Films To While The Class
Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) In Mind
DVD Review
By Frank Jackman
Strike, starring a cast of
hundreds of working people and others, directed by Serge Eisenstein, 1925
No question, no question at
all that some political films whether they were intended as propaganda for a
certain viewpoint as with the film under review, Russian mad man filmmaker
Serge Eisenstein’s 1925 Strike, or because
as the story line developed everybody was compelled to think through the
implications of the cover-up and preclude to coup in a film like Costa-Garvas’
Z. Here is the beauty of Eisenstein’s work whether with Strike or
an effort like Potemkin, the one with the famous baby carriage
scene on the Odessa Steps. The medium is the message to steal a phrase from an
old-time social media commentator. The whole thing is done, powerfully done,
with nothing but absolutely stunning cinematography, a few signboards (in
Russian with English subtitles), and some very interesting and varied mood
music which if I am not mistaken included some jazz theme stuff from Duke
Ellington, and if not him then definitely some jazz riffs along with that
inevitable classic music that one would have expected from a Russian filmmaker
who grabbed what he could from the Russian
Five.
Now the question of who a
film is directed at is usually pretty much just to lure in general audiences,
maybe if it is cartoonish then kids but usually general audiences. Eisenstein
in this film though is directing his efforts to working people, in order for
them to draw some important lessons about the class struggle. Of course
Eisenstein was working shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 in his
country and so he probably was more or less committed to this type of film in
the interests of the Soviet government and of the world revolution that was
still formally what the Bolsheviks and their international allies were all
about. (I might add though that a later film about Ivan the Terrible had the
same fine cinematic qualities and that was not particularly directed at the
world’s working classes but to ancient Russian patriotic fervor.) That drawing of
lessons about what happened during the strike is what drives the force of the
film.
Here is how this one played
out in all its glory and infamy. The workers at a Russian factory of unknown
location and for that matter of unknown production had been beaten down by the
greedy capitalists and stockholders, had had no say in what they made and how
much dough they made. (The scenes with the greedy capitalists are a treasure,
something out of any leftist’s caricature of the old time robber barons
complete with fat bellies, cigars and top hats). Like any situation where
tensions are strung out to the limit it did not take a lot to produce a reason
for a strike for a better shake in this wicked old world. Here it was an honest
workman’s being accused of a theft which he couldn’t defend himself against and
so in shame he committed suicide. After have previously spent several weeks
talking about taking an action to better their conditions the leaders of the
underground “strike committee” decided to have everybody “down tools.” (The
scene of this action with a rolling shutdown as section after section left
their benches was breathtaking.)
Of course in turn of the
century (20th century) Russia (and elsewhere) the capitalists
were as vicious as one would expect of a new class of exploiters dealing here
with people, men and women, just off the farm and so in no mood to grant such
things as an eight-hour day (a struggle that we in America are very familiar
with from the Haymarket Martyrs whose chief demand a couple of decades before
was for that same eight hour day) and a big wage increase. So the committee of
capitalists and their hangers-on gave a blanket “no.” Said the hell with you to
the strikers.
The aftermath of this
refusal is where the real lessons of this film are to be drawn. Needless to say
the capitalists were willing, more than willing to starve the workers into
submission (the scenes of some workers pawning off their worldly possession for
food for the kids, for themselves are quite moving).But not only were they
willing to starve the mass of workers back to the factory but did everything in
their power to break the strike by other means. First and foremost to send
spies out to stir up trouble in order to get the class unity broken, then tried
to get some weak-links to betray the movement from within, and if that didn’t
work then try might and main to round up by any way possible the leaders of the
strike in order to behead the movement. In the end though they were not above
using their “Pharaohs,” their mounted cops and troops to suppress the whole
thing. In the final scene after the cops and troops have done their murderous
assaults on unarmed strikers the corpses spread out widely on the massacre
field tell anybody who wasn’t sure about the role of the cops and troops all
they need to know about the way the strike was defeated.
From what I could gather
from the last signboard (one which mentioned the Lena gold strike which was I
believe was suppressed in 1912) the time period of this strike was between the
1905 revolution that went down in flames and the victorious revolution in 1917.
The implications of the failure of the strike, of the need to take the state
power, were thus through Eisenstein’s big lenses there for all to see. Hey,
even if you don’t draw any political conclusions from this film just watch to
see what they mean they say a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words.
Eisenstein has a thousand such pictures that will fascinate and repel
you.
