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