STRIKE Movie Review

Sergei M. Eisenstein's 1924 debut film is an audacious and astonishing depiction of a pre-revolutionary (1912) factory strike and the resulting violent clash between strikers and the Czar's brutal military forces. Strike is an electrifying film in which Eisenstein first demonstrated the power of his theories of film editing, which he characterized as “montage.” Perhaps more than any other filmmaker of the silent era, Eisenstein grasped the rhythmic power that could be unleashed in the editing process, and in Strike he masterfully displays his ability to seemingly expand time, creating entire dramatic structures within actions that would normally take only seconds of screen time. He orchestrates the violence like a conductor after suspensefully building up to it, and he provides full, operatic design within confrontations that would otherwise seem mere chaos. His ability to create silent “music” with these dynamic, juxtaposed images would fully flower in his next film, the 1925 The Battleship Potemkin. But Strike, which resulted from Eisenstein's frustrations with the limitations of the stage, is still a breathtaking eruption of artistry and inspiration that seems to leap to the screen directly from the mind of its brilliant creator. (A superbly mastered version of Strike is contained on a multi-film laserdisc of Soviet classics; the set also includes Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra's stunning original score.)

NEXT STOP … The Battleship Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook the World, Intolerance

1924 78m/B RU D: Sergei Eisenstein. VHS NOS, KIV, IHF