Film “Strike” by Eisenstein: When the strike was still life-threatening

The strike is a child of the industrial revolution. In England, the word strike, which actually means “blow”, got the meaning “organized work stoppage” around 1800. In Germany, the term only became known through the great strike of the Ruhr area miners in 1889, which led to the end of Bismarck’s chancellorship. It still says in contemporary documents strikeIt wasn’t until decades later that the word permanently took its Germanized form strike an.

This is also how you read it on the posters with which the Viennese company Prolet-Kinofilm once brought Sergej Eisenstein’s first feature film to German-language cinemas – with a poster by the great designer Mihály Biró. In Russian it is called “Statschka”. If you want to know what kind of life and existence threatening company a strike once was, you have to watch this classic by one of the most important film directors of all time.

In 1925, when communism had long been established and Soviet cinema began to flourish, for which his colleague Pudowkin stood next to Eisenstein, the film “Strike” looks back on the not too distant past: starvation wages and poor conditions depress the workers of a factory Tsar times. The company management spies on the troubled workers with informers. When someone accused of theft kills himself, a major strike breaks out. In the end, the workers are massacred by the military.

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Bluthund, Proll, Fachidiot – – – – –

Eisenstein extensively tested his so-called attraction assembly here for the first time. The scenes with the dying workers are cut hard against images from a slaughterhouse. Thanks to the extraordinary perspectives taken by cameraman Eduard Tissen, it still looks fascinating and modern 100 years later. You understand a little better why people came up with the idea that communism could be the solution to their problems.

There are attempts in the left-wing community to place the current rail strike in the tradition of great struggles of the workers’ movement. But the Weselsky world is far from that. It has more to do with a comedy of inflated egos à la “Schtonk” than with a truly proletarian drama like “Statschka / Strike”.

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