Amazon.com Essentials:
Sergei Eisenstein's debut film is more than a landmark of Soviet
cinema; it's easily one of the most thrilling and inventive films to emerge
from the silent era of Russian filmmaking. Eisenstein was a theater
director
and stage designer with some very specific ideas about the cinema, and he
put
them into practice telling the story of a worker's strike in
pre-Revolution Russia, portraying the struggle not of leader against
leader, but of the proletariat against the factory owners, enlivened by a
conspiratorial subplot involving a quartet of insidious spies sent to
infiltrate the ranks of labor. The subject matter is at times didactic and
the acting often hammy and overwrought, but the technique is vibrant and
the
images striking. Eisenstein's compositions reflect the graphic boldness of
contemporary poster art, mixing poetic realism with grotesque expressionism
in a gripping style, and his famous montage editing style (to be
perfected in his next film, Potemkin) is raw, experimental, and
energetic. Eisenstein's later films are more consistent and elegant, but
none of them have the sheer cinematic invention and energy of this first
film. The new score composed and performed by the idiosyncratic Alloy
Orchestra combines a mix of martial and mood music on synthesizer with the
driving percussion of drums, wood blocks, bells, and wrecking yard of
clanging metal objects--a dynamic soundtrack to one of the most auspicious
directoral debuts ever. --Sean Axmaker
