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Essay no: (e.g. 1 or 2) 2

Essay Title: (may be abbreviated)

What Strike(s) the eye

Assignment tutor/group: Ambrosia Garcia

Deadline: 04/12/2014

Date Submitted: 04/12/2014

Word Count: 2094

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The matter of discussion of this essay will be an analysis on a sequence from

the Russian film Strike by Sergei Eisenstein. Connected to the worker’s strike

of the early 1900s, the movie is divided into chapters, from all is quiet at the

factory to liquidation, giving the spectator a complete overview of the forces at

work during the struggle for socialism. The shot analysed belongs to the final

chapter.

This text shall discuss aspects of editing, mise en scene, performance and

cinematography in order to illustrate the tragic defeat of the strikers, which is

at the centre of this sequence and how these frames’ characteristics affect the

receptive eye of the spectator.

On a narrative level, this sequence, enclosed by the inter-titles “Go to your

apartments” and “They have broken in”, shows the repression of the strike by

the Cossack police. Troops overrun the workers district panicking, with their

violence, the crowd: a number of strikers tries to find an escape from the

police’ violence splitting up without any control, as mice in trap; their deranged

race is stopped by the gate to their apartments and the entrance of an

undefined building. Simultaneously, through a crosscutting, the director

focuses on a woman, isolated by the rest of the group, subdued by the

truncheon of a policeman, in a vain battle to escape. In the end of the clip, a

child, from the other side of the gate, opens the lock, permitting to the strikers

to run to their houses, soon followed by the police.

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This short sequence, with the introduction of a new setting in the end of the

clip, foreshadows the final massacre, a real human slaughtering.

Moreover the importance of this sequence is not limited to introduction to the

workers’ massacre but shows also one of his causes: the chaos ruling

between the strikers and the betrayal of the Lenin’s quotation: “The strength of

the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses the

proletarian is nothing, organized it is everything”1, shown in the first frames of

the film, as a premise to the entire narration.

According to all these aspects it appears clear how Eisenstein’s Strike follows

Lunacharsky’s belief, very common in the Soviet Russia, about the importance

of a social purpose in art, to be followed not only with a didactic spirit but

arousing, with the narrative, emotions in the masses-audience.

This sequence is based on the dualism between workers and police, as

representation of the bourgeois forces. The distance between these two

opposite classes is reflected in the enormous diversity in performance and

representation on the screen and a detailed analysis of both is required for the

understanding of all the film’s aims and techniques.

On one hand in the analyses of this sequence, the working class could be

considered the absolute protagonist because the director clearly focuses more

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!S. Eisenstein (1925) Strike. Produced by Goskino, Moscow !

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particularly on the worker’s answer to police’ violence, rather than on the fight

itself.

In this sequence the director brings to an exaggeration the renowned class-

unity, showed up to this moment just in his positive and creative power, he

decides to put aside every romanticization of the subject. In different shots the

crowd acts without any control and in complete Chaos, its movements are

exaggerated and brought to the extreme point of representation, the class’

purpose is split in the individual’s struggle to life.

The power of their mise en geste strikes so strongly the audience because

each movement in the sequence assumes a strongly emotional value, thanks

to a specific performance code. Actors’ movements are not exactly realistic,

they are “organic”, their aim is to strike the unconscious emotional eye of the

spectator rather than his intellect, according to Eisenstein’s theatrical

background.

Two scenes are particularly representative of this theory: firstly, when the

workers crows around the entrance of an industrial building and also when an

other group of strikers tries to break to their apartments; frame and shot

composition collaborate to the meaning of the scene. We will focus on their

order in the editing afterward. !

The first moment is shot mainly in two different ways, from a low angle with a

medium-long shot and from an aerial perspective, more focused on the

workers.

While the first one is much more narrative, in fact, showing all the characters

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implied in the action allows a broader understanding of the dynamics of the

scene, the second one serves more as an allusion to the strikers’ emotional

situation.

In this shot the frame is overloaded by workers that with a waxwing and

chaotic movement push on each other: there is no empty space on the frame,

their bodies go in and out the screen. In their hands raised to the sky there is

their panic and desperation, the surrounding of the police doesn’t exist

anymore, the spectator has to focus only on the strikers’ pain.

The second shot highlighted is meaningful as well and encourage the

spectator to reconnect this sequence to the complete film, in order to disclose

new relations between different moments and frames.

The action involved in this sequence is shot in different ways and from

different angles and perspectives

but one in particular stands out:

the camera is positioned on the

other side of the gate, framing the

scene with a medium shot from a

low angle, the source of lightning

is behind the strikers, their faces are in shadow as their bodies are obscured

by the gate’s gratings. (1.1) The only things that emerge from this frame are

the strikers’ hands, pushing with violence and terror the gate, asking for help.

The impossibility to look at their faces, together with the violence of the act,

questions their nature: the working class, without organization and frightened

!!!!!!(1.1)

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by the Power, seems to regress to an animal form. The lack of human features

on the screen de-humanises the subject, the strikers transmute themselves

into animals struggling to escape the cage of the bourgeois exploitation. In

relation to this the numerous images of animals in cage in the beginning of the

movie and the slaughtering of the bull in the end, gain more and more

significance.

At the same time the pathos of these scenes reconnects these frames of

sacrifice and pain to a religious iconography: the workers are presented as

undefended martyrs of the bourgeois power.

To conclude the striker’s performance becomes metaphor not only of their

feelings during the exact moment of the sequence but also of their general

condition as workers, strikers and human beings.

On the other hand, the driving force of this scene is the police’s violence: it

moves all the workers action. This is why an analysis of the police’s mise en

scene and mise en geste in this sequence is important to understand the

social pattern beneath Strike.

First of all what emerges clearly from the sequence is the contrast in apparel

between the two classes protagonists of these scenes: the police belongs to a

different class and to a different dress code; but apart for any obvious look

consideration what strikes is the state of their clothes. In fact despite the

violence of the scene their uniforms seem to be immaculate in contrast to the

tattered clothing wore by the strikers. The blood of their violence leaves their

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clothes, and souls, clean.

Moreover while, as we already pointed out, the general sensation of strikers’

shot is chaos, the Police are always depicted in the complete control of the

scene: differently from the working class they exactly now what to do and how

to keep the control of the situation. This security is reflected in their

performance, beyond doubt their moves look robotic, in them there is no

empathy with the strikers as well as for the audience is impossible to feel

empathy with them, to justify their actions.

The director has created “a chain of conditioned reflexes by associating

selected phenomena with the unconditioned reflexes they produce”2. The

spectator has been manipulated.

The power whit whom the police controls the scene and the director’s social

stimulation is evident especially

in a short clip: the beating of the

woman. This sequence, which is

edited with the craziness of the

crowd, shows a lady, isolated in

a dead end street, been beat by

a policeman on horseback,

trying, without success, to escape.

The contrast between the two protagonists of the clip is underlined by the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2!Bordwell, D. and Bordwell, B. (2005) The Cinema of Eisenstein. Taylor & Francis, Inc. !

!!!!!!(1.2)

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emotional power of the woman, by her organic movements. Medium and long

shots of the violence cut into close ups of the woman’s painful expression, the

policeman is abusing on a defenceless lady. On the other hand the police

violence has no face: the director almost avoids to frame their faces, they are

de-humanised; in other moments of the same clip the woman almost

disappears under the bigness and presence of the police: the camera is stable

and static, powerless related to the police.

In a striking medium long shot, while the woman tries to escape the policeman

climbing a wall and her faces emerges in the background, in the foreground an

horse pass by: in that moment all the space of the frame is occupied by the

police, and the audience clearly perceives how for the woman is impossible to

escape. (1.2)

In the disorganization of the strike, a woman is abused. In the disorganization

of the Strike, the police, the soulless representation of the bourgeois power

can take the perfect control of the situation and destroy what the strike has

created: Unity and Dignity.

Violence, Power, Representation, Chaos, De-humanization, Unity are the

themes of this essay, what in this sequence strikes most the eye. At the same

time, a correct analysis of this sequence could not avoid to include a focus on

the force that connects them all: the creative power of Editing.

The Editing is one of the major aspects in Eisenstein’s production, as director

and as cinema theorist as well, and in this sequence he gives to it an

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incredible power of creation and stimulation.

The sequence analysed could be seized into two main plot flows: the

craziness of the crowd and the beating of the woman; these two clips often

interwove each other. Through the crosscutting of these scenes the director

achieves new effects and gives strength to sensation as chaos and pain in the

spectators’ eyes.

In this sequence the sense of chaos and disorganisation is achieved through

an editing that breaks the narration flow in different points: the crowd divides

itself in small groups, go beyond and behind, while a woman is isolated by the

rest of the group. Intercutting the private massacre of a woman with the

general panic of the strikers trying to find an escape and refuge, the director

gives a face to the pain of an entire class, the one of the woman: her close-

ups became close ups of the strikers.

Moreover the duration of each clip collaborates to the final “emotional result”.

The Chaos that dominates the scene, its Violence, is reflected in the rhythm of

the editing: most of the frames are short, between 2 and 5 seconds, and while

the camera is stable, as if it was a frightened spectator of the scene,

everything in the frame, is frenetically moving in and out the space, in fast

flashes.

On the other hand, the pathos of some moments is slightly overlapped using

sharp changes of camera angle, to intensify a sequence accuracy and force of

impact, as for the sequence of the woman shot from 5 different angles. “In

such ways, Eisenstein follows the Constructivist tradition of threatening

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montage as a strategy for forming material in any medium”3.

The Editing is first of all intellectual and rhythmical and then narrative.

Thanks to particular editing strategies, to a precise work on performance and

mise en scene, this sequence, assumes a strongly emotional value. It depicts

the defeat of the strikers’ ideas under the violence of the police and the

beginning of a new martyrdom for the working class.

The spectator, in the soviet URSS as well as nowadays, could not be

indifferent to all this, he is the real target of (the) Strike; he is hit in the middle

of his pupils that watch the screen, in the middle of his heart that feels the

pain, in the middle of his brain that is ready to fight.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3!Bordwell, D. and Bordwell, B. (2005) The Cinema of Eisenstein. Taylor & Francis, Inc. !

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Bibliography Bordwell, D. and Bordwell, B. (2005) The Cinema of Eisenstein. Taylor & Francis, Inc. Goodwin, J. (1993) Eisenstein, Cinema, and History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Filmography S. Eisenstein (1925) Strike. Produced by Goskino, Moscow

Art V. Kulagina (1929) 1905: The Road to October, Lithograph !