21. Stachka (Strike) 1924

Directed By Sergei Eisenstein

Synopsis

Some workers decide to go on a strike. They start organising and the last drop comes when one of their coleagues commits suicide after being falsely accused of theft by the factory manager. The workers go on strike and conjure up a list of demands. Meanwhile a group of "private agents" are sent out by the powers that be in order to check on the workers.

The strike drags on until the workers are penniless and hungry. "Agents Provocateurs" are sent in in order to make the workers make a false move. They succed in making the workers participate in an attack to a liquor factory. The workers are brutally dispersed by the firemen with water-hoses. Following this the higher-ups send in the troops and it all ends in a brutal massacre of the workers.

Review

Ok, there is not much to be said about the plot. The workers don't come across as well as they could seeing as it seems that the demands made to the bosses are more of an afterthought to the strike instead of a motivation. So it is a case of strike first demand after. Theoretically you could be on the side of the employers here. It is however all changed by the terribly brutal and underhand methods that the employers use to solve the situation.

One thing can be said of Eisenstein, even with the crappiest of plots he can make the best of movies. Eisentein understands the film media like no other director before him. Unlike most other films it doesn't look like he is enacting a theatre play for a camera. Eisentein has discovered that film has very little limitations, so, for example, he has plans where he sees the factory by putting his camera upside down on a puddle; you only realise it is a puddle when someone treads on it, it is not only pretty, it is a completely different way to look at cinema.

In another scene one of the powerful people is looking at the pictures of the agents. There are four passport pictures in a page, the guy decides to hire them and instead of cutting somewhere else the people in the pictures start to move, Amelie style, but in 1924. In the final scene where everyone is massacred Eisenstein intercuts the killing of people with the even more brutal slaying of a cow. People are killed while the cow twitches and gushes blood from her throat. He enhances an idea with an image of something completely different.

And lets not start talking of his editing and cutting skills. This is a giant leap for cinema. It is as if Eisenstein had been born for this. Unfortunately the film's plot never rises above agitprop. But what agitprop!

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Final Grade

8/10 (crap plot!)

Trivia

It's revolutionary and Revolutionary!

From Wiki:

Eisenstein suffered a hemorrhage and died at the age of 50. An unconfirmed legend in film history states that Russian scientists preserved his brain and it supposedly was much larger than a normal human brain, which the scientists took as a sign of genius.