How does the film use classic Soviet Montage Techniques to tell the worker’s story?
Firstly, Eisenstein uses tonal montage to communicate the exploitation of the workers and the destructive nature of the Aristocracy, and their disregard for humanity. In the scene where one of the proletariats depicted are asked if he’d like to join the opposing force, he insinuates a fight and the upper class character slams his fist on the table, knocking over bottles of ink that essentially floods a map on his desk. This directly references the bloodshed caused at the expense of violence and mistreatment of workers, directly caused by the upper class, and their classist, inhumane ways.
According to Eisenstein, a musical score’s pacing (or meter) influences metric montage, metric montage is effective in building the tension of a scene and evoking suspense/ anxiety in a spectator. During the scene where the workers fight against the multiple officers on their horses, Eisenstein uses metric montage to almost position the audience amidst the chaos, as if they themselves were fighting for their lives in a high tension, dangerous situation alongside the overworked, underpaid, underappreciated factory workers.
The shot also depicts a small child sitting isolated in the danger, separated from his mother. Eisenstein slots in this shot amongst the violence to comment on how the factory workers don’t get paid enough to support their children, and equally wont get to see their children as a result of the excessive work hours. By seeing the effect the upper class’s classist ideology’s on multiple generations, the spectator is forced to comprehend the cumulative cause and effect that the mistreatment of workers has on society.
Finally, the use of intellectual montage in Strike (1925) brings the whole movie to a cathartic and violent finish. Eisenstein depicts a cow being brutally slaughtered, another cog in the machine of manufacture and labour, adjacent to way the factory workers are treated almost like animals, killed when deemed no longer useful. By using a scene so gory and shocking it reinforces the violence of the conflict depicted in the film, essentially commenting on the exploitation of the working class, and how the divide between the starving proletariat and greedy aristocrat breeds unnecessary bloodshed.
Additionally, the intellectual montage of a cow being slaughtered represents how the lower class fights for human rights and liveable work condition all their life, and some die in the process. By visually capturing death in such a vivid way, the spectator if forced of those to have died at the hands of the upper class, whether by poor work condition, suicide (as depicted in Strike) or fighting against the breech of human rights in the form of a strike. Eisenstein does this to elicit the importance of standing up against Capitalism and the class system, as the repetitive cycle of working and then dying is tragic and the only true way to overcome this is to stand against higher status characters and a union, together, or else you are just another cattle being killed for its profit.
