Strike

Once considered one of the great filmmakers who ever lived, and whose Battleship Potemkin (1925) was once judged by critics and directors to be the greatest film ever made, Sergei Eisenstein has seen his canonization come and go. Now merely a film school requirement, the name never attains front rank anymore - due to either the general collapse of Soviet Communism and therefore any need to take its culture seriously, or an evolution in taste away from montage pyrotechnics in silent film and toward the camera-movement poetics of the Murnau school, or the last half-century of silent-era discovery and reevaluation that has perhaps stolen the spotlight from Eisenstein's hectically edited, fiercely Bolshevik smart bombs. Like advertising, propaganda is made both useless and quaint by its inherent ephemerality; considering it as art years hence means tumbling into the rabbit-hole of kitsch. (Which we do; note the modern popularity of futurist design and the poster art of Alexander Rodochenko, who, if he were alive, could design my phone bill and I'd pay it twice.) One of the questions regarding Eisenstein today comes down to whether or not he was successful in subverting the state-mandated strait-jacket of his movies' material with his extraordinary visual voodoo. Free of historical intents or contexts, however, fascist art is usually heartbreaking in its naivete, but Eisenstein's movies seem embittered and angry, as if revolutionary discontent unconsciously expressed the artist's outrage that of all the nations in all the eras for the artist to be born into, it had to be this one. Eisenstein was once regarded largely as cinema's most formidable intellectual, but his dialectic-based montage system was a theoretical Kahoutek, and his editing symbologies - equating Kerensky with a peacock in October (1927) - don't necessarily age well. (Not as salient commentary, anyway.) His entire filmmaking philosophy, though responsible for much that is deathless in movie history, was prefigured on a self-deifying cosmos: Eisenstein was the omniscient god, and the audience his easily manipulated minions. (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, it could be said, have similar ideologies and formal approaches.) His most famous agitprop films click and whir like robots; it's no surprise that some of his most watchable films - Que Viva Mexico! (1932) and Alexander Nevsky (1938) - owe little to Hegelian schema and everything to full-tilt boogie expressionism. Everyone abandons dialectics sooner or later, and as the years and donnybrooks with the heads of state went by (Eisenstein was not only gay but rather more passionate about his artistic profile than his role as a propagandist), the filmmaker became entranced more by byzantine compositions than the ability to motivate the masses. Whereas Potemkin and October move like fast rivers of Leninist declamation, Ivan the Terrible (1945-46), coming after the baroque dreamtime of '30s Von Sternberg and the emergence of Welles, slows down to a shadowy, sculptured lurch. Where does that leave Strike (1925), his first feature, for all intents and purposes the film that launched Soviet political filmmaking and the idea that montage was both a uniquely cinematic thrill tool and a formidable instrument for propaganda? The new restored video release - grab it on Blu-Ray if you can, your eyeballs will buy you a case of champagne later - is as apt an occasion as any for applying a fresh perspective to what might be Eisenstein's most personal film, the one he had the most fun making, the man's 400 Blows or Citizen Kane. For one thing, this razor-crisp blast from the past isn't quite as burdened with grim, commanding Communist purpose as Eisenstein's subsequent silents. It is, in fact, spritely, jaunty, ceaselessly inventive and, surprisingly enough if you haven't seen it in a few decades, witty. As the title suggests, the story is a deliberately generic template for revolutionary action - Russian factory workers protest ill-treatment and poor wages, and are then spurned to a full-on strike after a framed compatriot hangs himself. Here, a strike is no dull narrative affair - the capitalists (all fat, cigar-smoking, cartoonish gluttons, of course) employ spies and Cossacks and even the fire department, and the espionage runs both ways, at a gallop. As with Eisenstein's other vintage agitprop classics, there is no single hero or villain, just crowds of collective will, in this case two colliding masses of human self-interest. But the electric pace and visual tumult keeps things charged with an almost slapstick personality. Eisenstein pulls out the stops: multiple exposures employed in an uncountable variety of ways, radical angles, cameras moving with/on top of factory equipment, expressionistically shaped iris ins and outs, even cut-out frames for creating a "fake" split-screen. And of course Strike is edited at a maniacal pace, full of rapid contrapuntal contrasts (if dialectic editing was or is good at anything, it's simply mustering visual excitement), as well as introducing the jump cut (not the Godard jump cut but the Scorsese jump cut), while also taking the time to follow a few pigeons lighting down on the stilled factory equipment, as the battles rage elsewhere. The plastic thrust of Strike is rascally and comedic - sure, Eisenstein's juxtapositions are often ponderous (a giant factory wheel slows to a halt as three workers, faded in, cross the arms in defiance), but the sheer speed and esprit of the film lets him get away with it, as fast comedies can often get away with crude jokes if they keep moving quickly enough. Or is simplistic Communist imagery simply easier to swallow now, so many years after the fact? Indeed, when Eisenstein cuts from Cossacks suppressing a workers' meeting to four fatcat stockholders "squeezing juice" for their cocktails, the effect can be groan-worthy if you let it. Or the outrageous hyperbole can seem almost zesty and satirical by now, since the film is not historical but almost fantastical in its stereotypical portrait of social strata. Look at Strike, with its grotesque villains and backstabbing narrative gambits (a spy secretly photographing a protester with a camera shaped like a pocket-watch), as a retro comic-book saga of good and evil, and suddenly the chill over Soviet tactics fades and you have pure grade-A pulp. The politics, too, emerge as stirring and lovely if you let them, since the film so relentlessly frames the workers' conflict as one of muscular courage, and since the workers were explicitly demanding the same rights - like an eight-hour work day - that workers all over the industrialized world had also been vying for in the pre-Revolutionary decades in which the tale is set. The famous dramatic peaks of the film - particularly the Cossack maliciously dropping an infant three stories to its death - remain powerful, enough so that Kino's discs bear a tiny warning about "violence" that some "may find disturbing." One can bet it's the only silent film to warrant such a labeling in 2011, and it's only due to Eisenstein's breathless artistry behind the camera and at the editing table. Kino's discs come with sweet supplements: Eisenstein's rarely-seen 1923 short Glumov's Diary - an experimental tidbit made to be shown during a stage performance of Alexander Ostrovsky's play Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man - and a featurette doc, Natacha Laurent's Eisenstein and the Revolutionary Spirit (2008), that limns the historical context around Eisenstein's career. For more information about Strike, visit Kino Lorber Films. To order Strike, go to TCM Shopping. by Michael Atkinson