Strike

Strike
Customer Review: Eisenstein's best - with a great new score!
I've been watching and enjoying Eisenstein for ages, but watched "Strike" only recently (at the recommendation of my SEIU union president, no less). Strike is a truly revolutionary film -- as art and entertainment, as well as politics. While Eisenstein could always succeed at these three levels, his films became more and more "conservative" over time, more ponderous, more conventional, more obsessed with power. This first film is full of energy and surprises -- company spies you can't help liking for their comical antics; agents-provocateurs you admire for their theatricality; dream sequences on a par with Twin Peaks. But it also tells the story of a strike with all the power and clarity of the best labor movies (e.g. Norma Rae), yet on a bigger, more brutal scale. The Alloy Orchestra provides a score that equals the epic panoramas of the factories, tenements, and intense conflict. They cover Eisenstein's emotional range from the hilarious to the devastating. One of my top ten.
Customer Review: All very good
The film itself is a classic of filmmaking, showing the early concepts and developments of how to dramatize an idea. The content of the movie comes froms a soviet ideal, the exaltation of the factory worker, but this is not Eisenstein's most important feature, but instead the technique in which it is done. The beggining is stunning and simple, showing a puddle that reflects a worker and a factory behind him, big chimeneys of smoke, and showing that scenario by not looking directly to it, but by a mirror, is something to admire. I am to become a film student, so I bought this film in this remastered edition so I can watch it as best as possible. And mainly to learn from it. It is worth it, and amazon always delivers. I live in Uruguay, far, far away from the US, and the shipment always arrives safely.