Stachka (1925)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Sergei M. Eisenstein

Writers:

Grigori Aleksandrov (writer)
Sergei M. Eisenstein (writer)

Release Date:

28 April 1925 (Soviet Union)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

In Russia's factory region during Czarist rule, there's restlessness and strike planning among workers; management brings in spies and external agents...

Plot Keywords:

Factory | Cult Director | Water | Public Domain | Experimental Film

Cast

Maksim Shtraukh	...	Police Spy
Grigori Aleksandrov	...	Factory Foreman
Mikhail Gomorov	...	Worker
I. Ivanov	...	Chief of Police
Ivan Klyukvin	...	Revolutionary
Aleksandr Antonov	...	Member of Strike Committee
Yudif Glizer	...	Queen of Thieves
Anatoli Kuznetsov
Vera Yanukova
Vladimir Uralsky		(as V. Uralsky)
M. Mamin
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Boris Yurtsev	...	King of Thieves

Also Known As:

Стачка (Soviet Union: Russian title)
Gapitsva (Soviet Union: Georgian title)
Strike

Runtime:

82 min | Spain:81 min | UK:95 min

Country:

Soviet Union

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Certification:

Portugal:M/12 | Spain:18

Company:

Goskino

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925)

The most watchable and least problematic of Eisenstein's masterpieces.

Eisenstein's most purely enjoyable film, possibly because the theorems are more lifelike. In many ways a comedy, as the villains (military, police, factory owners, underworld scabs) are caricatured and dehumanised, which makes the eventual horrors all the more shocking. The workers are, of course, idealised, but their paradise of laziness seems odd for a Communist work.

Montage is the thing, as ever with Eisenstein, both in terms of connecting images to create startling insights, and in making tense, exciting and inevitable the action; but there is an astonishing attention to compositional detail too, most haunting perhaps being the empty, abandoned, impotent, machine-heavy factories, or the vast-stepped drawing rooms of the bloated capitalists.