SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S STRIKE

From Wikipedia:

Strike (Russian: Стачка, translit. Stachka) is a 1925 silent film made in the Soviet Union by Sergei Eisenstein. It was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, and he would go on to make The Battleship Potemkin later that year. It was acted by the Proletcult Theatre, and composed of six parts. It was in turn, intended to be one part of a seven-part series, entitled Towards Dictatorship (of the proletariat), that was left unfinished. Eisenstein's influential essay, Montage of Attractions was written between Strike's production and premiere.

The film depicts a strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent suppression of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered, although there are several other points in the movie where animals are used as metaphors for the conditions of various individuals. Another theme in the film is collectivism in opposition to individualism which was viewed as a convention of western film. Collective efforts and collectivization of characters were central to both Strike and Battleship Potemkin.

More here.

I do so love the internet era.

I saw Strike long ago in a film and video theory class I took at the University of Texas.  At the time, I was really grooving on the revolutionary aspect of it all, the oppressive capitalists being fought by the working class, all the rhetoric, all the uplifting vibes.  I mean, of course, I was studying it for Eisenstein's startlingly advanced cinematic technique, but I was newly liberal at that point, and, in spite of my problems with how the Russian Revolution turned out, I loved, and continue to love, the Revolution's goals, and this movie creates a pure picture of what those goals were.  Exciting then, just as it is now.

Anyway, a buddy of mine, Matt Impelluso, who hosts the War Zone pod cast show on which I occasionally appear, posted on facebook that he was going to watch communist movies for some reason.  Inspired, I did a quick search and found Strike, in its entirety, on YouTube.  I watched part one and was blown away by how the movie stands up, not just as a cool movie, but as a blow-you-away movie.  Eisenstein was so advanced in terms of film narrative that few film makers have even come close to doing what he did nearly a hundred years ago.  He understood, probably better than anybody else, how to tell a story visually.  And his editing!  Suffice it to say that nobody since him has mastered the notion of juxtaposition of visual ideas in order to achieve meaning as well as Eisenstein.  Every single moment, every second, is packed with story and symbol.  There is not a wasted frame with Eisenstein, who, for my money, may very well have been the greatest movie maker of all time.

Check it out.  It's in nine parts.  Here's the first, and the link to each successive part ought to come up on the screen, in the upper left hand corner, when you get to the end of each part.  Did that even make sense?  You'll figure it out.  Fucking great movie!

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