Stachka [Strike] (1924)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://en.wikipedia.org)

Experimental, avant-garde piece of some brilliance representing the need for unity and solidarity among workers if they are to have any chance of success in achieving their reasonable claims regarding pay & conditions.

The genius of this movie lies in the ability to tell a serious, important, and profound story in a tight, muscular and economic manner. Divided into six parts, it is symphonic in structure; leading to a heady climax of satisfied ambitions and achieved goals. Unencumbered by diegetic dialogue, silent movies could be a more efficient and effective means of conveying stories with images & music since they are inevitably pared to the bone; removing any unnecessary and distracting matter. The visual metaphors and analogues simplify the narrative process and help us think through the issues presented with greater clarity.

There are no true characters here that we can become involved - only ideas presented emotionally. The film moves forward in its narrative aggressively and almost without a pause for breath. Even in the calmer, more elegiac, moments there is a sense of a coiled spring about to unload in a disciplined and non-chaotic way. The style veers from social realism - in the representation of workers - to abstraction - in the representation of bosses. The failure to present capitalists realistically is to be expected in Soviet cinema and marks this out more as clever propaganda than a realistic assessment of employment relations. Caricaturing your enemy, in this way, is the classic way to lose against them by the common error of underestimating them. Ones enemy is presented as a mere personification of an historical force rather than a person - the same stereotyping undertaken by the boss-class so represented. This latter hypocritical point partly explains the failure of Communism above which this film, aesthetically, stands head and shoulders.

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Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.