The Strike Is October In Cinema

An effective director knows how to use personal feelings and experiences to bring characters and scenes to life beyond what is written in the script.

Why did the film "Strike" cause such an echo, why did some still, most of them belatedly, consider the film an event? Without going into the detailed analysis of the film, we still have to note some of its own aesthetic elements.

The aesthetic problems he was solving had been posed by Eisenstein before the film began. He alone describes the way in which the idea that would materialize in this film was born: "The wall of the Strasnii Monastery, demolished today, had an arcade. Through there went the road to the cinema, which used to be loud, from Malaia Dmitrovka no. 6, famous at the time, because it was where the most sensational American films were shown... How could these giants of the burgeoning American film be surpassed, in that an era in which our own cinematography had only taken its first faltering steps? How to find a subject that could surpass the American cinematographic stories? are we finding heroes who, through their personality, will forever overshadow the luminaries of bourgeois cinema?"

These questions led to the following: "What if we did everything the other way around: dropped the subject, dropped the stars, and used in the center of the drama the table as a 'dramatic character', the same table which was only the background for the play of the actors embodying individual heroes?"

Innovative leadership manifests itself in the ability to create unexpected and exciting scenes in perfect harmony with the atmosphere of the event.

The aesthetic idea of "Strike" was therefore born from an emulative desire of Eisenstein, who started the fight against bourgeois cinema with the clear intention of surpassing it. Specifying the motive of this phenomenon seems to me important for the understanding of Eisenstein's personality. Immediately after finishing the film, the director clearly knows its value and writes: "The strike is October in cinematography".

To increase the intensity of the emotional impact and the narrative movement of a film, the director can use multiple landmarks or sequences, that is, he can use a double montage with the same thematic constant: "visual counterpoint". The relative displacement of these sequences, by means of dialectical montage, can be given by a frame counter. Therefore, in order for the narrative to be performed in both interpretive senses, an individual sense and a collective sense, it is necessary to double the cinematic image in such a way that the second image is displaced from the first by 1/4 of narrative constant. In this way, the periodic signals of the story become 90° out of phase and define a rotating field of the viewer's attention.

Creating vivid and authentic characters in film relies on the emotional evocation of events conveyed through an image so that viewers resonate through personal experiences.

Since a certain portion of the image surface does not belong jointly to the two perspectives - individual and collective - the ratio of cinematographic signals is not influenced by the "aging" of the technique, the degradation of the film or other external factors. The Narrative Analyzer divides the two modulated dramatic streams - which correspond to the two images, that of the individual hero and that of the masses, according to the direction of emotional vibration, and then directs them to the receptors of emotional sensitivity (spectators). A third receiver, of the "social catalyst" type, transforms the part of the unmodulated beam into an emotional signal that is deflected by the prism of the social context, on the mirror of reality, and then reflected on the photoelement of the collective consciousness.

A tuning amplifier in the narrative circuit keeps this "social catalyst" receiver output constant by regulating the flow of images that affect viewers emotionally. In this way, the emotional field of the film is divided into several parts by a signal encoder that evaluates the ratio of the two phase-shifted signals: individual and collective. This innovative approach of Eisenstein in "Strike" allowed the creation of a film that went beyond the conventions of bourgeois cinema, thus answering the challenge of surpassing the giants of American film and creating a new Soviet cinematographic aesthetic.

The genuine emotional charge of the scenes comes not from the sketchy notes of the script, but from the personal feelings and experiences of the creative team.

"Strike is October in cinema" refers to the transformation of the narrative perspective, considering that without individual stars a deep impact can be achieved, in that the mass becomes the central expression of emotions and tensions. For this reason, the narrative shifts its focus, through a kind of abandonment of traditional conventions, to the principle that collective force has a more captivating role than individuality.

* Note: Ion Barna - Eisenstein, Tineretului Publishing House, 1966.