Stachka (Strike)

Image credit: Amazon.co.uk

In a depressing start to a gloomy Wednesday morning, I just finished watching a silent masterpiece that brutally highlights the despicable and unfeeling side of humanity. Sergei Eisenstein’s Stachka (or Strike) might be a bit dated, but it really hammers home the idea that humans as a species have a diabolical dark side that tends to win out every time, especially in times of high stress. 

Strike depicts an uprising in a Russian factory, as a series of mistreatments mixed with the authorities’ greed and dishonesty goad the workers towards rebellion. Told in six parts, the film begins with a series of ripples, which then grow into the dramatic events of the following chapters, escalating to strike, starvation, counter rebellion, and finally a massacre. 

Intended to mark the beginning of a series of works about the rise of Marxist-Lenin rule, Strike never got its follow-ups thanks to Bolshevik censorship. However, the film does work as a stand-alone feature (indeed it was Eisenstein’s first and paved the way for other such masterpieces as The Battleship Potempkin [1925] and October [1927]). 

 Eisenstein explores various cinematic tricks and motifs that greatly exacerbate the central drama and carnage of the political messages, the most poignant being in the final chapter where depictions of the massacre are intercut with scenes of cows being slain in a slaughterhouse. This graphically horrific and metaphoric trick is enough to break one’s positive spirit and cause nightmares, even a seasoned mover-goer. 

Image credit: Silver in a Haystack

But of course, this is the point. Eisenstein’s fascination and appreciation of the film medium as a communication, cultural and political means of expression really comes across with this film and while his treatment of his audience is to emotionally hijack them and then continuously punch them in the face until their nose cave and their cheekbones splinter, it nevertheless gets the job done effectively. 

Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1924 Cast: Grigori Aleksandrov, Aleksandr Antonov, Yudif Glizer, Mikhail Gomorov, I. Ivanov, Ivan Klyukvin, Anatoll Kuznetsov, Vladimir Uralsky, Vera Yanukova, & Boris Yurtsev