Eistenstein's first film deals with a widespread labor strike in a rural factory and is, without doubt, one of the most astonishing debuts in film history. His introduction of dialectical montage--which included then-innovative shock cuts to such violent images as a raised club, a bloody face, and a bull's throat being cut--both disturbed and galvanized contemporary audiences. Combined with the expressionistic compositional style Eisenstein had absorbed from French and German films, it established its director as a new force in world cinema. Commissioned by the government to commemorate the first, failed Bolshevik revolution, the film covers a 1912 strike at a metalworks factory whose workers have been bullied and humiliated by the plant management. When a fired worker commits suicide, the workers organize a peaceful strike. But the plant bosses make use of agents provocateurs and eventually bring in the czar's troops, who crack down on the strikers with maximum brutality. Aside from his editing innovations, Eisenstein pioneered the concept of the collective group as a character, influenced by the example of the newly formed Soviet Union, as well as the Constructivist art of the period. FIRST TIME EVER RELEASE ON BLU-RAY FROM KINO.

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The first full-length feature project of pantheon Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Strike is a government-commissioned celebration of the unrealized 1905 Bolshevik revolution. The story is set in motion by a series of outrages and humiliations perpetrated on the workers of a metalworks plant. The Czarist regime is unsympathetic to the workers, characteristically helping the plant owners to subjugate the hapless victims. Finally, the workers revolt, staging an all-out strike. Here is where Eisenstein's theory of "the montage of shocks" was given its first major workout. While the notion of juxtaposing short, separate images to heighten tension and excitement was not new, Eisenstein was the first to fully understand the value of using sudden-shock images (a bloody face, a fired weapon, a descending club) to make his dramatic and sociological points. Playing to mixed reviews and small audiences in Russia, Strike proved a success worldwide, assuring Eisenstein complete creative freedom on his next project, the immortal Potemkin. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

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