Welcome to a dark and joyless Russia in the days before its revolution.
This is a place where, if you manage to survive childbirth, all you get is a yowling, extra mouth to feed. If your man doesn't work, you starve.
Rabid for profits, industrialists seek higher production by lengthening shifts at the local, hellish factory.
When the workers proclaim, "We're on strike," it sounds triumphant, but fear abounds.
"Soon we'll have nothing to feed our faces," says a unionist's wife (Vera Baronovskaya). "In a week, we'll be dead from empty bellies."
Directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller create tension by showing one class conflict after another. When the moneyed class brings in strikebreakers, the viewer braces for violence. But the workers really don't want to hurt one another.
"Brothers, you're going against your own people!" a striker shouts.
The acting in this silent film is stark and expressive. In particular, Ivan Chuvelyov does well as a peasant who unwittingly betrays a unionist. When he realizes what he's done, he attacks his "betters," winds up in police court, and dares to defend the workers' advocate: "He's got kids sitting at home with nothing to eat!"
For his courage, the peasant gets his face smashed and a trip to the Great War front ("Enlist this one as a volunteer," snarls a cop).
This movie, produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution, aired on the network of the City University of New York. With class conflict a theme in the presidential election, this film is worth a view.
This is a place where, if you manage to survive childbirth, all you get is a yowling, extra mouth to feed. If your man doesn't work, you starve.
Rabid for profits, industrialists seek higher production by lengthening shifts at the local, hellish factory.
When the workers proclaim, "We're on strike," it sounds triumphant, but fear abounds.
"Soon we'll have nothing to feed our faces," says a unionist's wife (Vera Baronovskaya). "In a week, we'll be dead from empty bellies."
Directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller create tension by showing one class conflict after another. When the moneyed class brings in strikebreakers, the viewer braces for violence. But the workers really don't want to hurt one another.
"Brothers, you're going against your own people!" a striker shouts.
The acting in this silent film is stark and expressive. In particular, Ivan Chuvelyov does well as a peasant who unwittingly betrays a unionist. When he realizes what he's done, he attacks his "betters," winds up in police court, and dares to defend the workers' advocate: "He's got kids sitting at home with nothing to eat!"
For his courage, the peasant gets his face smashed and a trip to the Great War front ("Enlist this one as a volunteer," snarls a cop).
This movie, produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution, aired on the network of the City University of New York. With class conflict a theme in the presidential election, this film is worth a view.