Bruce Loeb on Piano Telling of a factory worker's strike inCzarist Russia in 1912 and its brutal suppression, Eisenstein's Strikewas one of the most original debuts in film history. In its brilliantmixture of agit-prop techniques and comic-grotesque stylization, itreveals the influence of the explosively rich contemporary theater inwhich Eisenstein was involved. Soviet Toys, Vertov's animated"kino-reklama" (film-advertisement) for the "People'sBank," is a grotesque satire of NEP (New Economic Policy)-men andclergy as implacable enemies of the working class. One of the firstanimated films made in the Soviet Union, it is a curiously visceralexample of film expressionism in which the NEP-man literally ingests allhe covets.