Political Consciousness in the Work of Pudovkin and Eisenstein Eisenstein’s 1925 film Strike was his first full-length feature and was a Modernist, state-commissioned depiction of a pre-revolutionary strike in a factory in 1903. The film, performed by the Protelkult Theatre, the theatrical branch of the Protelkult artistic movement, was intended to be an individual installment in a seven-part series titled “Towards Dictatorship” (of the proletariat) which 2. Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow. Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 3. Cara Marisa Deleon, “Ideology and Reality: Society and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother,” Senses of Cinema, July 2006. 4. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
5. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 310. 6. Vladimir Lenin, “Party Discipline and the Fight Against the Pro-Cadet SocialDemocrats,” in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 3203.
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would never be completed. Notably, his most famous film, the canonized Battleship Potemkin, was produced within a year of the release of Strike. Eisenstein had been a high profile member of this sociopolitical movement, and his works even after the movement’s dissolution of the Red victory in the Civil War were highly influenced by the Protelkult aesthetic.5 In his depiction of the pre-revolutionary strike in a Petersburg factory, Eisenstein’s first shot is a quotation from Lenin’s call for the organization of a revolutionary party independently from the liberal bourgeoisie in his essay “Party Discipline and the Fight Against the Pro-Cadet Social-Democrats” on the power and revolutionary potential of the working class through organization. This political homage to Lenin’s theory of revolution through the scientific management of the masses is therefore clearly stated, as the shot reads: The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletarian is nothing. Organized it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, unity of practical activity.6 This invocation of Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary party as rooted in the actual struggle of the work-
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the failed 1905 revolution. Each film was a popular success amongst the ranks of the Bolshevik Party and the Russian working class at large.23 We can interpret a unique and nuanced account of the nature of the consciousness that fueled the antagonism between the working class and the Tsarist capitalist bosses of the factory. Because of the state’s use of film as a tool of propaganda and the impossibility to produce film independently of the commission, filmmakers were forced to commit themselves to the Soviet project through their art.4 These two perspectives of the Revolution in political memory can be understood as ideological hinges within Soviet cultural production, Bolshevik fractional political debate, and Soviet thought at large.