problems as nationalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. I suspect, on the whole, that overly dramatized films like Strike are less effective as vehicles for promoting either awareness or change in relation to social issues than are more fact-based exposés. On the other hand, montage-based psychological appeals have often proven effective for influencing voting decisions and consumer choices.

Production Values: The storyline for Strike is clearly propagandistic, though not much more so than some films from Europe and Hollywood, such as On the Waterfront, Norma Rae, La Terra Trema, or Miracle in Milan. There is no pretense, in Strike, of fair-minded objectivity. Quite the contrary! It was Eisenstein's explicit belief that the only worthwhile purpose of cinema was to influence the views of the audience and to incite action. Eisenstein lets no opportunity go by to demonize the managers, capitalists, and officials or to garner sympathy for the downtrodden workers. The managers laugh crudely at the workers' demands and, later, at their plight. One of the Cossacks even throws a young child to its death off a third-story walkway, for no particular reason. It's all a bit reminiscent of the Dudley Do-Right versus Snidely Whiplash kind of dichotomy. It's pure caricature. Viewed in that way, it's a harmless enough kind of propaganda, precisely because it's so blatantly one-sided. I personally have far more objection to films that mask more subtle kinds of bias behind a pretense of evenhandedness.

Eisenstein had a lifelong fascination with images of animals. For Strike, he made frequent use of shots of animals, both in the image sequences that carry the main story and in unrelated images introduced through montage editing. There's a sequence, for example, where the children of the workers are imitating their father's run-in with the foreman, using a goat as the hapless stand-in for management. There is a shot of a cat dodging a thrown object and another of what appears to be a couple of dead cats hanging from a clothesline. Eisenstein also associates each of the informers with an animal, melding pictures of the animal with the corresponding informant's face, thereby establishing that the spies lack humanity. There's a famous sequence, near the end, of a cow being slaughtered juxtaposed with the attack by the Cossacks on the strikers. Eisenstein repeatedly uses circular objects to connote the endless continuity of time.

What stands out most about this film is the extraordinary range of audacious shot and editing techniques. Strike is a veritable catalog of technical innovations and wizardry. There are double exposures, an upside down puddle reflection, shots through windows, reflections in mirrors, fades and melds, side by side panels that then merge, shots of distorted reflections in a glass ball, low angle shots, film reversals, silhouette shots, and much, much more. There are some surreal elements introduced, such as a pair of midgets dancing on a table behind two policemen who are in the process of turning one of the strikers into a snitch. There are a host of out-of-context images, such as nervous eyes turned to the side, juxtaposed to add a sense of paranoia to the main sequences. There are back and forth cuts between a manager squeezing juice from an orange while the Cossacks, who have surrounded a group of workers in a wooded area, tighten the ring around them.

Eisenstein was most fortunate to acquire the services of Edward Tissé as his cameraman for Strike. Eisenstein, though teeming with brilliant ideas, was raw and inexperienced as a filmmaker in 1925, while Tissé was both experienced and talented as a cinematographer. Tissé was able to capture effectively Eisenstein's conceptions on film. The professional relationship between the two men lasted through most of Eisenstein's career.

While making Strike, Eisenstein effectively developed his notion of "intellectual montage." He typically spent many more hours in the editing of a film than in the shooting. Eisenstein's idea was to create a rapid succession of quick shots (which might be relatively meaningless taken alone) that would acquire meaning through the intellectual process of association. The secondary benefit is that rapid cuts can also add tempo and excitement to a film. To the Soviet authorities, Eisenstein's editing techniques became known as "formalism," which they railed against incessantly.

Many of the film's frames are notable for the intricate detail of the mise-en-scene. Especially impressive are the shots in the factory interior (a labyrinth of wheels, ropes, aisles, and machinery) and the worker's multistory tenement maze. The DVD provides a new soundtrack, performed by the Alloy Orchestra. Eisenstein never intended the film to be accompanied by music, but purists always have the option of hitting the mute button on their remotes. I found the soundtrack quite effective and complementary. It comes across as something of a cross between modern avant-guard classical music and funky honky-tonk. The instruments include saxophones, clarinets, an accordion, percussion, pipes, pans, and synthesizers.

Eisenstein demanded an "antinaturalistic" style of acting from his performers, with emphasis on grandiose, exaggerated movements. In keeping with the Soviet philosophy, Eisenstein's early films feature the collective more than individuals. Crowds are as much characters in Strike as is any individual person. The crowd movements are intricately choreographed to create a kind of swarming or flock movement effect. Since Eisenstein usually wants his camera to take in the entire scene, he makes relatively little use of facial close-ups, diminishing the importance of facial expression for conveyance of feelings. Most of the workers are fine physical specimens, while the capitalists are either rotund or have snarling, sinister visages.

Bottom-Line: The DVD provides a very nice transfer, with crisp and sharp chiaroscuro, though there are some scratches and debris. The principal extra, on the DVD, is a commentary track by University of Chicago film professor Ivan Tsivian, who provides incisive analysis, mainly of symbolic meanings, shot techniques, and historical contexts.

The combination of Eisenstein's formalistic conception of filmmaking and the highly dramatic style of acting results in what would be a powerfully emotional film, were it not so over-the-top that it comes across as cartoonish caricature. It provokes emotion, but mainly the kind of emotion you might feel when Snidely Whiplash ties Nell Fenwick to the train tracks.

Strike ranks as one of the great films in cinematic history, simply from the vantage point of technical innovations. That it also launched the career of one of the greatest film directors adds to its luster. The plot is simplistic, but plot complexity during the silent film era was seldom what we now expect from films. The propaganda value of the film is overrated, since the film mostly invalidates its thesis by its excesses of melodrama. This is a must-see film for anyone interested in film history and understanding the editing techniques that are so widely used today. The value of the film is more than just academic, however. The visual images are high artistry.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Russia and the U.S.S.R.:

Alexander Nevsky
Andrei Rublev
Anna Karenina
Ballad of a Soldier
Burnt By the Sun
Come and See
The Cranes Are Flying
Dersu Uzala
Don Quixote
Freeze Die
Ivan the Terrible
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
Nostalghia
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Solaris
War and Peace

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age