Directed by:
Karel SteklýScreenplay:
Karel SteklýCinematography:
Jaroslav TuzarComposer:
E. F. BurianCast:
Marie Vášová, Ladislav Boháč, Bedřich Karen, Naděžda Gajerová, Miloš Nedbal, Lída Matoušková, Josef Bek, Pavla Suchá, Jaroslav Zrotal, Josef Benátský (more)Reviews (3)
I've never spent more than a day in a movie without beautiful women. This is to say I would like to vary the well-known lesson about the need for beauty not only in film but in life in general. Although The Strike offers a landmark of Czech state film, a festival hit at the time, and the fact that it consists of excellent work with drama (both social and family), when there is too much, then it is too much. While Marie Vášová has a solo, Boháč caricatures life's twists from extreme to extreme. Bek loves (but at least here I enjoy him, because he has no competition) and only looks forward to Red Kladno. And Věra Kalendová? She becomes a phenomenon that Czech cinema will long resent.
()
A brilliantly over-ambitious attempt by Steklý to combine constructivist naivety with historical trauma. Scenic revolutionary suggestiveness and the Russian constructionist school meet here with a reconstruction of the shooting of the workers and the description of their hardships filmed in and around the real Kladno mines. From an aesthetic point of view, this creates an interesting paradox, whereby the film, following the model of socialist realism and its admiration for industry and the agricultural cultivation of nature, creates dramatic spectacular images in which tall smoking chimneys, blackened walls, and statuesque miners are portrayed with admiration for their power and monumentality, yet at the same time, contrary to the rules of social realism, all of this seems threatening because none of it yet belongs to the working people. The mine, the tipple and the factory act as centers of humiliation and danger for the workers. And yet the film can't help but be properly unionist in its fascination with those spaces.
()
A fairly decent story with inoffensive direction that manages to conjure up three or four interesting scenes, but that's about it. The actors couldn’t be any shabbier, and most of the dialogue are like nails on a blackboard, making the emotions seem machine-like almost to the point of ridiculousness. And the melodramatic music is nauseating from the very first scene. Communist art like The Strike is something you don’t want.
()
Gallery (9)
Photo © NFA
![The Strike - Photos](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/166/001/166001590_8bb2cf.jpg)
Ads