Strike
About Strike
At a Russian factory in 1903, management spies watch the shops. A micrometer is stolen, the worker Yakov is blamed, and he hangs himself. The hands walk out, dump a foreman in a wheelbarrow, and send demands: an eight-hour day, a thirty-percent raise, six hours for minors. Shareholders wipe their boots on the letter. A police spy photographs a strike leader. The 'King of Thieves' is hired to start a fire and loot a liquor store so the strike can be blamed. Firemen turn hoses on the crowd. The governor sends troops, who drive the workers into a field and shoot them. The shooting is cut against a cow being slaughtered.
Cast & crew
More about Strike
Sergei Eisenstein's first feature, made with the Proletkult theatre and Goskino as one part of a planned cycle, Towards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Grigori Aleksandrov, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valerian Pletnev shared the script. Eduard Tisse photographed it, with Vladimir Popov and Vasili Khvatov. Test footage was shot at a studio on Zhitnaya Street; factory workers from Moscow filled the crowd scenes.
Themes
Background
The strike in the film is set in 1903, before 1917. Eisenstein made it in 1924–25, when Goskino was still financing experiments from the theatre workshops.
Making
Eisenstein was moving from Proletkult stage work to film. The animal labels, the thieves' king on a junked car, and the slaughterhouse cut are the devices Proletkult officials later called gimmicks.
Reviews
Mikhail Koltsov wrote in Pravda that it was the first revolutionary work of Soviet cinema. Proletkult officials attacked what they called superfluous formalism. In Sight & Sound in 1956, Ivor Montagu described the mix of factory realism and clowning.
Audiences
Many audiences in 1925 found the grotesque style hard to follow, and the film had little distribution outside the Soviet Union until the 1950s and 1960s.
Look
Eduard Tisse shot the shops, the locked factory with birds in the aisles, and the field where the soldiers fire. The massacre is intercut with a butchered cow.
Preservation
Prints survive at feature length. A digital copy is on the Internet Archive under Strike_323.
Notes
- It opened in Leningrad on 1 February 1925, had a public showing on 9 March, and a theatrical release on 28 April.
- The six chapter titles run from 'At the factory all is quiet' through 'Extermination.'
- Spies have animal code names. One of them, the Owl, hides a camera in a pocket watch.
- Shareholders at the meeting use a lemon squeezer while they talk about pressing the strikers.
- The Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts gave the film a gold medal in 1925.
- Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's next film, came out of the same unfinished cycle.
Awards
- Gold medal, International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris (1925)
Scenes
- Yakov, blamed for a stolen micrometer, hangs himself in the shop.
- Workers wheel a manager out and dump him.
- The Owl photographs a strike leader with a camera hidden in a watch.
- Soldiers shoot the crowd in a field while a cow is killed on the slaughterhouse floor.
Influenced
- Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Also available
- Internet Archive (Strike_323)
