Strike (1925)
Factory workers walk out over the unjust firing of a colleague, and their strike hardens into open class war as company spies, hired provocateurs, and mounted troops move in. The suppression climaxes in a massacre intercut with shots of cattle being slaughtered.
Strike was Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature, made with the Proletcult Theatre troupe as one planned episode of an unrealized cycle on the road to the 1917 revolution. Its slaughterhouse-intercut climax previews the montage-of-attractions technique Eisenstein would sharpen into a global influence the very next year, with Battleship Potemkin.
Background
Strike was Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature film, made in the Soviet Union in 1925 and associated with the Proletkult theatre movement. It depicts a factory strike that turns into a violent confrontation with company spies, provocateurs and troops, and its climax is a massacre of striking workers. Eisenstein built the film from short, rapidly cut images rather than around a single protagonist, a method he developed further in Battleship Potemkin the following year. The cast was largely made up of non-professional actors, a common practice in early Soviet cinema.
What to watch for
Pay attention to the montage in the massacre sequence, which intercuts the killing of workers with shots of a slaughterhouse. The comparison is blunt and was deliberate, which makes it one of the film’s best-known passages. Much of the film’s force comes from quick, graphic cuts rather than long takes, which gives the violence a rhythm of its own. Notice how individual faces appear briefly and how the workers are shown as a collective rather than as a set of individuals. The film is silent, and its intertitles are part of its structure, so the viewing requires attention to both image and text.
