Strike / Stachka / Стачка (1924) DVD9 + DVD5 RUSCICO

Commissioned by the government to commemorate the first, failed Bolshevik revolution, the film covers a 1912 strike at a metalworks factory whose workers have been bullied and humiliated by the plant management. The last straw was the suicide of a worker accused of stealing a micrometer. An inevitable fine and a many-month payment of the debt for the lost instrument would have ended in his death from hunger anyway. The workers organize a peaceful strike. But the plant bosses make use of agents provocateurs and eventually bring in the czar's troops, who crack down on the strikers with maximum brutality.

Sergei Eisenstein's debut film is more than a landmark of Soviet cinema; it's easily one of the most thrilling and inventive films to emerge from the silent era of Russian film making. Eisenstein was a theatre director and stage designer with some very specific ideas about the cinema, and he put them into practice telling the story of a worker's strike in pre-Revolution Russia, portraying the struggle not of leader against leader, but of the proletariat against the factory owners, enlivened by a conspiratorial subplot involving a quartet of insidious spies sent to infiltrate the ranks of the workers. The subject matter is at times didactic and the acting often hammy and overwrought, but the technique is vibrant and the images striking. Eisenstein's compositions reflect the graphic boldness of contemporary poster art, mixing poetic realism with grotesque expressionism in a gripping style, and his famous montage editing style (to be perfected in his next film, Battleship Potemkin) i s raw, experimental and energetic. Eisenstein's later films are more consistent and elegant, but none of them have the sheer cinematic invention and energy of this first film.

Film made in Hyperkino format with interactive academic commentaries.

DVD9 + DVD5 | PAL 4:3 | 01:34:07 | 7.02 Gb + 4.27 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Russian intertitles
Subtitles: English, Francais, Espanol, Italiano, Deutsch, Portugues
Genre: Drama, Silent

Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Cast: Maksim Shtraukh, Grigori Aleksandrov, Mikhail Gomorov
Country: Soviet Union
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