The sequence is very short, just under a minute and a half, but contains over 30 shots. This rapid cutting is typical of the Montage film which on average has a greater number of shots than any other type of filmmaking of that era[1]. The scene begins by showing the striking workers running, hundreds of them, and also shows the military advancing and firing, but it never shows the military in the same shot as the workers. The military chase the striking workers and then gun them down in a field. We don’t see any people being shot, but instead we see all their bodies lying there after the slaughter. This footage is intercut with non-diegetic shots of a bull being killed in a slaughterhouse. The use of a non-diegetic insert is another common Montage device.
The bull being slaughtered in Strike has no causal, spatial, or temporal relation to the workers. Its non-diegetic image is inserted…not to suggest that these two events are happening simultaneously, but to get us to see the massacre as being like a slaughter.[2]
The effect of this non-diegetic shot of the animal being killed is to make the viewer see the deaths of the men in the same way.
In addition, other than two close-ups of workers’ hands raised upwards, and not counting the killing of the bull in which there are also some close-ups, every shot in the scene is a long shot, showing many hundreds of figures at any one time. This in itself is not something typical of Montage, other than that they “avoid conventional chest-height, straight-on framing and utilise more dynamic angles”[3]. What is typical of Montage in this shot selection is the idea of collectivism over individualism. There are very few individual characters of importance, most of the story is told through groups of people: the workers at the factory are united as one unit, and the military are the same. This is achieved in part through mise-en-scène, with the soldiers all remaining faceless and wearing identical military uniform, and the workers wearing very similar ‘peasant’ looking clothes. This method of mise-en-scène is also very typical of Montage, with people being cast because they looked like the role they were going to play, for example “for Potemkin, Eisenstein chose the small, fastidious man who plays the doctor because he ‘looked’ like a doctor – though he actually made his living shovelling coal”[4]. This idea of collectivism was very much promoted at the time by the Soviet government, who were also advocates of Constructivism, the idea that art should be socially useful. Constructivism was pushed on the Montage filmmakers by the government as Lenin had been quoted as saying that cinema was one of the most important art forms for them.
Eisenstein sets out his approach to filmmaking in his essay ‘Montage of Attractions’ as follows: “For the exposition of even the simplest phenomena cinema needs juxtaposition (by means of consecutive, separate presentation)”[5]. In this particular sequence from Strike there are many examples of this juxtaposition, carried out in different ways and aspects. The first few shots for example depict the workers running. First they run from left to right, then from the back distance towards the foreground also with some movement left to right, then the third shot shows them running from right to left. This goes against standard continuity editing as typical of American films, as obviously they have not suddenly changed direction and started running the other way; instead we are merely now watching them from the other side or direction. The first shot also shows them running downhill, while in the third they are running uphill. Eisenstein said “I should call cinema ‘the art of juxtapositions’ because it shows not facts but conventional (photographic) representations”[6]. This is evidenced by the fact that we do not see any people actually being shot, or any falling over dying, we only see them running, and then dead, with the bull in between representing that they have been killed, slaughtered as the helpless bull is. We do not wonder what happened to them; we see gunfire, and we see them dead and infer what happened in between.
The idea of juxtapositions as simply a means to an end is also the Montage director’s approach to editing, “that cuts, in and of themselves, stimulate the spectator”.[7] In the American style of continuity editing the idea was to edit in order to make time appear to flow smoothly whereas, in Montage, techniques such as overlapping editing or elliptical editing were often used. Both of these techniques are demonstrated in the scene analysed here, overlapping editing with the killing of the bull, and elliptical editing with the killing of the workers. Overlapping editing involves repeating part or all of a previous shot. With the bull we see the man’s hand strike down, and then we see him raise his hand up and strike down on the bull again. The bull falls in this shot, and then it cuts to another shot of the bull falling down from full height again. With each of these shots the characters and the bull are standing in different positions, creating another kind of juxtaposition between shots. The effect this has can be seen as creating conflict through spatial relationships as well as temporal ones, as time repeats itself but movements change between repetitions. The purpose and effect of overlapping editing is to expand the length of time an action takes, with the idea being that “the filmmakers do not guide the spectator through a clear, straightforward locale…rather, the viewer must actively piece together what is going on”[8] thus engaging and stimulating the spectator. Elliptical cutting, in contrast, creates a diametrically opposite effect. By leaving out a portion of the event, the event takes less time than it would in reality. “The contradictory temporal relations created by overlapping and elliptical editing compel the spectator to make sense of the scene’s action”[9] note Thompson and Bordwell.
The key factor for Montage films is juxtaposition, conflict in any way possible: spatial, temporal, juxtaposition between shots, visual conflicts and any other way to create opposing ideas within the films. The idea behind this developed theory of Montage was that by causing the audience to have to think about what they are seeing and then have to analyse what they have seen in order to understand it, the effect would be that the audience would engage with the scene more actively. While this may be true in part, the main criticism made against the Montage filmmakers was that the peasant classes of the Soviet Union found their films too difficult to follow, which hampered their success domestically; however, they did flourish abroad, as for example Potemkin was very popular in Germany.
Overall I found Strike very interesting to watch, the story line more engaging than Potemkin, which felt more like set pieces (albeit brilliant ones) without a particularly strong narrative tying the whole together. I also found Strike’s more frequent usage of the non-diegetic inserts very thought provoking, such as that when a ghostly micrometre surrounded the character’s head when he is accused of stealing it. Strike feels like a much further developed style of film than the other silent films I have seen. The power of Strike to engage spectators remains undiminished after nearly ninety years.
Bibliography
Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010)
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998)
[1]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010),, p. 117
[2]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 119-120
[3]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 121
[4]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 124
[5]Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), p.36
[6]Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), p.36
[7]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 117
[8]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 118
[9]Kristin Thomas and David Bordwell, Film History an Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 117
Final Mark: 65%, 2-1
Final Mark: 65%, 2-1
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