Film Review
It was whilst he was engaged with the Proletkult Theatre in Moscow that
a young theatre director and film theorist named Sergei Eisenstein
conceived a series of films that would celebrate the Russian
revolution. The first of these would be
Strike, a piece of pure Communist
propaganda that showed the necessity for the proletariat to work
together to overcome exploitation by their capitalist paymasters.
Whilst the series was not completed as intended, it did provide
Eisenstein with subject matter for two other films -
Battleship Potemkin (1925) and
October
(1928). These three films established Eisenstein as the most
important filmmaker of the Soviet Union and earned him his reputation
as one of the greatest cineastes of all time.
What is most striking about Eisenstein's early films is their sheer
emotional intensity and energy, which the director achieves through his
ingenious editing techniques, known as
montage. The sequence in
which the strike commences, with the workers throwing down their tools
and storming out of the factory, consists of numerous frantic short
cuts edited together in such a way that you can feel the adrenalin
surge and hear the sounds of a world falling into anarchy. There
are no individual characters a spectator can identify with, but his
sympathies are well and truly with the collective mass of the oppressed
who dare to take a stand against their exploiters.
A later sequence in the film illustrates one of the best known examples
of what Eisenstein termed
dialectic
montage - the juxtaposition of unrelated shots to create an
impression which is far more than the sum of the individual
shots. Here, explicit images of cattle being butchered are
inter-cut with pictures of the striking workers being shot dead by
Cossack soldiers. The visceral impact of the former magnifies the
senseless brutality of the latter, thereby accentuating the emotional
response of the audience.
As in his subsequent Soviet propaganda films, Eisenstein uses shocking
images abundantly in this film to reinforce his political
messages. One of these, which appears in several of his films, is
the thoughtless killing of a small child - the innocence of the child
confers on its killer, and those he serves, the mask of Satan
himself. Whilst much of the symbolism is crude and painfully
obvious, it is hard to sit through an Eisenstein film without becoming
involved, both emotionally and intellectually, and feeling a very real
sense of anger against the tyrannous regime depicted in the film.
Strike is an extraordinary
first film and was quite unlike anything seen in cinema up until this
point. Few films prior to this had anything like its impact; it
has a sense of realism, drama and immediacy that seizes the spectator
in an iron grip, and never lets go. We sympathise with the
bitterness of the workers before the strike, we sense their desperation
when they begin to go hungry, and we feel only anger when the forces of
capitalism begin a war against them that they cannot win.
You can argue about the ethics of an artist manipulating his audience
in such a flagrant manner (particularly when the Soviet system which
Eisenstein was happy to glorify ultimately proved to be little better
than what went before it), but this film demonstrates the power of
cinema to convey a point of view and possibly alter the way we
think. Political leaders across the developed world were not slow
in realising the value of this, particularly in the run up to and
during WWII...
© James Travers 2008
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Russia, 1912. Sick of the conditions under which they have to
toil for a meagre salary, the workers at a factory are on the brink of
rebellion. The flashpoint comes when one of their number hangs
himself after having been unjustly accused of stealing a tool by his
foreman. The workers walk out on mass, refusing to return
until their managers have agreed to their terms. The factory
owners, fat industrialists with a taste for luxury, are infuriated by
this illegal revolt and resolve to bring the workers to heel - by any
means possible...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.