Strike

Sergei Eisenstein's explosive debut feature — made when he was just twenty-six — dramatizes a factory strike in pre-revolutionary Russia with an energy and visual invention that announced a completely new kind of cinema. Workers endure grinding conditions, organize in secret, walk out, and are brutally suppressed by Tsarist forces in a climax that intercuts the massacre with footage of cattle being slaughtered. That final sequence shocked audiences and remains one of the most viscerally powerful examples of montage editing ever created. Eisenstein conceived of film as a collision of images that would produce ideas in the viewer's mind, and Strike is where that theory first detonated on screen. Raw, angry, formally dazzling, and still capable of hitting you like a fist.