Sergei Eisenstein’s “The montage of attraction” theories in his film “Strike” (1925)
In 1925, Sergei Eisenstein created his first work, ‘Strike’. In six chapters, the film recalled and portrayed the entire process of a strike movement in Russian history.
Strike displayed Eisenstein’s practice and construction of his attractive montage theories. In this article, I want to analyze the sixth chapter of the film: Liquidation, and try to interpret and comment on it in conjunction with the excerpts from Eisenstein’s The Montage of Attraction, a critical theory in the early years of his directing career.
In paperwork The Montage of Attraction, Eisenstein described attraction as: “An attraction is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e., any element of it that subjected the audience to emotional or psychological influence”, and he further defined a montage of film attraction as: “instead of a static ‘reflection’ of a particular event….a free montage with arbitrary chosen independent effects but with the precise aim of a specific final thematic effect — montage of attractions.” In general, films are not static reflections of a specific event but should be a skillful combination and interaction of different scenes to create a more significant meaning than the original. Specifically, a montage of attraction is the selection of a strong and compelling sequence and the appropriate combination to influence the audience’s emotions and make them accept the director’s ideas.
We can further interpret this theory from Strike and appreciate how montage attraction conveyed emotions and ideas to the audience. In the last chapter Liquidation, the whole process of repression was carried out through a large number of short shots and rapid switching of close-ups to create a sense of tension and crisis. The first and the biggest conflict was the contrast between the workers and the cavalry. The cavalry was small in number and the workers were crowded, yet the cavalry looked down and whipped the workers from their horses in a taller position.
Here the contrast between the many and the few, the high and the low, was shown through the repeated editing of the opposite content. Furthermore, the subtle composition contrasted with the workers fleeing in panic. The image of the cavalryman was a metaphor of capitalism and big factory owners exploiting the working class, giving the audience a sense of breathless oppression and suffocation.
After editing a close-up of a baby being brutally thrown off a building, the camera switched to a close-up of an officer laughing brutally. The contrast between these two sets of close-ups allowed the audience to feel the shock, heartbreak, and then anger in the extremely shocking scene, which was very much in line with Eisenstein’s definition and intention of the attraction of montage: “a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience.”
The final shot, and the most famous one, was the jump-cut between the scene of the massacre of the striking workers and the scene of the cattle slaughter.
This was a subtle juxtaposition montage, and the principle behind it was the same as the Kuleshov effect. That is, it is not the content of a single shot that causes the emotional reaction of the film, but the emotional hints brought by the juxtaposition between several images. This scene was a combination of a “close up of the bull’s legs convulse, and a hoof beats in a pool of blood…” and a “Medium close up of people falling over a precipice….” Obviously, the slaughtered cows here suggest the tragedy of the workers being killed, causing the audience to feel sad and indignant. The audience can well understand the intuitive political metaphor and idea behind the film Strike, which was to evilize capitalism and tyranny, to show its exploitative nature, and to provoke the audience’s feelings of discontent and hatred towards the capitalists, and sympathy for the proletariat.
Impressively, Eisenstein presented a rapid rhythm and expressed various emotional catharsis through a large number of edits and carefully arranged shots in Strike, thus realizing the artistic creative function of the montage of attraction: fully expresses the senses of impact, shock and even violence in an explosive form.
“The Montage of Attraction” S. M. EISENSTEIN Selected Works VOLUME I Writings, 1922–34 , by Sergei Eisenstein, Indiana University Press, 1988
