Telling of a factory workers’ strike in czarist Russia in 1912 and its brutal suppression, Strike, in its brilliant mixture of agitprop techniques and comic-grotesque stylization, reveals the influence of the explosively rich Soviet theater in which Eisenstein was involved. In surprise associations—intercutting shots of the secret police with animals, or a massacre with an abattoir—Eisenstein is at once playful and ferocious. Essential for introducing Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, Strike is filled with memorable scenes, such as a forbidden meeting in the stockyards, that give the flavor of the underground (both myth and reality) in prerevolutionary Russia.