Strike (1925)

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Writers: Proletkult under the direction of Valerian Pletnev
Stars: First Workers’ Theatre of Proletkult

Index: That's a Wrap!

As propositions go, the series of seven silent Soviet Union propaganda films called Towards Dictatorship of the Proletariat isn’t very high on my priority list. However, only one was made and it was the debut of Sergei Eisenstein, who came out seriously swinging.

After a quote from Lenin about the strength of the working class being organisation, part one of six promises us that “All is calm at the factory”. So far, so boring. However, then the cinematography leaps into action.

There’s a great characterful close up, a tasty dissolve, a delightfully choreographed shot of a busy hallway and a gorgeous high dolly shot through a factory floor. That’s the first twenty seconds. No, I’m not kidding.

Is that a moment of animation? Or is it one of a set of impeccable silhouettes? There are horizontal shots through working machinery, vertical shots through openings and reverse shots in puddles. Everything’s in motion, as a busy factory should be. That’s another minute or two. Eisenstein’s shot length is shockingly short but every setup has meaning.

And then we meet the obese director behind his gorgeous desk in his plush office, smoking a big cigar, as a powerful contrast to his men out there on the factory floor.

Sure, there’s plenty of overacting here but it tends to have effect, not least when we meet a bevy of undercover agents, their animal spy names a reflection of physical characteristics. The movie includes a lot of animals and takes a lot of opportunities to compare the workers and the minions to them, but never the bosses.

Frankly, the first two of these six parts are a wake up call to anyone directing movies back in 1925. Never mind what they thought could be done with the medium of film, watching a half hour chunk of this would give them whole new ideas of what’s possible. To think of what he did here in his debut feature, knowing that Battleship Potemkin was coming later the same year, is almost mind boggling.

Amidst all the technique, there’s a plot. The first part sets up the workers and the bosses, with a brief reminder that this is still Imperial Russia under the Tsar, through the Bolsheviks planning revolution. The second part triggers the strike. A worker appropriately reports the theft of a micrometer that cost three weeks of wages. The manager falsely calls him a thief so he hangs himself right there in the factory, in the knowledge that he can’t prove he isn’t. If the shot time was already short, it now shifts to rapid fire to demonstrate how fast the news travels. Everybody downs tools, there’s anger, fights break out. By the time the crowd makes it to the foundry, it’s a mob, and they tip the managers down a cliff into the water.

Thus far, this is masterclass, but part three and part four are a lot slower, maybe too slow. Things certainly happen. The strikers issue a set of demands and senior management laughs at them; one important shareholder actually scrunches the paper up to clean a lime off his shoe. Meanwhile the factory sits empty, but for cats and birds in more shots to compare workers to animals. The strike drags on and families that were enjoying time together are now down to their last scraps of food and arguing about the likelihood of getting more.

Throughout all of this, glorious visuals keep on coming. There’s a sequence when the Owl uses a cool spy camera to capture an agitator in the rain, who’s promptly bribed by the high ups to a backdrop of a couple of midgets on a table, dancing the night away as exotics. Part five begins with a field full of huge barrels set into the ground. They’re full of unscrupulous men and the Empire uses them to strike back.

By the way, that’s just one glorious location of many. If I had to pick my favourite, I would find it difficult to choose between half a dozen of them. There’s the meeting on top of a stack of carriage axles, wheels still attached, or the one on top of an anchor hovering just above the water. There’s the spy escaping through a vast curtain of hanging rope. There’s the side shot of an apartment block with police horses on each level. There are the endless stairs that a servant has to climb to reach shareholders in discussion. As blatant a metaphor as it is, the shot of ink spreading over a city map like it’s blood is effective too as a location analogue.

And then there are the brutal scenes, which grow in part five, “Provocation to a Massacre”, and escalate even further in part six, honestly titled “Extermination”. Never mind the actual massacre and its aftermath, which is powerful enough, there’s the woman being beaten by a policeman on horseback after rescuing her son from beneath its legs. There’s the officer who picks up a baby and drops it off the balcony at the top level of the apartment block. We see it dead on the ground. And, just in case we were somehow still missing the point, Eisenstein is daring enough to alternate scenes of massacre with a butcher slaughtering a cow. Once again, workers are equated with animals. Even death can’t save them from that fate.

In other words, even if we call out both the middle parts for their slowness, we can’t fail to be astounded by the first two and shocked by the last two. Even if we take umbrage with the script for taking the depressing path of having the bad guys win (though I have no idea who they expect to work in their factory after they massacre all the workers), we can’t fail to feel the power of how it all goes down. Even if we struggle to pick out any single actor for praise, we can’t deny that the ensemble performance is characterful and the crowd scenes vast.

Howard Hawks described a great movie as having three good scenes and no bad ones. It’s fair to say that this has countless good scenes and even more great shots. Yet, somehow the studio’s board had serious doubts about what Eisenstein might do, given his background in experimental theatre. They had him conduct a couple of days worth of test shoots then took him off the picture. Only when the studio head personally guaranteed that the film would be finished did they let him continue.

While he certainly experimented across the entire film with technique, it proved to be the sort of technique that the rest of the cinematic world adopted. To help, he wrote an essay, Montage of Attractions, in between the picture’s completion and première. It seems fair that I only recognise much of it because a century of filmmakers copied what he did here for the first time. Now I’m even more eager to revisit Battleship Potemkin in December.