FM-S098-1925

Strike

Video

DVD

F&MS

No

Available

Eisenstein's STRIKE, with Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE, marks the most remarkable cinematic debut in history. 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 Czarist government dispatch infiltrators in an attempt to break the worker's 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. The story, divided into six parts, was influenced by the amazing theatrical inventions of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Eisenstein experimented with the use of montage, parallel editing, expanded time, and the intercutting of symbolic images - the beginnings of the techniques that would change the look of cinema. To many, Eisenstein's first film - like Welles' - would remain his greatest work, surpassing even Potemkin in its power and sheer brilliance.