Soviet cinema must cut through to the skull! … We must cut with our ciné-fist through to skulls, cut through to final victory and now, under the threat of an influx of ‘real life’ and philistinism into the Revolution we must cut through as never before! Make way for the ciné-fist!
In November 1922, Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevitch published an article in praise of ‘The Eighth Art’ (i.e. the cinema) and, especially, of Charlie Chaplin, who had ‘taken the eighth seat in the council of muses.’1 While criticising the ‘corrupting influences of naturalism’ on some directors, such as Louis Delluc, films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, animated films and the detective adventure comedy film, gained their approval. ‘Everyone is aware of the enormous influence that cinema now exerts on the other arts … Thus the happy infant (as Ilya Ehrenburg called it) grows bigger and prettier and the directors, artists, poets and technicians of the whole world who are interested in the victory of the new art must devote all their efforts to ensuring that their favourite infant does not fall into the obliging clutches of the “heliotrope auntie” and the sanctimonious watchdogs of morality.’2
In the near future, there would be more menacing ‘watchdogs of morality’ than these heliotrope aunties or Mrs Grundys presenting themselves in various forms during Eisenstein’s life. While researching An American Tragedy in the USA, he came across a photo of three Daughters of the American Revolution, archetypically prim and proper looking (bespectacled, hair in buns etc), on which he could have drawn for the censorious women in the courtroom, a typage not unknown in Hollywood films. He was also to suffer from the prudish disapproval of a group of Pasadena women who had invested in Qué Viva México!
Eisenstein’s first practical experience with the eighth art was the five-minute film interlude used in his production of Enough Folly in a Wise Man. It shows the actors, including Grigori Alexandrov, Maxim Strauch, Mikhail Gomorov and Eisenstein himself in masks or highly stylised make-up.
The play opened with the hero Glumov, played by Alexandrov, in top hat, white face, white smock and tights, recounting how his diary has been stolen and that he has been threatened with exposure. Curtains parted at the back of the stage to reveal a screen on which a film was projected. The film showed Glumov’s acts and thoughts over a period of a week. It begins with the theft of his diary by a man in a black mask – a pastiche of the American detective film, especially Pearl White’s cliffhanging serials such as The Exploits of Elaine (1915). The depiction of the contents of the diary parodied a Pathé newsreel and took a dig at the Kino-Pravda news-reels then being made by Dziga Vertov.
The film goes on to reveal Glumov’s flattery of his patrons. By the use of dissolves, he transforms himself into whatever object is desired by each person; with General Joffre he becomes a machine gun, with his scolding uncle he turns into an obedient ass, with his doting aunt he becomes a babe in arms … (it was an unintentionally prescient reminder of how Soviet artists had to take whatever shape the regime demanded, when their spring changed instantaneously into winter.)
Glumov then wanders over the rooftops, climbs a steeple, waves at an aeroplane flying above, hangs his top-hat on the steeple, loses his footing and falls into a motorcar that takes him to the very theatre (the Proletkult) where the show is taking place. As the film ended, Alexandrov burst through the screen onto the stage, triumphantly holding up a reel of film. This final idea had been used several years earlier by Max Linder in Moscow, which Eisenstein had probably heard about but not seen.
‘Thus the theatre took a leap into cinema, expanding metaphors to degrees of literalness unattainable in the theatre itself,’ recalled Eisenstein. ‘And this culminated in the final stroke: when the audience called for me, I did not come on stage to take any curtain-calls – instead I appeared on the screen bowing like a peculiar version of the Pathé cockerel, with the shock of hair I affected in those days that was worthy of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion!’3
Glumov’s Diary, as the segment is often referred to, was shot at Goskino (State Cinema Enterprise) on a Thursday, and was ready for the show’s first night the following Saturday. ‘As the Goskino people thought that I might be too mischievous, so they gave me as a teacher … Dziga Vertov! After watching us take our first two or three shots, Vertov gave us up as a hopeless case and left us to our own fate.’4
As the untrained Proletkult group had been warned about wasting precious raw film, each shot was filmed exactly as it was to be cut, none of the hundred and twenty meters was wasted. The conclusion of Eisenstein’s first shooting script reads: ‘Baby/Head of Strauch/Strauch (long shot)/Mashenka (close-up)/Legs/Mashenka and Glumov (close-up)/Cheque paid to organisation (long shot)/Thumb/Trio [Pyriev, Antonov, Strauch]/Thumb/Trio/Grisha/I bow.’
By this time the cinema was no revelation to Eisenstein. Several years earlier, as a penniless student, he had wormed his way free into a St Petersburg cinema and seen the repertory of American films showing there. At the same time he had seen the first German expressionist films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with its weird and distorted sets and grotesquely angled photography. Most important was his encounter with the films of D.W. Griffith and, through them, with the principal of montage. Intolerance, which had found its way through the blockade early in 1919, was an exciting discovery of the possibilities of cinematic expression and proved a seminal influence.
In 1920, a copy of The Birth of a Nation reached Moscow. According to Eisenstein, Griffith, ‘The Great Old Man of all of us’, had ‘played a massive role in the development of montage in the Soviet film.’5 (In 1923, Griffith was invited to make a film in the Soviet Union, but declined the offer.) Some years later, however, Eisenstein felt that Griffith was unable to take the possibilities of cross-cutting and parallel action any further. It was, of course, Eisenstein who realised its full potential.
Yet several years before Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, one of the first theorists of the cinema, was advocating the study of American films, especially Westerns and the work of Griffith. ‘I was the first in Russia to speak the word “montage”, to speak of the action, of the dynamic of the cinema, of realism in the art of film,’ Kuleshov claimed.6 He articulated what seems basic to us today, that the arrangement of individual shots in the cutting room (montage) is central to the specificity of cinema. He arrived at montage almost by accident because the shortage of film during the Civil War years led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting up and rearranging parts of old ones.
‘We make films, Kuleshov made cinema,’ declared Pudovkin.7 In 1924, Kuleshov put his researches at the services of his first fiction feature, the gag-filled satire The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, made with members of his workshop, including Pudovkin, who played one of the criminals. Using mobile cameras, quick cutting and sequences derived from American chase films, the picture managed to deride the West’s stereotyped view of ‘mad, savage, Russians,’ while creating its own stereotyped Americans – the Harold Lloyd-type Mr West, clutching an American flag, and his faithful cowboy aide Jed, firing his six-guns and lassoing motor cyclists in like steers from the top of a Moscow taxi.
The first meeting between Eisenstein and Kuleshov took place at the time of Enough Simplicity for a Wise Man, which had impressed the latter. ‘Here was a theatre director who used new methods,’ Kuleshov recalled, ‘and who seemed to be speaking to us with those new words for which we were all waiting, and not always patiently, in those stormy and passionate years.’8 Kuleshov was then only twenty-four, one year Eisenstein’s junior, but had made his first short film, The Project of Engineer Prite, when he was eighteen.
Kuleshov was running ‘films without film’ workshops in the first Soviet State School of Cinematography, preparing film-makers for the day when they could obtain raw stock to put in their empty cameras. He and Eisenstein made a ‘business arrangement.’
‘Our intentions were entirely admirable, but our accommodation was totally inadequate, whereas Eisenstein had superb accommodation in the building of the Proletkult. Hence our business agreement, whereby Eisenstein gave my own students the use of his floor-space for their gymnastics, sport, acrobatics, and so forth, and in return I gave lectures on the cinema to his actors. We both gained from our collaboration, and in Eisenstein’s case the gain was largely due to his ignorance of the cinema. Yet he had already developed a great interest in it, and his appetite had been increased by his experience in making that short sequence for A Wise Man. So he decided to study the cinema in earnest, and he asked if he might join my laboratory as an observer. I agreed at once, with the consequence that for three months, and regularly each evening, he worked with me on the technique of film editing and especially the editing of the subject matter that attracted him most of all – mass movement and mass action … Eisenstein proved to be the most extraordinary student, and I can say in all sincerity that in those three months he completely mastered all that was known at that time about the arts and techniques of the cinema. He began as my pupil, but very soon he became my teacher, thereby proving the truth of one of his favourite sayings: that anyone in the world could learn to become a film director, but some people needed three years’ training and others at least three hundred … For Sergei Eisenstein the time required was exactly three months – part-time!’9
Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov attended the workshops held in the attic of Meyerhold’s theatre. It was not long before Eisenstein was formulating his theories on montage, which would later veer away from those of Kuleshov. But he had to wait a little longer to be able to put any of his theories into practice. He came closer with his work with Esther Shub, which marked the real beginning of his cinematic apprenticeship.
The Ukrainian-born Esther Shub studied literature in Moscow in the years before the Revolution. With the Revolution she enrolled in classes at the Institute for Women’s Higher Education, and became ‘theatre officer’ at the State Commissariat of Education. Shub began work at Goskino in 1922, editing and titling foreign and pre-revolutionary films, some of which had to be adjusted to accord with revolutionary principles. All films from abroad were closely censored to eliminate any ‘unhealthy tendencies’ before their general release to the public. In this censoring process the entire sense of the film could be radically altered. There was a case when excerpts from two completely separate films were edited into a single film so as to point out the contrast between the life of leisure enjoyed by the passengers of a luxury liner and the sweat and toil of the stokers below deck. She also completely re-edited Carmen (1916), Charlie Chaplin’s first film to be seen in Russia.
Eisenstein frequently visited Shub in her cutting room, observing her at this questionable practice, and watching the run-through of films she had edited. At the end of March 1924, assisted by Eisenstein, she was cutting the two parts of Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922), which she reduced to one film under the title Golden Putrefaction for Soviet distribution. Then, at her home, where she had a small cutting table and projector, she would put together pieces of film with often startling results. It was at Shub’s cutting table that the mysteries of montage were revealed to Eisenstein.
Shortly after working with Shub, Eisenstein left Proletkult, following a clash of opinions. One reason was the feeling that their co-operative mentality did not permit him the recognition he felt he deserved as a director. He turned for help to his old friend from the Civil War days, the painter Konstantin Yeliseyev, who was now editing the review Red Pepper. Yeliseyev readily accepted Eisenstein’s suggestion that he should join the review as a cartoonist. The very next day, however, Eisenstein apologetically explained to Yeliseyev that he had changed his mind overnight, having been given the chance to make his first full-length film. Although there was a constant shortage of film stock throughout the 1920s, Soviet film production was gradually increasing, and Goskino’s director, Boris Mikhin, was keen to shoot a projected cycle of seven films to be called Towards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, intended as an historical panorama of the Party and the working class movement before 1917.
They were to be: 1) Geneva-Russia: the work of the Tsarist secret police 2) Underground: underground political activity 3) The First of May: the organising of illegal May Day meetings 4) 1905: the conclusion of the first stage of the Russian Revolution 5) The Strike: revolutionary responses by the proletariat 6) Prisons, Revolts, Escapes 7) October: the seizing of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Valeri Pletnyov, the head of Proletkult, was given the job of writing the script for one of the films, The Strike, and invited Eisenstein to direct this joint production of Proletkult and Goskino. Though planned as the fifth film in the cycle, it was to be the first to start shooting. Boris Mikhin was determined to draw Eisenstein into filming despite his unconcealed dislike of his theatre work. But, as he later claimed, he intuitively recognised Eisenstein’s potential as a great film director.
Before shooting began in the summer of 1924, the cautious Mikhin began breaking Eisenstein in on the technical aspects of the film studio, and chose the people to work with him. He introduced Eisenstein to twenty-seven-year-old Edouard Tisse, a cameraman who had distinguished himself in newsreel work during the Civil War. In 1918, Tisse shot the first Soviet feature, Signal, and a film about Soviet Latvia the following year for Vertov’s Kino-Glaz group.
There is so much mystery surrounding Tisse’s origins that many false statements about them have been printed. He was said to have been born in Latvia of a Swedish father and Russian mother (or vice versa). Because of his name, people presumed him to be French, putting an acute accent on the final ‘e’. Even more confusing was the fact that Eisenstein referred to him as ‘The German’.
Tisse was born Kazimirovich Nikolaitis in Lithuania of Catholic Lithuanian parents; his father was Kazimir Nikolaitis, and his mother was of Swedish extraction. For some reason, the son took the name Edouard, changed his surname to Tisse, and claimed to be German. (Later, in the early 1930s, when it was extremely unpopular to be German, he explained that a mistake had been made, and that he was really Lithuanian.)
Eisenstein and Tisse met for the first time in the garden of the Morozov mansion, the headquarters of the Proletkult Theatre. Eisenstein showed Tisse the treatment for The Strike, which Tisse went through carefully, calmly correcting several technical terms such as substituting ‘double exposure’ for what Eisenstein had imaginatively called ‘profusion upon profusion’.
Though very different physically and temperamentally – the volcanic Eisenstein with massive head, wild hair and boyish face; Tisse, tall, blue-eyed, blond, calm, modest and temperate – they were well suited in their daring and eagerness to experiment. Tisse was probably the person with whom Eisenstein talked least about filming. There was no need. Nor did they even address each other by the familiar form of address, bound though they were by a deep aesthetic affinity.
Mikhin explained to Eisenstein why he chose Tisse as photographer. ‘In the theatre you get carried away by your passion for acrobatics. You’ll probably be just as rash when it comes to filming. Edouard has an outstanding record as a news reporter and he’s also still an excellent athlete. You’ll doubtless get on well together.’10
However, it was touch and go as to whether Eisenstein would make his first film at all. Mikhin made Eisenstein do some test filming, but when the first two tests were rejected, Goskino were on the verge of dropping the tyro director. He then made a third test, and due to the persistent efforts of Mikhin and Tisse, including their willingness to give a written guarantee of the film’s successful completion, Eisenstein was given the go-ahead.
Certain principles formed the foundation of The Strike. It would present a generalised picture of a strike, and not an actual historical event, a synthesis of many such clashes between the workers and the owners. Also, instead of individual heroes the workers should be portrayed as collective heroes in their clash with the capitalists.
Eisenstein spent some months researching the subject prior to shooting, meeting a number of formerly outlawed Party activists and strikers; he visited factories, assembled a prodigious amount of documentation, and read books such as Emile Zola’s Germinal, the novel of hunger and misery during a 19th-century coal strike. He worked day and night, as he was always to do, and since he was still dealing in an unfamiliar medium, he asked the experienced Esther Shub to collaborate with him.
For two months they worked on the script at her house, but after its official acceptance, he left her out of the filming team – an action which she never understood and which wounded her deeply. The reason is hinted at in a characteristically teasing paragraph from Eisenstein’s memoirs.
‘In her relationship with me in the 1920s, Esfir Ilyinichna Shub probably saw herself as some kind of enigmatic George Sand. Although it would be difficult to find anyone bearing a fainter resemblance to Chopin or de Musset than me, short-legged and corpulent as I am. But why else would she have advised me to read Tynyanov’s A Nameless Love … a picture of such a love. A love hidden and illicit. But illicit rather than hidden. But of such strength. And inspired. A love which strove to immerse its unattainability in the flourishes of the endless Don Juan catalogue.’11
Esther Shub, four years Eisenstein’s senior, wanted to get closer to him than he wished, and he was always ironic about her from the beginning of their relationship. In the passage quoted, Eisenstein equivocally implies that Shub was in love with him, but failed to declare it, as well as making an underlying reference to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.
On The Strike, Eisenstein’s object of desire, Grigori Alexandrov, was credited three times, as assistant director, as co-screenwriter, and as actor in the role of the foreman. Mikhail Gomorov and Alexander Antonov from the Proletkult played workers, and Maxim Strauch a police spy. Strauch’s wife, Judith Glizer, was one of the leading female workers. Other parts were filled by actors and students of the Proletkult studio, joined by Moscow factory workers for the later crowd scenes.
The first scenes were filmed at the studio in Zhitnaya Street, which for that time was relatively well equipped. Every evening, after filming, the team would discuss the work they had done and decide on a programme for the following day. At these discussions, which Mikhin also attended, Eisenstein almost invariably made demands considered excessive by the management, as when he insisted on using a thousand extras for the episode in which the police and firemen drive away the workers with jets of water. Mikhin pointed out the impossibility of such a demand, but Eisenstein refused any concession. After a fierce quarrel, Mikhin resorted to the stratagem of pretending to agree, while secretly giving orders for only five hundred extras to be called in.
Eisenstein wanted to shoot the clash between the workers and the boiler-house mechanics opposed to them as a ‘series of complicated circuses’ with men leaping and vaulting about, brawling, throwing each other into barrels. When a stool had to be smashed over the head of one of the fighters, he insisted on the splinters of wood being clearly visible. Everything was rehearsed to perfection, but repeatedly failed to work out during shooting. Once Tisse found he had run out of film and the whole process had to be repeated.
On one occasion, while filming on location at the Simonov Monastery, Eisenstein wanted to liken the factory manager to a grinning frog – shades of his earliest sketches – whereupon filming came to a standstill while everyone went off to the lake in a desperate search for a frog. On a freezing October day, one of the property men had to wade into the water up to his waist, but to no avail since the director rejected every frog produced as being too small, or unsuitable in some other way. At long last the right frog was found. Too late, however, as it was already getting dark and the frog had to be thrown back. Eisenstein was unaware of the resentment this incurred among the crew, because his mind was set only on the realisation of his ideas, irrespective of the difficulties involved. (He did, however, get a gruesome close-up of a magnificent frog in The General Line, a few years later).
The film’s method of construction was based on what Eisenstein called ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’ set out in an article he wrote after The Strike was completed. ‘An attraction is in our understanding any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that, combined with others, possesses the characteristic of concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose. From this point of view a film cannot be a simple presentation or demonstration of events; rather it must be a tendentious selection of, and comparison between, events, free from narrowly plot-related plans and moulding the audience in accordance with its purpose.’12
In what could be called Eisenstein’s Theory of Relativity, he demonstrated that cinema is ‘the art of comparisons … montage is fundamental to cinema …’ These theories become clear in practice when one is watching The Strike.
The Strike was a logical extension of Eisenstein’s energetic approach to the theatre, showing the same enthusiasms and the same fundamental principles of entertaining and shocking the audience. Although the workers are handled for the most part naturalistically, and several sequences, such as the scene in which the factory workers are beaten up by the mounted forces of the Tsar, are totally realistic, the capitalist bosses and their stooges are extreme caricatures, realised through the techniques of the circus and American slapstick film comedy. Other influences seem to have been German Expressionism, remembering that Eisenstein had worked with Shub on the cutting of Dr Mabuse, the Gambler, and he knew George Grosz’s savage portraits of the bourgeois of the Weimar Republic.
The director of the factory is so gross (Grosz) that he can hardly sit behind his desk. A couple of dwarfs do a tango on a table laden with caviar and champagne, and another pays court to ‘The King’, the leader of a gang of thieves, vagabonds and beggars, in a parody of upper-class manners.
There are also images that foreshadow the films of Jean Vigo and Luis Buñuel. Dead cats hang upside down on ropes in a junk yard. (In The Battleship Potemkin, sailors imagine themselves hanging from the yardarm in a similar manner.) There are two tight close-ups of an eye. (Even more Buñuelian is the scrutiny by the doctor through his pince-nez of the maggots in the meat in The Battleship Potemkin.)
In an extraordinary surreal dissolve, a ‘cemetery’ of empty barrels suddenly comes alive with hundreds of low-lifes crawling out of them. Police agents nicknamed The Monkey, The Fox, The Owl and The Bulldog, are revealed by means of dissolves behind the animals in the same postures and expression, in a manner used by Vigo in À Propos de Nice (1930).
Visual jokes and tricks abound: three of the stockholders are identical fat men in top hats, while others resemble Chaplin heavies Eric Campbell and Mack Swain. A foreman gets stuck upside down in cement, and another is put in a wheelbarrow and thrown into a muddy pool, leaving his boater floating on the surface; a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes discloses an ordinary detective with a pipe, and photographs come alive, with one of the subjects hanging his hat outside the frame.
Diverting as these effects are, they are used for a dialectical purpose in a film which opens with a quote from Lenin: ‘The strength of the working class lies in organisation. Without organisation of the masses the proletariat is nothing. Organised, it is everything. Organisation means unity of action. Unity of practical operation.’
The causes and results of the strike are powerfully exposed, the brutal suppression of the workers living up to Eisenstein’s ambition to ‘never make films in which the camera is an objective witness, to be watched by an impassive eye of glass. I prefer to hit people hard on the nose … I don’t produce films to please the eye but to make a point.’13 (This was Eisenstein’s unflattering reference to Dziga Vertov’s Ciné-Eye/Kinoglaz documentaries.)
As in the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin, there are scenes of people desperately trying to escape advancing soldiers, the dynamic, rhythmic cutting almost coinciding with the more rapid beating of the spectator’s heart. In fact, The Strike has a number of sequences that were further developed in Eisenstein’s following film.
Despite the attempt to make a film not about individuals but types, the hero being the mass of collective actions, certain individuals stand out: the bald-headed worker who hangs himself when accused by the management of being a thief, the father who cannot feed his child but throws him his empty tobacco pouch to chew on, the children imitating their elders by putting a young goat in a wheelbarrow, and two of them playing with dolls as the mounted police enter the tenement building, and two brave young leaders of the strike, played by the blond Mikhail Gomorov and the dark, curly-haired Alexander Levshin, two of Eisenstein’s closest collaborators.
Although The Strike was a silent film, it contained what Eisenstein considered his first experiment with sound in the cinema, in a sequence of a workers’ picnic in the countryside with ‘singing’, accompanied by an accordion. ‘The sequence attracted attention, of course, because the method was not used for purely graphic purposes but as a means of conveying, through one exposure, a picture, and through the second, a sound; through the realistic, objective long shot, a depiction of the event and the source of the sound; through the close-up, the idea of the sound itself, the sound of an accordion … At the edge of the frame the distant view disappeared, allowing the keyboard of the accordion and the fingers moving over it to emerge sharply and solidly into the foreground. The rhythm of the moving metal strips corresponded to the walking rhythm of the approaching group, and the sound, conveyed by graphic means, embraced the whole landscape in song, thus embodying a generalisation of the entire scene.’14
But what was most innovatory in the film was the use of visual metaphors such as the shock-cuts between the police moving into action against the strikers, and a lemon-squeezer being manipulated by one of the factory bosses. Or again: the final sequence in which the workers are massacred inter-cut with documentary shots of a bull being butchered in a slaughterhouse. (An influence on Georges Franju’s Le Sang des Bêtes/Blood of the Beast in 1949).
Eisenstein described his reasons for choosing these images in his tongue-in-cheek manner. ‘I did this, on the one hand, to avoid overacting of the extras from the labour exchange “in the business of dying” but mainly to excise from such a serious scene the falseness that the screen will not tolerate but that is unavoidable in even the most brilliant death scene and, on the other hand, to extract the maximum effect of bloody horror. The massacre is shown only in establishing long and medium shots of eighteen hundred workers falling over a precipice, the crowd fleeing, gunfire etc, and all the close-ups are provided by a demonstration of the real horrors of the slaughterhouse where cattle are slaughtered and skinned.’15
It was obviously more than a practical solution to ‘the business of dying’ on screen, a metaphor of a ‘human slaughterhouse’, a juxtaposition of images that strove to transcend the literal shooting of workers. The final scenes are described in the script thus: (Close-up) People roll over a cliff. The bull’s throat is slit – the blood gushes out. (Medium close-up) People lift themselves into the frame, arms outstretched. The butcher moves past the camera (panning) swinging his bloody rope. A crowd runs to a fence, breaks through it, and hides behind it. Arms fall into the frame. The head of the bull is severed from the trunk. A volley. The crowd rolls down a slope into the water. A volley. (Close-up) The bullets can be seen leaving the gun-barrels. Soldier’s feet walk away from the camera. Blood floats on the water, discolouring it. (Close-up) Blood gushes from the slit throat of the bull. Blood is poured from a basin (held by hands) into a pail. Dissolve from a truck loaded with pails of blood – to a passing truck loaded with scrap-iron. The bull’s tongue is pulled through the slit throat (to prevent the convulsions from damaging the teeth). The soldiers’ feet walk away from the camera (seen at a further distance than previously). The bull’s skin is stripped off. 1,500 bodies at the foot of the cliff. Two skinned bulls’ heads. A hand lying in a pool of blood. (Close-up) Filling the entire screen: the eye of the dead bull. THE END.
The Strike was completed at the end of 1924, premiered in Leningrad on February 1, 1925, and shown to the general public in March. Pravda considered it ‘the first revolutionary creation of our cinema’, and Izvestia ‘an immense and interesting triumph in the development of our cinematographic art.’ However, puzzled by the satirical and grotesque elements, public reaction, on the whole, was unfavourable. The film’s strong passages of naturalism seem to have been easier for audiences to digest than those sequences whose origins were the circus and the theatre of satire. There were also those in authority who criticised the film’s eccentricity and lack of harmony between ideological content and form.
The execution of Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘Montage of Film Attractions’ was greeted by modernists as an exciting advance. In The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Griffith used parallel montage for dramatic purposes – two different, distant actions, shown alternately, used mainly to create suspense. But when Eisenstein used juxtaposition and parallel montage, he did so with a clear dialectical purpose.
In the mid-1930s, Eisenstein told his students at the State Cinema Institute in Moscow, ‘It is noteworthy that Griffith, first to put into practice … parallel and cross-cutting, could take its possibilities no further. For him there existed only the plot cross-cutting of the action, he did not realise that such parallel presentation of action contained further possibilities. Look at his film Orphans of the Storm – he made it in 1923 [actually 1921] that is, the year before The Strike. Notice the crowd scenes. You will see his work lacks particular plastic development of given content, and the crowd scenes are extremely chaotic.’16
It was at this time as well that Eisenstein diverged from Kuleshov, who favoured a cinema of fiction and a style of continuity, with characters related in a plot. Five years later, Eisenstein wrote: ‘The old film-makers, including the theoretically quite outmoded Lev Kuleshov, regarded montage as a means of producing something by describing it, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks … but in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another.’17
Surprisingly, there is virtually no comment by Eisenstein anywhere on the style of the films of Abel Gance, although he later met the French director in Paris. Gance’s rapid cutting and montage techniques, particularly as used in La Roue, preceded The Strike by two years.
Writing a little over two decades later, Eisenstein called his first feature ‘a typical “beginner’s piece” … the picture was as tousled and pugnacious as I was in those far-off years.’18 This was not only a mature artist’s normal affectionate but condescending view of a work of his green years but, in a climate of apprehension and suspicion, every utterance he made had to be circumspect. In 1946, at the height of the stultifying Soviet Socialist Realism, the portrayals of great national heroes, and the ‘cult of personality’, especially that of the leader of the ‘united’ nation, both the modernist form and the ‘collective’ content were frowned upon.
‘The Strike brought collective and mass action onto the screen, in contrast to individualism and the “triangle” drama of the bourgeois cinema,’ Eisenstein explained. ‘No screen had ever before reflected an image of collective action … But our enthusiasm produced a “one-sided” representation of the masses and the “collective”; one-sided because “collectivism” means the maximum development of the individual within the “collective”, a conception irreconcilably opposed to bourgeois individualism. Our first mass films missed this deeper meaning …’19
Today, though the potent ideological content seems no less relevant to the continuing exploitation of workers throughout the world, The Strike stands high among the modernist masterpieces of the cinema, and is indicative of what was to come. In addition to demonstrating the ‘montage of film attractions’, in which normal action is interrupted by shots that do not contribute to the action but comment on it, the film contains most of the themes, motifs, stylistic effects and personality of Eisenstein, which he was to deepen, develop, and transmute in all his work, whether written, drawn, filmed or dreamt. Although The Strike met with mixed reactions, and was not shown much outside ciné clubs abroad, it gave Eisenstein the confidence and desire to make more films. ‘For my part I was rather like an impetuous tiger-cub, not quite sure of its legs, reared on the milk of theatre, but who had been allowed a small taste of the blood of freedom as a film-maker!’20