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Strike
(Stachka)

Live Musical Accompaniment by Martin Marks
Screening on Film
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein.
With Maksim Shtraukh, Ivan Klyukvin, Grigori Alexandrov.
USSR, 1925, 35mm, black & white, silent, 82 min.

Eisenstein’s first film follows the progress of a workers’ strike at a factory in pre-Revolutionary Russia from worker dissatisfaction and organization to a violent denouement. True to Eisenstein’s ideological resistance to the reliance on heroic individuals in mainstream cinema, the focus shifts among a number of groups: provocateurs, strikebreaking troops, an arrogant ruling class and of course the workers themselves. To keep his lesson in the rise of the proletariat entertaining, Eisenstein utilizes all number of attention-getting devices or “attractions” – physical action, heart-tugging melodrama, comic and grotesque exaggeration. Thus, Strike not only announces Eisenstein as a master of montage, it also serves as a valentine to his beloved forms of popular theater: the circus and the music hall.

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