The Strike (film, 1925)

the Strike ( Stachka or Стачка ) is a Soviet film of Sergueï Eisenstein, carried out in 1924, but left in 1925. It is about first film of the realizer, who will know the dedication the same year with the Battleship Potemkine .

Synopsis

In 1912, in Russia tsarist, the workmen of a factory are thorough with end by exhausting work conditions, and spies chosen among the Lumpenprolétariat are charged to unearth the leaders trade unionists. A workman is marked wrongly to have stolen a Manomètre. Under the pressure, it is hung. His/her colleagues decide to put themselves in strike, but this one will be repressed in a bloody way by the army tsarist.

Comment

the film is a film of Propagande, intended to galvanize the masses, one of the first production of the cinematography of state of the Soviet Union little time after the Révolution of 1917. Eisenstein shown there a remarkable control (it is its first film) in the framework, the assembly and the symbolic system. The destiny of the workmen crushed by the system is put in parallel with that of animals (until " the abattage" final, gone up in parallel with that of cattle), in opposition with the life of the middle-class men who however are nothing without the people.

For its first film, Eisenstein chooses to present an exemplary form of resistance to oppression: the strike. But, far from making of it a realistic description or a historical reconstitution, it makes of it the theory by the choice of framings, the work of the assembly and the implementation of a dimension symbolic system. From where a film which seems a " handbook of knowledge-burdening with the use of all the generations of the monde".

“the Strike brings the solution to the secular problem of dramatic creation, because its hero and his main character it is the mass… Déjà brilliant film was the first draft of Potemkine. ” - Georges Sadoul

the film was restored and wired for sound in 1969, with extracts of the fifths and sixth symphonies of Prokofiev.

Distribution

Alexandre Antonov: the working militant
Gregori Alexandrov: the foreman
Maxime Chtraukh: the indicator
Ivan Kliouvkine: the activist
Mikhail Gomorov: the workman who hangs
Boris Yourtzyev: the king of the underworld

Distinction

In 1925 the Strike receives the gold medal of the Exposition of decorative arts in Paris.

See too

'' the Strike '' on the encyclopedia Inserted.
the Strike on Internet Movie Database
Videoartworld: The Masters Series. Catalog of films, Photograph, Films of Eisenstein on Line. Public domain

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