Strike (1925): The Soviet Film That Came Before the Iconic “Battleship Potemkin”
Before there was the classic Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein created his first full feature-length film — none other than the 1925 film Strike. As predecessor to Battleship Potemkin, Strike perhaps set the stage for Eisenstein’s use of Montage editing, a sought-after style in the Soviet film industry of the 1920s, and particularly of a device called the nondiegetic insert.
According to Film History: An Introduction, a nondiegetic insert “consists of one or more shots depicting space and time unrelated to those of the story events in the film”, so as to create unusual spatial relationships and conflict.
In Strike, Eisenstein creates meaningful symbolism by attempting to correlate the images of two elements that hold no temporal, causal or special relationship to each other — that of the slaughter of the bull and the workers. However, the juxtaposition of these images expresses the idea that the workers suffer a fate and treatment that could be likened to the ruthless slaughter of animals. Nondiegetic inserts formed the very crux of Eisenstein’s “intellectual montage” theory, and so animals were a constant means of…
