Product Description

Sergei Eisenstein's "Strike," with Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," mark the most outstanding cinematic debuts in the history of film. Triggered by the suicide of a worker unjustly accused of theft, a strike is called by the laborers of a Moscow factory. The managers, owner and the Czarist government dispatch infiltrators in an attempt to break the workers unity. Unsuccessful, they hire the police and, in the film's most harrowing and powerful sequences, the unarmed strikers are slaughtered in a brutal confrontation. This edition of "Strike" is digitally remastered from a mint-condition 35mm print made from the original camera negative and features new digital stereo music composed and performed by the Alloy Orchestra.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65064 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2000-07-25
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Silent, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Customer Reviews

Amazing cinematic expression of class struggle
Eisenstein captures extraordinarily the struggle between labor and capital, displaying brilliant cinematic innovation in the process. The factory workers are not individualized, with certain leaders representing the whole, but shown as a collective whole; both powerful and creative. The factory owner is not one particular boss, but a collage of multiple personalities, to express the impersonal nature of capital and the profit system. The film shows the organizing drive from early meetings of workers, to job actions, to the boss planting spies (innovatively shown both as humans and as devious animals), to the resulting strike and its conclusion. A raw, riveting film that set the stage for Eisenstein's later films, especially "Battleship Potemkin" and "October." A must see for those interested in the labor movement, cinematic and artistic brilliance, or the combination of the two.

The auspicious film debut of director Sergei M. Eisenstein
If the quick and easy label is to call Sergei Eisenstein the Orson Welles of Soviet cinema, chronology notwithstanding, then "Strike" ("Stachka") is the great director's "Citizen Kane." This comparison would be dictated not by the greatness of this 1924 silent film, but rather by the fact "Strike" was Eisenstein's debut film. What the young Eisenstein clearly has in common with the young Welles is the reckless creativity of a kid with a brand new toy. The story is about the strike of factory workers in Czarist Russia in 1912, which ends with the rebellious comrades being brutally beaten down.

Eisenstein might be consumed with exploring the boundaries of cinematic technique, but he does evince some basic storytelling skills here. The climatic tragedy is set up initial comic element, which gain our sympathy for the workers on a human rather than an ideological level. Certainly a management that brings in spies and agents to infiltrate the oppressed workers cannot be supported. The strike begins after a factory worker, falsely accused of being a thief, hangs himself. The initial excitement over the prospects of success faded as the strike goes on and on. When the provocateurs hired by management finally bring things to a head, the tired and hungry workers are no match for the military troops that come to crush them. "Strike" features Grigori Aleksandrov as the Factory Foreman, Aleksandr Antonov as a Member of Strike Committee, Yudif Glizer as the Queen of Thieves, and I. Ivanov as the Chief of Police.

The more you know about Eisenstein's later works, the more you will recognize the raw cinematic techniques he displays in his first film as being refined in his later masterpieces. I know the obvious comparison is to look at "Battleship Potemkin" after screening "Strike," but I think the most profitable analog is with Alexander Dovzhenko's 1929 "Arsenal," which deals with a similar subject, namely a 1918 strike by Bolshevik works in Kiev. "Strike" runs 75 minutes and this Kino on Video edition has been digitally mastered from a mint 35mm print taken from the original negative. The presentation of this silent film is enhanced by a new score by the Alloy Orchestra.

Eisenstein's best - with a great new score!
I've been watching and enjoying Eisenstein for ages, but watched "Strike" only recently (at the recommendation of my SEIU union president, no less). Strike is a truly revolutionary film -- as art and entertainment, as well as politics. While Eisenstein could always succeed at these three levels, his films became more and more "conservative" over time, more ponderous, more conventional, more obsessed with power. This first film is full of energy and surprises -- company spies you can't help liking for their comical antics; agents-provocateurs you admire for their theatricality; dream sequences on a par with Twin Peaks. But it also tells the story of a strike with all the power and clarity of the best labor movies (e.g. Norma Rae), yet on a bigger, more brutal scale. The Alloy Orchestra provides a score that equals the epic panoramas of the factories, tenements, and intense conflict. They cover Eisenstein's emotional range from the hilarious to the devastating. One of my top ten.