Strike (1925)

 Sergei Eisenstein's "Strike"

Sergei Eisenstein's 'Strike' takes place in 1903, at a time when class division was high in Russia. The Industrial Revolution had taken hold of the country. For the world, the Industrial Revolution brought the mass production of materials and technology. With this, capitalism really started to take hold as owners of capital and other means of production became richer and were able to exert more control over their workers. The industrial capitalists and nobles of Russia began to seize power over the working class. With the spread of capitalism, the notion of individualism also spread inherently. The infiltration of Western ideals into the Russian culture created the early 20th century tensions that would eventually lead to the Soviet Revolution of 1917.  This gave rise to Vladimir Lenin, who led the working class proletariat to overthrow the industrial capitalists and the aristocracy that propped it up. 

It is with these ideas the Soviet film theorist Sergei Eisenstein created both the film Strike, as well as his theories on film montage. The film Strike is essentially about a group of laborers going on a strike against the oppressive owners of the factory. With his film, Eisenstein deftly shifts from the traditional individualistic perspective towards an overarching depiction of the Soviet collective experience. Strike is not about one person, but about a group of people. This is one of the essential ideas behind the Soviet Revolution. At the beginning of the film we see a quote from Lenin, "The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletariat is nothing. Organized, it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, the unity of practical activity." This quote really sets up a foundational ideal of the film. Effective action and storytelling can be used with the display of characters as a group rather than as individuals. With this notion, you can create group action to represent larger abstract concepts. 

Eisenstein also uses the Soviet revolution to come to another conclusion about film language itself. Due to the Communist revolution and the proletariats acting in conflict with their oppressors, a new concept of society was created. With this idea, Eisenstein developed his theories of montage. Montage, as we understand it in contemporary cinema, is the idea of compressed time and space to convey a larger point. An example of this is the training sequence in Rocky - shots and edits of Rocky training i.e., running up a hill edited against him punching a punching bag edited with him doing push ups. This sequence spliced together creates in the mind of the viewer the experience of the extensive time Rocky trained.  However, it also efficiently compresses the amount of time spent watching the process. The montage sequence conveys the larger idea, "Rocky spends a lot of time training." Although, when Eisenstein refers to montage, he is referring to the actual editing of a set of images. The word 'montage' here comes from the French word meaning 'assembly' - as in an assembly of images (assembly being another connotation of the Soviet notion of organization of masses). With these montages, Eisenstein is able to take two images with no direct correlation and create conflict between them. Whether that conflict be between the conceptual difference between the two in the mind of the viewer, or the radical and rapid edit between them. The rapid editing between two images can create conflict due to its extreme ability to call attention to itself. Western film at the time, thanks in part to D.W. Griffith, had pinned down an efficient way to edit images together so that the viewer doesn't notice the edit. For example, when someone looks at something offscreen, the film then cuts to the image of what the person is looking at. Alternatively, when action occurs, one can cut to another action taking place at the same time. For instance, a couple sitting in a train car juxtaposed with the image of train tracks. The intention here is to seamlessly notify the audience that the couple are sitting on a train car while the train is moving along the tracks toward its destination. However, Eisenstein's theories of montage are meant to create conflict within the viewer. Because the images themselves are unrelated, the viewer is meant to participate in the viewing experience by providing a contextual similarity between the two images. This participation by the viewer takes two separate images and creates a third abstract meaning.

In Strike, Eisenstein uses the Soviet revolution and his theories of film montage to great effect. The film begins with three images - factory smoke stacks, an underhanded factory owner, and busy laborers - effectively creating the film's first montage. These edited images convey the economic landscape Russia was experiencing at the time of the film's setting. The aristocracy and ruling classes had individual ownerships in the bustling economic industry. Throughout the first part of the film, it is apparent that laborers are unhappy about their working conditions. This is achieved by Eisenstein showing us different shots of laborers drenched in shadow whispering to each other. The factory owners catch wind of this insurrection and send out hired informants to spy on the laborers. 

After being accused of theft by one of the factory heads, a factory worker commits suicide. This is the incident that incites the strike by the laborers. The proletariat band together and go on strike, stopping all factory production. Not only do we see the masses of laborers banding together and leaving their work stations, but Eisenstein also edits together the image of three laborers with the spinning wheel of a factory machine. When the three laborers fold their arms, the machine wheel stops. These two images together convey the larger idea of the proletariat making up the foundation of industry- without their mass support industrial progress and it's profits stop completely. With that thought, you can draw a line further to the cessation of economic flow to the ruling class. 

As the proletariat are forming their demands, the are greeted by police forces. While being confronted by police, they are bullied and hassled to the point of sitting down in the field to protest. While this is happening, Eisenstein shows us the factory director meeting with the shareholders to review the demands of the people. They not only scoff at the demands, but one of the shareholders uses the demands to clean up lemon juice that spilled on his shoe - just to show how unconcerned they are. One of the other shareholders starts to juice lemons for their drinks while saying, "If you push hard, you really get the juice." The image of him doing this is edited together with the image of the proletariat being intimated by police -  as if to denote the pressure the stockholders intend to apply on the strikers. 

The shareholders send back a refusal of demands and send out spies to survey strike leaders. As the leaders of the strike discuss the refusal of demands by the shareholders, Eisenstein superimposes the image of the police chief's hand over the group - just before he transitions to the Chief picking up a pen to sign an arrest warrant for the leader. Eisenstein is conveying the level of power and control the police chief will exert on the strikers. 

The shareholders are also able to hire homeless civilians to infiltrate the strikers' protests and instigate violence and arson. The hired provocateurs are able to set fire to a liquor store - causing the fire department and the police to get involved. Once involved, the police begin to mercilessly massacre the strikers. While killing them, Eisenstein edits these images of police violence over the images of a bull being slaughtered. The conflict in these images is not between what is happening thematically, but rather the visual discomfort with the images of the slaughtering of the cow. The visual horror of the cow's slaughter is thematically contrasted with the slaughtering of the proletariat. Eisenstein is conveying the idea that the laborers are like cattle, and are being unjustly slaughtered as such. 

With these visual conflicts that Eisenstein creates, he is able to make the viewer an active participant in what they are seeing. He makes the viewer feel like part of the collective with the proletariat. Using these methods of montage, he can formulate a sequence of images that creates in the mind of the viewer an abstract idea. The abstract ideas here focus on the Communist revolution versus the capitalistic industrialists. Eisenstein expertly demonstrates their oppressive dictatorship over the laborers and the scope of their power and wealth.