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The revolutionary gag is on the visualization of the filmic "cut," thus the slashing saber and the shattered eyeglass. Overthrow of the Titans down the Black Sea, rallying cry and elegy, five movements. The battleship crew have had all they can stands and can't stands no more, their borscht meat is so infested with maggots that "it could crawl overboard on its own." The Biblical homily on the smashed plate, the priest wielding his crucifix-club (a low angle on the deck briefly transforms him into Nosferatu), the trembling mass under the white canvas. "To the rifles, brothers!" People in upheaval means technique in upheaval, just the occasion for Sergei Eisenstein to invent volcanic new forms. The freewheeling frenzies of Strike are streamlined and concentrated so that the camera exerts pressure wherever it turns, the celluloid itself seems to flex like sinew. Everything is worked out for maximum graphic impact: The tangle of hammocks for sleeping sailors, the taut diagonals of naval artillery, figures in striped uniform scurrying against metallic grates. Requiem for the fallen firebrand, the trickle that becomes a stream. "All of Russia has risen—are we to be the last?" Sails silhouetted in morning mist, cheering crowds at the shore, a matter of tempo and rhythm, the calm before the storm that is the Odessa massacre. Endlessly running down the steps before a Czarist fusillade, the wailing mother like the link between Munch and Bacon, several films in miniature pulled together into a suspended nightmare. The flapping flag tinted red, enough to rouse a stone lion. "Shoulder to shoulder. The land is ours. Tomorrow is ours." Eisenstein and the shock of insurrection, a burning pamphlet closely studied by Hitchcock and Kurosawa and Pontecorvo. The beautiful anticlimax follows the extravagant suspense of pumping pistons and quivering dials with the simple deliverance of solidarity, "l'onde toi devenue" (Mallarmé). Cinematography by Eduard Tisse. With Aleksandr Antonov, Grigori Aleksandrov, Vladimir Barsky, and Beatrice Vitoldi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |