Synopsis
Down with autocracy! Long live the democratic republic!
Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.
1925 ‘Стачка’ Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.
La Grève, Stachka, La huelga, A Greve, Staking, 파업, Stávka, Streiken, Sciopero, Streik, Strejken, Grev, 罢工, გაფიცვა, Lakko, Strajk, 罷工
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More modern than any film I saw in 2018: it's not enough to show the abuses of the systematic, or merely depict that it exists - you have to see its intricacies and functions. Because then otherwise you're just fighting against thin-air. Notwithstanding that one has to be almost supernaturally talented for a film this brilliant to be their first (at this point I'd argue that Eisenstein is the only genius that cinema produced, but that's for another write-up), you can't show these functions with the traditional western protagonist system - the canon itself is part of the oppression. Not that the maneuver is reactionary: by ditching the protagonist, or characters, or "story", we can get a direct and immediate…
join a union! still feels like the future of cinema, both technically and politically, even after almost a hundred years. makes you wonder what can still be accomplished with a camera.
85/100
Suffering in layers ramping and stuttering through time; rhythmic and formally confrontational to the point of exhaustion. Eisenstein utilizes Montage as an intellectual, historical springboard, but there's still the lingering horror within the graphic nature of the cuts. Edits as varied, mathematical calculations of terror and breathtaking jolts. Prettyyyyy fuckin' Major.
- its an outrage! they've involved the factory in politics! -
what they wanted:
an 8 hour work day for adults. a 6 hour work day for minors.
a 30% pay increase. civil treatment by management.
what they got:
told their demands were insolent and illegal.
herded and beaten and slaughtered by cops.
whatever rights we have today and not much is left are not rights that were granted to us by a benevolent power structure we the people work hand in hand with towards mutual prosperity but rights that were demanded and fought for and paid for in blood. we would do well to never forget this. i do not believe in the liberatory power of revolutionary violence. i…
"The strength of the cinema is organisation. Without organisation of the images, the film is nothing. Organised it is everything." - Vladmir Lenin
Sergei Eisenstein’s drama follows factory workers in pre-revolutionary Russia, driven to strike by the demands of their cruel bosses, and the subsequent impacts this has on the people involved.
This was Eisenstein’s first full-length film, and is brimming with ideas that even today seem quite innovative. Key among these is the use of montage, skilfully combining seemingly disparate images in a way that gives a new meaning to the sequence as a whole.
Though this has become fairly common in the years since, to the point where certain moments have lost a degree of their original impact, Eisenstein’s passion both for the subject matter and cinema as a whole really shines through, producing some profound and stirring imagery. The most…
The flagship of left-wing cinema is really a catered buffet of declamations. Each shot a sentence. Each sequence a paragraph.
wasn't expecting this to feature an expendables-esque group of private detectives who all have weird gimmicks trying to sabotage the striking workers -- eisenstein is rightly acclaimed for his total mastery of montage, and it is indeed glorious, but i think what gets lost a bit in that acclaim is that he's also an amazing compositionalist, he has an intuitive understanding of how to create beautiful frames which then create intense sympathies or contradictions when put into his rapid montage -- there's parts of strike, especially early on, that are even reminiscent of german expressionism, which is often used as a counter-point to soviet filmmaking of this era, but which i think is very much related in several ways, especially the use of constant irony -- the police trying to stomp on the striking workers inter-cut with several fat cats squeezing juice for their lunch is inherently powerful stuff which doesn't rely on bourgeois narrative continuity to obtain its potency.
As the opening Lenin quote states, there would be nothing without the organization of the masses, so it almost seems like a no-brainer that the film must then follow no individual or even ensemble of individuals but rather an organized mass. Of course, the brainer part is constructing a film that allows for this mechanical, omniscient, ant-farm perspective and still translates the kinetic spirit of revolution, the fervor that must be sparked in each individual and the specifics of their shared experiences. Such an approach is almost alien today, with 100+ years of convention cementing a need for protagonists, even in our most ensemble of films. But to do what Eisenstein did today would simply be counter-cultural; back then it was revolutionary. If nothing else, though, Strike gave us the cinematic language for the old Bureaucratic Game of Telephone bit, for which we should all be thankful.
It is unnerving how it has no main characters, but instead a collective mass. This is its most disruptive feature. The more individual characters are figures within the capitalist hierarchy. It conjured for me the fanaticism of anti-identity work in some corners of communist thought that cannot imagine a collective of individuals in their abstractions of humanity. If John D'Emilio is right, and I believe he is, industrial capitalism created the material reality that gave rise to proliferating sexualities and constructs of gender, before Foucault's roving discourse ossified them in paper-work identities. I think about this a lot as a trans* woman: will the destruction of capital require the destruction of everything capitalism created? The paranoid policing of "bourgeois" tends…
I watched this for the first time about twenty months ago. I remember getting like nothing out of this and overall being kind of confused why my friends had such high praise. Watching Strike now, I can't even fathom how I didn't like it. I don't know how that was possible. It's always fun to see your progression over time as things happen like this. Fresh eyes are always the best eyes.