Eisenstein Montage Theory Strike 1925 Film Analysis

Montage Trope is one of the critical techniques in filmmaking as it consists of putting a series of shots together to make a meaningful scene. It is done to maintain coherence between the shots and the character’s actions to make a dialogue and performance of a task. This paper aims to present a discussion of the “slaughter” sequence in the movie Strike (1925) in relevance to the given readings of Eisenstein.

The significance of the slaughter scene within the movie Strike is that it shows the cutting of a bull in line with the attack on the striking workers. It is a metaphor suggesting that the workers are treated like cattle and slaughtered like a bull, as in the scene of attack over the laborers (Matthew). The slaughter scene is not shown individually or separately from the scene of striking workers; it is shown within the same scene by cutting technique in a meaningful and apt manner. The slaughter scene was meant to represent the suppressed workers. Their strike resulted from that suppression, which was again suppressed by a greater kind of violence, shooting them down with machine guns and making a connection with the slaughterhouse (Mitry). The stylistic and continuous deployment of the shots for the entire scene displays a visual metaphor as it becomes the language of the several images and shots that came together to play with the psychological interpretations of the viewer. For instance, the slaughter scene had altogether 40 shots, in which if we take only two to make a connection, like shot 14, in which the medium close up shows a cow being slit and the in the very next shot 15, a long shot showing the army shooting fire at the people make strong relevance with each other. Eisenstein created this masterful allegorical relationship with a symbolic pedagogy (Brown 62).

Further, a temporal relationship between the two views and shows them in sequence to formulate a clever relationship. The continuity editing technique Eisenstein used in the movie is by placing one short over the other to show each of the steps taking place at a time but at a different place, still showing the same meaning. This is the objective a montage represents mechanically and principally splicing up the shots to determine the relationship of lengths with a rhythm (Leyda 48). This is the very idea used in, for example, shot 29, 30, and 31, along with a connection with shot 32, where the cow is being dragged after being cut up, and people are shown dead after being fired, laying on the ground.

It is also stated that montage is created to click onto the psychological attractions of the viewer beneath the action shown in the shot or scene, prompting a theme and that too, an extreme or urgent one (Leyda 231). The same idea is captured in the slaughter scene with spatial techniques, specifically cut-in and cut-away techniques. It is said that it uses two different shots’ cut-in technique, for example, for bull’s medium shot and close hot for cut-ins while cut-away for shooting scene from a long shot of people being shot at to extra-long shot. The utilization of this technique emphasizes that it has been deployed to understand better the entire scene where zoomed-in faces, hands, and facial expressions, such as a close-up of someone’s eyes in shot 35, are relevant to the complete slaughter scene. The continuity of the scene is also better interpreted when the cut-away depicts the bigger picture of the slaughter and its connection with the shooting of workers, particularly the field where they are shot and the whole slaughterhouse where bulls were cut.