|
The opening composition (smokestacks against blank skies) announces a medium of contrasts, but Sergei Eisenstein doesn't stop there—the image is later reflected on a puddle and played in reverse, a cinema not just of conflicts but of combustible imbalances. "Towards the Dictatorship," a salvo enacted in the best Kabuki-Keystone tradition by the Proletkult First Workers Theatre. The factory is the mechanistic center stage, high-angled shots transverse through greasy expanses while low angles highlight the geometry of industrial scaffolding. Lean proletariat on one side, blubbery capitalism and its menagerie of finks on the other: "Everything on which their thrones rest was made by the workers' hands," a suicide triggers the uprising, gears are halted and gates flung open. Far from a formalist dryly trying out his theorems on screen, Eisenstein here is a bedeviled caricaturist clicking with film's inherent turbulence, hurling fast and furious gags like a Bolshie Tex Avery. Lap dissolves and shock cuts, silhouettes and superimpositions, circles and lines and torrential masses of people slamming into each other. Above all, the notion of a world churning with wild machines, with the camera the wildest of them all. A revolution founded on despair will not stand, the workers' utopia gives way to hunger and discord as the strike drags on, the Tsar's police ride in for the liquidation. Quite the agitprop hootenanny, influential to everybody from Buñuel (dwarfs tangoing atop a dinner table, unnoticed by partygoers) to Huston (a cigar-puffing magnate's bulk clogging up the frame) to Coppola (sacrificial bull and systematic massacre) to Van Sant (album pictures coming to life). Lenin's "unity of action" is the stated goal, though Eisenstein's battle cry is more universally cinematic: "Agitate everywhere!" With Maksim Shtraukh, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ivan Klyukvin, Mikhail Gomorov, and Boris Yurtsev. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |