7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
In Russia's factory region during Czarist rule, there's restlessness and strike planning among workers; management brings in spies and external agents. When a worker hangs himself after being falsely accused of thievery, the workers strike. At first, there's excitement in workers' households and in public places as they develop their demands communally. Then, as the strike drags on and management rejects demands, hunger mounts, as does domestic and civic distress. Provocateurs recruited from the lumpen and in league with the police and the fire department bring problems to the workers; the spies do their dirty work; and, the military arrives to liquidate strikers.
Starring: Maksim Shtraukh, Grigori Aleksandrov, Mikhail Gomorov, Ivan Klyukvin, Aleksandr AntonovForeign | 100% |
Drama | 75% |
History | 8% |
Period | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Russian: LPCM 2.0
None
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
“Montage” is definitely one of the most devalued words in the great glossary of cinematic terms. After all, when you hear the word now, you’re probably more likely to think of the fist-pumping, Dolph Lundgren vs. Sylvester Stallone “training” section of Rocky IV than the masterful “Odessa Steps” sequence in 1925’s The Battleship Potemkin. Yes, montage can be a way to quickly show the passage of time, but that’s only one use. Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein—who, along with D.W. Griffith, practically invented many of the precepts of modern film editing— saw montage as an intellectual tool capable of visually representing a Hegelian, thesis + antithesis = synthesis dialectic. By juxtaposing and intercutting between two unrelated images, he found that he could elicit from his audience a third mental picture, meaning, or emotion. “Montage is conflict,” he once said, and Eisenstein employed his theories of editing to explicitly didactic ends as illustrations of his Marxist ideals, celebrating the class-warfare of the Russian Revolution in his first three films, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October. While this thematic trilogy was never exactly the rousing, international call to arms Eisenstein hoped it would be, he succeeded in introducing the world to some truly revolutionary ideas about filmmaking.
Strikers
Restored by The Cinémathèque De Toulouse and given a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer by Kino-Lorber, Strike's Blu-ray presentation renders obsolete every prior home video edition of the film. If you own Kino's 2010 release of Battleship Potemkin you'll have a good idea of what to expect—an image that's beautifully resolved, tonally balanced, and faithful to source, free from digital tampering and compression/encode issues. Of course, since the film is nearly 90 years old, there's bound to be some age-related damage to the print. Specks and small pieces of debris often dot the image, brightness fluctuates on occasion, and there are vertical scratches that sometimes run through several seconds of footage, but this is all to be expected from a silent film from the mid-1920s. What's important is that the restoration efforts of The Cinémathèque De Toulouse clearly focused on gathering the best possible materials and presenting them faithfully. The film's inherent grain is fully intact—there are no leftover traces of noise reduction—and edge enhancement doesn't appear to have been used. The level of clarity is often astounding, with strong detail visible in the factory environments and in the gaunt, proletarian faces of the non-professional actors Eisenstein was fond of casting. The tonal gradation is excellent as well, with dense blacks, crisp whites and natural-looking contrast. There are some shots where whites seem a bit blown out, but I suspect this has more to do with the source footage than with any post-telecine digital color grading. This is almost certainly the best the film has looked since its 1925 debut.
Strike features a newly commissioned musical score compiled and performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and presented via a Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track. The orchestral music is rich and vibrant, with deep cellos and shimmering strings, bright horns and mournful clarinet. Complementary rather than overpowering, the score suits the film well, underscoring the action and hitting all the right emotional cues, especially during the bleak ending. A 5.1 audio option would've been nice, but I actually prefer a 2.0 presentation for silent films—it feels more appropriate, somehow. All intertitles are in English, and there are forced English subtitles for certain text-heavy shots, like headlines or signs.
Kino-Lorber's consistent output of newly restored silent classics is a true gift to film lovers/collectors. They've done it again with Sergei Eisenstein's debut feature, Strike—made when he was just 26—an energetic piece of "remember the proletariat" propaganda that established the director as one of the key figures in post-Revolution Russian cinema and vastly expanded the visual language of movie editing. The Cinémathèque De Toulouse's restoration of the film is gorgeous in high definition, and the disc also includes Eisenstein's first experimental short, Glumov's Diary, and a wonderfully informative interview with film historian Natacha Laurent. Highly recommended!
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