All Slights Deserved

Like many people I like nothing more on a Friday night than to relax with a work of Russian Constructivist cinema. There's just something about rousing Soviet agit-prop that says "the weekend starts here". If you disagree well that's obviously because you're a bourgeois individualist, an anachronism destined to be swept away by the inexorable tide of communism. Strike was Sergei Eisenstein's feature debut, at the disarmingly young age of 26 he found himself spearheading the new Soviet film drive with what was meant to be the first of seven (some sources say eight) films intended to chronicle the path towards the proletariat dictatorship. The remainder of the series were never completed but the director demonstrated enough talent to be commissioned to produce the even more celebrated Battleship Potemkin later that year. Strike centres around an uprising of workers at an unspecified factory in Russia in 1903 (i.e. some years prior to the Revolution). The...