The Strike

The first Czechoslovak film to receive the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, The Strike is a cornerstone example of political agitprop. Set amidst a worker's strike in late-nineteenth-century Kladno (the main coal-mining region of the country), the film lays down the battle lines early with its portrait of hardscrabble miners, determined wives, jackbooted military oppressors, and the dandified Germanic elite who control them all. (Made immediately after the war, the film also highlights Czech nationalism in the face of German rule.) Fortunately the film is no mirthless diatribe, but full of verve and a remarkable black-coal realism; Karel Steklý's direction benefits from the noirish black and white photography of Jaroslav Tuzar, which captures the miners' underworld realm and their nighttime union gatherings along with the remarkable landscape of the region. The Strike became the model for countless generic retreads in the ensuing restrictive years.