Telling of a factory workers' strike in Czarist Russia in 1912 and its brutal suppression, Strike was one of the most original debuts in film history. In its brilliant mixture of agit-prop techniques and comic-grotesque stylization, it reveals the influence of the explosively rich contemporary theater in which Eisenstein was involved. Jay Leyda writes in Kino: "Eisenstein based his film method on his theatrical principle of 'montage of attractions,' meaning that every moment the spectator spends in the theater should be filled with the maximum shock and intensity.... Strike is full of cinematic metaphors and images of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste; it is a deluge of real things and surroundings.... (It) shows a manifestation of...'constructivism', less in surface design...than in the more important matter of method: building inventions with the essentials of reality."