Strike

Eisenstein's first feature and one of the founding texts of revolutionary cinema. Workers at a factory in tsarist Russia go on strike. The cause is a death: a worker falsely accused of theft hangs himself. The management hires agents, the police organise, and the strike is put down in blood. The idea is to build no individual hero. There is no single worker at the centre; the crowd is the character. Eisenstein's theory of editing comes out of this: colliding two separate images to produce a third idea in the viewer. The best-known passage is at the close: the killing of the strikers is cut together with the slaughter of a bull in an abattoir. It is counted among the first instances of montage used directly as a political instrument. Naming the informers after animals and making them animal-like in make-up also shows the period's approach to typing. A foundational work for anyone interested in silent cinema and the theory of montage. For a viewer who wants to attach to a character it is deliberately cold; nobody is introduced and you are not expected to grieve for anyone in particular.