"Strike" was Sergei Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. Like his better-known "Battleship Potemkin", made later in the same year, it was intended to be part of a larger project which was never finished. "Battleship Potemkin" was supposed to be part of a great epic celebrating the failed revolution of 1905, which the Bolsheviks saw as a dress-rehearsal for their seizure of power twelve years later, and "Strike" was intended to be part of a seven-part series entitled "Towards the Dictatorship". (As in "dictatorship of the proletariat").
Another similarity between the two films is that both were made with an explicitly propagandistic purpose, concentrating on the vices of Tsarism rather than the virtues of Communism. "Strike" is ostensibly set in 1903, although the vehicles and women's fashions we see would suggest a rather later date. The film tells the story of a strike by the workers at a factory in Tsarist Russia, and its suppression by the police and military. The original reason for the strike is the suicide of a worker wrongly accused of theft, although the strikers later formulate demands for increased wages and shorter hours, demands which are contemptuously rejected by the management and the corrupt bourgeois shareholders. The final scene depicts the massacre of the striking workers by the army, cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered. (An example of Eisenstein's theory of "montage"). "Strike" emphasises collective rather than individual action even more than "Battleship Potemkin". In the latter film the rebels all work together, but they are led by the charismatic revolutionary agitator Vakulinchuk, a figure who significantly combines Lenin's bald head with Stalin's walrus moustache. There is no equivalent character in "Strike".
"Battleship Potemkin" is a technically accomplished film with one particularly masterly scene, the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence, but I cannot regard it as a great film. It was a good film made in a bad cause, not so much towards the dictatorship of the proletariat as towards the dictatorship of Stalin and the Party elite. "Strike" is much less accomplished; the tension established in the early scenes dissipates in the lengthy middle sections depicting the activities of the various company spies with their animal code-names, and the final scene has none of the emotional impact of "Odessa Steps". The symbolism of the cattle slaughter is crude and obvious, and the propaganda is too heavy-handed to be effective, about as subtle as Orwell's "Four legs good, two legs bad!" "Strike" is a mediocre film made in a bad cause. 4/10.
Another similarity between the two films is that both were made with an explicitly propagandistic purpose, concentrating on the vices of Tsarism rather than the virtues of Communism. "Strike" is ostensibly set in 1903, although the vehicles and women's fashions we see would suggest a rather later date. The film tells the story of a strike by the workers at a factory in Tsarist Russia, and its suppression by the police and military. The original reason for the strike is the suicide of a worker wrongly accused of theft, although the strikers later formulate demands for increased wages and shorter hours, demands which are contemptuously rejected by the management and the corrupt bourgeois shareholders. The final scene depicts the massacre of the striking workers by the army, cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered. (An example of Eisenstein's theory of "montage"). "Strike" emphasises collective rather than individual action even more than "Battleship Potemkin". In the latter film the rebels all work together, but they are led by the charismatic revolutionary agitator Vakulinchuk, a figure who significantly combines Lenin's bald head with Stalin's walrus moustache. There is no equivalent character in "Strike".
"Battleship Potemkin" is a technically accomplished film with one particularly masterly scene, the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence, but I cannot regard it as a great film. It was a good film made in a bad cause, not so much towards the dictatorship of the proletariat as towards the dictatorship of Stalin and the Party elite. "Strike" is much less accomplished; the tension established in the early scenes dissipates in the lengthy middle sections depicting the activities of the various company spies with their animal code-names, and the final scene has none of the emotional impact of "Odessa Steps". The symbolism of the cattle slaughter is crude and obvious, and the propaganda is too heavy-handed to be effective, about as subtle as Orwell's "Four legs good, two legs bad!" "Strike" is a mediocre film made in a bad cause. 4/10.