Strike (1925) Analysis: Eisenstein’s Politics of Montage

Originally published May 10, 2017. Substantially updated September 2026.

What I remembered most about Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike was not its story. It was the force with which the film seemed to seize control of my attention. Nearly every cut insisted that I connect one image to another, whether I was ready to make the connection or not. Watching the film can feel less like following a narrative than being caught inside an argument that has already gathered too much momentum to stop.

That intensity remains Strike’s greatest strength. It is also what sometimes makes Eisenstein’s first feature exhausting. The film is funny, furious, visually inventive, and about as subtle as a brick through a factory window. Yet dismissing it as propaganda tells us very little. The more interesting question is how it manufactures political meaning—and why that method remains effective even when its message becomes heavy-handed.

You can rent or buy Strike (1925) on Amazon.

The film dramatizes a factory strike in 1903, well before the Bolshevik Revolution. A worker is falsely accused of stealing a micrometer and dies by suicide after the accusation destroys his reputation. His death transforms private humiliation into collective outrage. The factory workers stop production and demand an eight-hour day, higher pay, and humane treatment. Management responds with surveillance, delay, economic pressure, and eventually violence.

Produced after the Revolution, Strike was intended as part of an unfinished seven-film cycle titled Toward the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Eisenstein wanted to demonstrate how class conflict develops and how solidarity might be organized. The result resembles a revolutionary instruction manual made by someone who kept getting distracted by the possibilities of cinema—and, ultimately, found those possibilities more exciting than the manual.

Most conventional films teach us to experience political conflict through an exceptional person. A single character recognizes injustice, gathers followers, and gives the audience an emotional center. Strike refuses that structure. There is no charismatic organizer whose courage awakens everyone else. Individual workers briefly emerge from the crowd, but the workers collectively remain the protagonist.

This is not simply a consequence of thin characterization. Eisenstein’s rejection of the individual hero is part of the film’s politics. History does not advance because one remarkable person rescues everyone. It moves through shared recognition, collective labor, and coordinated action. That rejection of the savior places Strike within a broader tradition of Marxist films that challenge the individualism of conventional narrative cinema.

The factory establishes this relationship before the strike begins. Workers and machines move together in an enormous system of wheels, belts, pipes, and bodies. When production stops, the machinery becomes still. Labor had made the factory appear alive; without the workers, its supposed power is exposed as dependency. The owners possess the means of production, but possession alone cannot make anything move.

Eisenstein organizes the opposing side differently. The workers form a political mass, while the owners and police spies become grotesque social types. The owners drink and squeeze fruit while considering demands made by people who cannot feed their families. Spies receive animal identities that reduce them to appetite and physical resemblance. Authority first appears bloated and absurd. Only later does it reveal how much violence its ridiculous figures can command.

This creates an unavoidable limitation. I admire the collective protagonist more than I emotionally connect with it. The worker’s suicide supplies an immediate human wound, but the film quickly absorbs him into the movement he initiates. Eisenstein wants identification to move away from an individual and toward a class. For me, it never completely does.

That distance helps explain why the images remain more vivid than the narrative. I remember stopped machinery, workers filling geometric factory spaces, and spies peering through hidden cameras more readily than I remember who delivered which message. Strike is among the most important silent films for philosophy students because its form cannot be separated from its account of collective identity. That does not always make it easy to watch. It makes the difficulty meaningful.

Eisenstein was less interested in making one shot flow invisibly into another than in making images collide. A wheel stopping, workers crossing their arms, owners squeezing juice, and soldiers attacking a crowd do not merely record separate actions. Their juxtaposition instructs us to read those actions as parts of the same political system.

This is the principle behind Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions.” Borrowed from his work in theater, an attraction is an element calculated to produce a particular response from the audience. Editing does not simply preserve an event after it happens. It arranges shocks, contrasts, and associations that push the spectator toward an emotional and intellectual conclusion.

At its best, the technique gives Strike an energy that feels remarkably modern. Multiple exposures combine workers with machinery, while irises, extreme angles, and rapid cutting turn surveillance into a visual game. Eisenstein works with the excitement of a filmmaker discovering that cinema has far more freedom than continuity allows. The plot occasionally seems to chase the style, desperately trying to catch up.

The film is also much funnier than its reputation suggests. Criminals emerge from barrels like figures in a political cartoon, while the ruling class appears so comfortably useless that its members become slapstick props. The comedy creates a trap: we laugh at people whose power appears ridiculous, only to discover that ridiculous people can still order soldiers to fire.

The authorities and Eisenstein both attempt to control interpretation. The state watches the workers and manufactures events that support its preferred story. Eisenstein arranges images just as deliberately. These forms of manipulation are not morally equivalent: one protects exploitation through coercion, while the other exposes it through art. Still, Strike never pretends that images speak for themselves. Whoever controls their arrangement can influence what an audience believes happened and who deserves blame.

The liquor-store sequence is central to this idea. It can initially appear to be another eruption of revolutionary chaos, particularly because Eisenstein’s editing does not pause to provide the kind of narrative explanation modern viewers may expect. But the destruction is not initiated by the workers. A police agent employs provocateurs to loot and burn the store, manufacturing a spectacle of lawlessness that can be attributed to the strike.

The authorities create the disorder that makes repression appear necessary. Once the fire has been staged, the distinction between strike and riot becomes easier to erase. The state can present violence against workers as a defense of the public, even though its own agents produced the danger.

This is where Strike feels least confined to 1925. Power still benefits from defining protest through its most chaotic images. Causes disappear, provocation becomes invisible, and the response is treated as the original offense. Whoever controls the account can transform victims into threats and retaliation into order.

Eisenstein makes this struggle part of the film’s form. Fire can become evidence of popular criminality or state provocation. A crowd can appear to be a dangerous mob or a community protecting itself. Montage does not merely illustrate ideology; it demonstrates how ideology is produced through selection and sequence.

The idea is more sophisticated than the film’s caricatures sometimes allow. Owners are gluttonous, spies are animals, and workers are almost uniformly virtuous. No one will mistake Strike for a delicate inquiry into competing perspectives. Yet its account of political perception is sharp. Authority needs only a compelling image of chaos and the institutional power to explain that image first.

All of Eisenstein’s methods converge in the final massacre. Soldiers pursue workers and their families through open fields and crowded housing. Bodies fall. A child is thrown from a balcony. The organized movement of armed forces overwhelms civilians who have nowhere left to retreat.

Eisenstein intercuts this violence with footage of a bull being killed in a slaughterhouse. Neither group of images contains the film’s complete meaning on its own. Their collision creates it: the state processes workers as disposable bodies, killing them with the impersonal efficiency of an industrial system.

The comparison is blunt but effective. Eisenstein denies the viewer the protection of distance. The bull’s killing is real: its body shudders, collapses, and bleeds while the human massacre continues in parallel. Physical revulsion becomes political anger.

That strategy also creates an ethical contradiction I find difficult to ignore. Strike condemns a government that treats human beings as expendable material, yet it uses an animal’s death as material for its own argument. The bull does not merely represent suffering; it suffers. The sequence therefore raises a problem connected to the moral status of animals: can a film condemn the reduction of living beings to objects while instrumentalizing an actual death to make the comparison?

That contradiction does not empty the sequence of meaning. Eisenstein wants the slaughterhouse to explain the massacre, but the relationship works in both directions. The workers are treated like cattle, while the bull reminds us how routinely violence becomes acceptable once its victim has been placed outside moral concern.

The ending reveals both Eisenstein’s brilliance and his limitations. He can create an association of extraordinary power, but he does not trust the audience to arrive there gently. Every cut pushes harder. Every symbol becomes louder. By the time the massacre begins, subtlety has long since packed its bags and left the factory.

That is partly why Strike stops at four stars for me. Its narrative can be confusing, its political types flatten into cartoons, and its most celebrated sequence depends upon real violence that complicates the metaphor. I appreciate the collective protagonist as an idea, but I occasionally miss the intimacy a developed individual character might have provided.

Yet the film’s imperfections are inseparable from its vitality. Strike feels like the work of someone discovering what editing can do and immediately attempting all of it. It is angry, playful, manipulative, and formally restless. A century later, its politics remain visible, but so does the pleasure of invention.

Most importantly, the film understands that political power involves controlling the story told about conflict. The police manufacture disorder so they can suppress it. Eisenstein manufactures meaning so the suppression cannot appear innocent. Strike leaves little room to disagree, but it makes the struggle over perception impossible to ignore.

Strike (1925) Rating ★★★★ out of 5

If you’d like to watch Strike (1925), it’s currently available to rent, stream, or purchase via Amazon.

Sources and Further Reading

• Atkinson, Michael. “Strike.” San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
• Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman’.” The Drama Review.
• Hutchinson, Pamela. “The Long Take: Veggie Tales.” Sight and Sound, March 7, 2022.
• Nicholson, Ben. “Where to Begin with Sergei Eisenstein.” British Film Institute, Jan. 23, 2018.
• Ryabchikova, Natalie. “The Master’s Debut: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1924).” Senses of Cinema, December 2017.