Strike (Stachka)

The first two-thirds of this film were skilfully constructed and very engaging. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself understanding the characters, appreciating the editing and following the story without being distracted by the less familiar silent film style. Moreover the story content was refreshingly original for me; I don’t know many stories about worker-strikes. So I bought into it and was even enjoying it… then Eisenstein went a bit crazy… and very Russian. The last two sections of this film in six chapters just completely lost me, confused me, amused me (unintentionally I’m sure!) and ultimately bored me. My main issue was with character. Cleverly Eisenstein had set up various main characters amongst the workers who we knew and recognised but then in the build-up to the climax, when our emotional attachment to the characters is of greatest importance, they disappear. Worse, he actually introduces a whole bunch of new characters – some crazy people who live in barrels – and goes off on a complete tangent. This community has not been set up in any way and neither has the set-up of our previous group of characters been paid off. I just became totally lost. Further to this problem is Eisenstein’s insistence, like in Potemkin, of making ‘the mob’ his protagonist. We become emotionally engaged in a story if we know and care for the characters. A mob is kind of hard to engage with, on any level, especially if they’re running around willy-nilly doing goodness knows what without a moments breather. The intended theme of injustice doesn’t work unless we somehow know this crowd and feel their pain. When they are hosed down we are obviously supposed to feel angry at the unfairness of the situation but because I had no emotional attachment I felt nothing and instead watched it with mild discomfort and occasionally amusement. Even the baby being thrown off the balcony produced horrified hilarity rather than serious shock and the cow being slaughtered, though unpleasant to watch, had little emotional significance for me. So I don’t think Eisenstein set up his pay-offs, or paid off his set-ups in this film and despite some ground-breaking editing it lost both my emotional attachment and engagement with the story.