Sergei Eisenstein - Formal Critique of Strike.
Art is often looked at in relationship to the historical context of the art and the connections that may or may not exist between the artwork and the artist, but when reading the critiques of critics such as Roger Fry, one can see a different approach to criticizing art. Fry suggested through his writings that art has little or no meaningful connection with either the artist who makes it or the culture to which it belongs and that we should analyze works of art out of context -as pure form, rather than as expressions of time and place. He and many other formalist critics concluded that art can be viewed without its cultural context and can viewed in the alphabet of the artist, the language of line, shape, space, color, light, and dark, and through this understanding of the art language, the work of many can be formally critiqued. Film is a form of art and a form of expression, and through Sergei Eisenstein's Strike and his use of the infamous montage, one can see that his films are no different from the artwork of many masters of paint or marble.
Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian film director, screenwriter, editor, and theoretician who was educated in engineering but took a turn to film production, produced many powerful films in his lifetime. In Strike, Eisenstein's use of balance, order and proportion, and pattern and rhythm alone provokes numerous emotional responses from the viewer, and the text that he has written in the language of art leads the observer to discover a truth that Eisenstein has hidden within his mastery of montage and visual manipulation, the sad and unjust mistreatment of the weak and abused. .
In the first and introductory segment of Strike, Eisenstein portrays the rebelling workers in the fields trying to escape from the fierce grip of authority. The peasants are shown desperately sprinting through the countryside on foot while the authorities relentlessly pursue them on horseback.
Griffith, and The Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it is their similarities that are most intriguing. ... Eisenstein uses real events to draw his viewer in as well. ... Eisenstein is a bit more subtle. ... He strikes the man in the hammock (Vakulenchuck) who responds by turning over in his hammock, face down, and crying. ... Griffith and Eisenstein were both cinematic geniuses of their time. ...
Films by Sergei Eisenstein (Strike, 1924; Potemkin, 1925; October, 1927), V.I. ... Especially Potemkin presents the clearest example of Eisenstein's influential theories of montage. Eisenstein constructed his films using shots as his cinematic building blocks. ... For example, in Strike the nature of the slaughter perpetrated by the Cossack army is conveyed by juxtaposing scenes of advancing soldiers with a bull being slaughtered and ink being spilt over a street-map of the city being attacked. ... Eisenstein was building on theories of film making developed by Lev Kuleshov and Dzi...
The influence of Marxist dialecticism led Sergei Eisenstein, another Montage filmmaker, to theorize that shots should clash with one another to create a new idea in the mind of the viewer (Thompson & Bordwell 116). This practice is employed multiple times in Eisenstein's film October (1928), such as in the juxtaposition of Kerensky with a shot of Napoleon (Thompson & Bordwell 120). With Vertov and Eisenstein as exemplars, it is clear that the Montage filmmakers achieved success not solely because of the technological evolution, but because they purposefully utilized the cinematic formal...
