Part 2. Strike & Misère au Borinage

The Melodrama of Proletarian Solidarity: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) & Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens & Henri Storck, 1934)

As a “form of collective action,” Joshua Clover suggests in his historical study of class struggle tactics, Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), the strike can be defined as an object of study according to three essential precepts:

1) struggles to set the price of labor power (or the conditions of labor, which is much the same thing: the amount of misery that can be purchased by the pound);
2) features workers appearing in their role as workers;
3) unfolds in the context of capitalist production, featuring its interruption at the source via the downing of tools, cordoning of the factory, etc. (p. 16; emphasis in original)  

Insofar as the strike is a form of struggle corresponding to a particular development in the way that labour is divided and administered under capitalism, Clover’s definition is very helpful. What it necessarily elides, however, is an element of the strike that is not unique to capitalism and wage-labour, but which is instead mediated and reconfigured according to these material conditions: solidarity. A peculiar phenomenon, at once affectively charged and intellectually demanding, working class solidarity emerges at its source from the collective, or at least common, experiences of labour, exploitation, dispossession, and alienation. It simultaneously exerts an affective force or claim over the individual and requires of the individual a perspective or consciousness capable of abstracting from the often messy, conflicting signals of the empirical situation. Such a situation poses the possibility of the proletarian subject simultaneously coming to apprehend of the structural basis of the class conflict to which they are subject, and binding themselves to the particulars of the struggle in the form of personal identification and political will. Solidarity as a structure of feeling glimpsed in the political form of the strike, then, appears as a secondary element of the strike’s “social content,” buried amongst “the principles of the participants, their affects and beliefs,” (Clover, p. 84).

This essay will analyze the formal, dramaturgical, and political dimensions of the solidarity question in the committed strike documentary, and how changing patterns in the dominant modes of documentary filmmaking affected its expression. The strike documentary, as a recognizable subgenre of committed filmmaking, provides a useful test case for this kind of analysis. This investigation will proceed through a consideration of two major works produced in the wake of the Russian Revolution’s epochal realignment of the international working class movement, Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) and Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens & Henri Storck, 1934). The strike documentary, I argue, is perched between competing tendencies toward, on the one hand, the sobriety of cultivating an historical materialist analysis of the social and, on the other, the affective and emotional force of suffering and injustice, often melodramatically coded in the subgenre’s visual rhetoric of poverty and misery. This complicated dialectic between head and heart, as it were, is not unique in the history of committed aesthetics, but what is significant about the strike documentary is the way it gestures toward and attempts to develop both practical and representational forms adequate to the emerging, ever mutating sense of solidarity as a possible structure of feeling under industrial capitalism.

The condition of possibility for capitalism's uneven development throughout Europe during the long nineteenth century was the formation of the proletariat, and hence the condition of possibility, which the strike itself suggests, for a new form of solidarity experienced as a structure of feeling in the factories and the fields. Structure of feeling is a notoriously slippery concept. It attempts to give name to those collective modes of feeling or experience in a society that transcend the schematic formal divisions between the social and the personal, that escape the typical dichotomies of conceptual language. Raymond Williams (1977) defines the structure of feeling as a “cultural hypothesis” that is principally “concerned with meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt,” or “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought” (p. 132). Structures of feeling are therefore not pure feeling or sensation in opposition to consciousness or rationality; rather, they are social phenomena that operate across cultural formations in dialectical synchrony with the existing (dominant, residual, and emergent) material and ideological forms of domination and resistance. They do not generally announce themselves, but are more often glimpsed in the art and literature of a particular group and moment. And by the time that they have been conceptually formalized by the intelligentsia the dominant structures of feeling in a society may have already changed.

Solidarity, on the other hand, immediately strikes one a feeling or mode of consciousness that, rather than hiding amidst aesthetic forms and semantic figures, necessitates some form of collective declaration. Solidarity is not actualized without a decision, a moment of political will. It is what Williams calls the “practical consciousness” (p. 130) of solidarity, however, that ties the lived and felt reality of this experience to the idea that he is attempting to explore under this name. Solidarity is a strange thing, insofar as the form of unity that it refers to can neither be primarily situated on the side of either affective bond or political consciousness, whether based in class, race, or some other identity or analytical standpoint. Only in the practical, dialectical movement between these different poles can the collectivity of thought and feeling that make up the organic totality of the structure of feeling be observed. Solidarity, being the referential name for a particular mode of sociopolitical experience, is therefore never complete, never unadulterated or unreserved. Its particular experience may be principled and thoughtful, or angry and brash, or even filled with doubt or disunity.

Aside from the more contested, predominantly liberal lineage of the labour exposé, if there exists any established subgenre within the already minor history of committed labour filmmaking, it is the strike documentary. Like many other kinds of political film, the question of solidarity is a central concern of the committed strike documentary. What makes the strike documentary particularly attuned to this problematic, however, is the nature of the strike itself. Strikes are political activities carried out with particular ends in mind, in response to particular grievances or in support of particular demands. They are sequential, and therefore usually intelligible narratively. Strikes may conclude in a set number of ways, whether in a workers’ victory in which the capitalists must accede to their employees’ demands (or further, in the potentially revolutionary universalization of the general strike), a qualified victory for the workers, a qualified victory for the owners, or the clear defeat of the striking workers (numerous variations or combinations of these different scenarios can of course also play out). The temporal finitude and the particular stakes of the strike as an expression of proletarian self-activity, with real material consequences for the participants, allow the strike film to function in the moment as an urgent appeal for solidarity or, retrospectively, as an appeal for future solidarity and/or as an object for political analysis.

Arguably, the first great strike documentary was not even a documentary in the customary sense. Strike (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s debut feature film, portrays a labour clash at a Russian factory in 1903. After a worker is accused of petty theft by a factory manager and levied with a punishment that is itself tantamount to an economic death sentence, the man hangs himself in desperation. His death sparks the other workers to rebellion, which turns into an all-out strike. As the strike drags on, the workers face state repression, dwindling food stores, and subversion by police agents, but they also develop sophisticated forms of revolutionary self-organization and a new comprehension of solidarity as a collective structure of feeling they would not have otherwise experienced without the division of labour demanded by capitalist industrial production. In the end, the Tsarist army slaughters the striking workers and their families, the images of human death symbolically intercut with images of animal slaughter. Their deaths cannot be read as tragic in the traditional sense, however, as the utopian promise of the fictional workers’ brief self-governance enacted on screen had by 1925 already been consummated in the Bolshevik Revolution and the defeat of the White Army in the Civil War.[1] 

Despite the film's clearly fictional narrative structure, pioneering documentary scholar Bill Nichols (2016) argues that Strike has significant “documentary value" (p. 24). This is the exact term used by John Grierson in his New York Sun review of Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana (1926), which is popularly, erroneously cited as the first appearance of the word "documentary" as a technical term.[2] The unorthodox “documentary value” of Strike, like Eisenstein’s more famous Battleship Potemkin (1925), comes from the director's rhetorical and thematic concern with the world-historical inheritance of the failed 1905 revolution, which served as a precursor to the February and October Revolutions of 1917.[3] “Strike gives figurative embodiment to more than just a strike,” Nichols writes elsewhere, “it is not the documentary record of a real strike, or the true story of an imaginary one” (1994, p. 110; emphasis in original). The film’s achievement, in other words, is far in excess of simple documentation for purposes of empirical or archival posterity. Against the dominant tendency whereby “what has already occurred takes precedent over the dialectical process of remembering the past to transform the future […],” Nichols continues, “Strike refuses to offer an indexical pathway back to the past as the visible ruins of a congealed consciousness and meaning” (1994, p. 114).

Eisenstein’s radical montage style and sensitivity to the dialectical movement of history mark Strike as formally distinct, perhaps even unrivalled, in the history of the strike documentary—for reasons beyond the obvious—but dramatically familiar as an (albeit unconventional) form of melodrama. The melodrama in its mature form first arose in eighteenth and nineteenth century France as a type of popular romantic drama set to music, which mediated and reflected on the economic and political turmoil unleashed by the Revolution and its long aftermath through the personal dramas of the new bourgeois familial morality. Melodramas, Elisabeth Anker (2012) writes, are “organized in cycles of injury and action, of suffering and strength, until a hero rescues the victim and usually triumphs over the villain” (p. 136). Eisenstein’s modern variation of melodrama as progressively rising action of workers versus bosses and state hinges on “the dramatic recognition of good and/or evil and in that recognition the utopian hope that justice might be done,” contra the knowing acceptance of fate’s immutability typical of tragedy, which Linda Williams characterizes as decisive to the form (2014, p. 113; emphasis in original). And although the film’s emphasis on the workers as a collective subject minimizes melodrama’s traditional preoccupation with the individual, one of the few recognizable characters—the worker whose suicide incites the factory to rebellion—still performs the narratively crucial role of the unjustly suffering individual (as vanishing mediator) whose misery establishes what Williams calls the “moral legibility” that can frame and animate the workers’ outrage and guide them toward concretely pursuing their utopian imaginary. Although the individual victim in Strike can at first blush be read as distinct from the collective proletarian hero, the hero’s failure to save the dead worker—who can only be redeemed posthumously in the Benjaminian sense—draws these dialectical poles back together into a unity of object (victim) and subject (hero). By mediating the sensational, emotional, and visceral pull of the narrative (frequently expressed via exclamatory close-ups) with the machinic dynamism of his editing, Eisenstein seeks to make use of melodrama’s qualities of mass attraction while simultaneously “leaving aside the [tradition’s] sentimentality and bourgeois concerns” (Gaines, 1995, p. 112).  

 The stylistic distance between the Soviet Strike and the Dutch Joris Ivens and Belgian Henri Storck’s Misère au Borinage (1934), produced less than a decade later, suggests the parallel distance between the artistic eclecticism of the immediate post-revolutionary USSR and the more considered harmonization of cultural and material production as socialist construction began in earnest with the Five Year Plans. Realistically depicting striking miners living in abject poverty in Belgian coal country, Misère au Borinage has emerged of the two films as a far more widely emulated aesthetic model for the documentary representation of proletarian and slum life. Although it unavoidably tarries in that familiar, melodramatic, frenzied realism of the miserable, an aesthetic holdover from the nineteenth century novel’s preoccupation with the socioeconomic chaos of the Industrial Revolution, the directors were deeply concerned with overcoming the politically debilitating threat posed by meditative forms of sentimental or moralistic audience reception common to the film’s subject matter. In many ways, the aesthetic problematic of Misère au Borinage is similar if not identical to that of Strike: how to overcome the ideological impasse of pity as an audience reaction when the “actuality” of the poverty and immiseration before the camera appears so absolute, and the odds—both political-economic and dramaturgical—against which the workers must struggle seem so insurmountable. Misère au Borinage thus provides the realist response to Strike’s modernist consideration of committed aesthetic practice, but as I will argue these two aesthetic formulations are deeply imbricated historically.

Jane M. Gaines (1999) highlights Misère au Borinage as “a milestone in political aesthetics” that “pioneered a look” in committed documentary (p. 87). She also argues that, in contrast with a post-revolutionary work like Eisenstein’s, it “raises the [fundamental] question of […] the difference between using revolutionary film to reeducate or resolidify solidarity among the converted and using film to initiate and convert” (p. 87; emphasis added). Misère au Borinage was completed after Ivens’s invited visit to the USSR at the end of the first Five Year Plan in 1932, during which time he directed his major solidarity documentary about socialist construction, Komsomol (1933). The influence of this experience is apparent in the Belgian film’s reinterpretation and recontextualization of the socialist realist aesthetic for a capitalist setting,[4] which Ivens as a dedicated Communist brought back with him from the cultural debates then raging in the Soviet Union.[5] If the goal of socialist realism was “the edification of socialist society” and the formal resolution of the contradiction between individual and collective in the figure of the new socialist man, the transposition of these aesthetic concerns to a pre-revolutionary capitalist context necessitated a reconsideration of scale and intent (Robin, 1992, p. 214; emphasis in original). The workers of the Borinage region are portrayed in highly emotional terms over a series of loosely connected vignettes, but the grand, mimetic heroism often associated with Stalin-era depictions of Soviet life is here distilled to small-scale gestures of solidarity like the casual occupation of a fellow worker’s home so that his family’s furniture cannot be repossessed.

Ivens and Storck went to great lengths during production to counteract the aesthetic lure of their subjects’ abjection.[6] “During the filming of Borinage,” Ivens later recalled,

we sometimes had to destroy a certain superficial beauty that would occur when we did not want it. […] In the cramped and filthy interiors of the Borinage, an agreeable aesthetic value might prevent a spectator from saying to himself, “This is dirty—this smells bad—this is not a place for human beings to live.” (Quoted in Waugh, 2016, pp. 181-182)

Besides the conscious excision of visually evocative or traditionally beautiful details, one of the basic techniques Ivens and Storck use to distance the viewer from the immediacy of the visual is expository address. They begin with on-screen text that, while far from noteworthy as a feature of silent cinema, is significant for the way that it interacts with staged footage to spatially locate and contextualize the class struggle in the Borinage region within the workings of the global capitalist system. Title cards, both expository and explanatory, punctuate the editing throughout. Elements like these help to communicate in very simple terms that while the mire of the slums may constitute the concrete material of the workers’ lives, it is not the real horizon of their roles as economic agents or objects. While the daily lives, and particularly the cramped homes, of the workers and their families are filmed with great intimacy, this intimacy is treated like the double-edged sword it is. The on-screen figures do not become recognizable to us as individuals with particular qualities, even though they are often framed in close-ups or tightly composed ensembles in two-, three-, four-, five-, even six- and seven-shots. The film’s final passage, detailing a public workers’ demonstration after Ivens and Storck have focused for most of the running time on more personal matters of social reproduction and survival, opens back up to this holistic economic perspective with its recognition of the class struggle’s continual movement and possibility: “the formulation of a long-term political strategy has priority over the mere revelation of the workers’ poverty” (Waugh, 2016, p. 185).

Assuming we accept some variation of Nichols’s documentary designation of the Eisenstein film, Strike and Borinage can be classified as examples of what he refers to as reflexive and expository documentaries, respectively. Expository documentary was the dominant mode of non-fictional filmmaking in Europe and North America throughout the form’s early periods of development. This mode of representation is defined, as the name suggests, by a directness of rhetorical address, the coherency and continuity of which usually operates as a structuring principle of greater importance than the film’s diegetic elements. “The rhetoric of the commentator’s argument serves as the textual dominant, moving the text forward in service of its persuasive needs,” Nichols explains,

(The “logic” of the text is a subordinated logic; as in law, persuasive effect tends to override the adherence to the strictest standards of reasoning.) […] The expository mode emphasizes the impression of objectivity and of well-substantiated judgment. This mode supports the impulse toward generalization handsomely since the voice-over commentary can readily extrapolate from the particular instances offered on the image track. Similarly it affords an economy of analysis, allowing points to be made succinctly and emphatically, partly by eliminating reference to the process by which knowledge is produced, organized, and regulated so that it, too, is subject to the historical and ideological process of which the film speaks. (Nichols, 1991, p. 35)

Because Borinage lacks the proverbial Voice of God in terms of auditory address, the film’s intertitles play this foundational textual and argumentative role instead. There is a sense in which the requirement for the viewer to read the titles introduces a more active, open experience of viewership, however marginally, than aural narration allows for. Nevertheless, Ivens and Storck’s purpose is unambiguous. Borinage was produced to establish a feeling of solidarity with the striking miners, to help direct that solidarity towards providing material support, and to be useful in that vein to the Belgian Communist Party for propaganda and recruitment purposes. In these material aims, it was unusually successful for a work of documentary filmmaking (Gaines, 1999; Waugh, 2016). In contrast to the expository mode’s bracketing of the epistemological problematic, a reflexive film like Strike is very clearly concerned with making popularly intelligible history itself as a dialectical movement of class forces such that the viewer has not only the desire but also the analytical tools to interpret and participate in that collective struggle. 

The declaration or expression of solidarity, whether it be in the form of strike, documentary, money, material resources, voice, bodily presence, or something other, is always a formal articulation of that underlying structure of feeling, never the thing itself. The committed documentarian of the strike, then, is put in the position of aesthetically intervening in the cultural sphere on behalf of the political claim instigated by strike, such that the “thought as felt and feeling as thought” of the site of exploitation to which the strikers’ solidarity is addressed is made tangible and intelligible, both in itself and in relation to the capitalist social formation that structures it. The structure of feeling is primarily a trace of a common mode of experience—and solidarity is certainly that—but the work of forging solidarity is simultaneously a refusal to allow this commonality to remain comfortably at the level of recognition. It is instead charged by the revolutionary injunction elaborated in Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: not only to interpret the world, but to change it.

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[1] A similar narrative structure appears in Eisenstein’s next film Battleship Potemkin (also 1925), which transposes the strike narrative form onto a loosely fictionalized account of a famous naval mutiny that occurred near the port of Odessa in 1905.

[2] Nichols (2016) suggests that the “documentary value” in Strike’s early melding of nonfiction and fiction is comparable to Flaherty’s exotic anthropological scene-setting in Moana, despite their divergent categorizations in most tellings of film history (p. 24).

[3] The historical distribution and reception of the fictionalized Battleship Potemkin further draws out this documentary character. The film’s London premiere in 1929 featured on the same bill the premiere of John Grierson’s canonical silent documentary Drifters (1929), about British fisherman in the North Sea, and Grierson himself was directly involved with the preparation of English-language titles for Battleship Potemkin’s earlier American release.

[4] The first major period in the debate over the direction of Soviet artistic and cultural life, which had been ongoing since prior to the Revolution, culminated with the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, held in Moscow between August 17 and September 1, 1934. 591 delegates representing 52 different Soviet nationalities participated at the Congress, as well as 40 foreign writers. Although socialist realism had already become a major force in Soviet aesthetics, it was not until this Congress that it was formally adopted as the official aesthetic line of the USSR: “[T]he veracity and the historically concrete aspect of the artistic representation of reality have to be allied to the task of ideological change and the education of workers in the spirit of socialism” (quoted in Robin, 1992, p. 11). While socialist realism shares many features in common with social realism, the historical particularity of its development and reception make it important to understand as a unique movement.

[5] For his lifelong commitment to the actually-existing international communist movement; willingness to explore the aesthetic possibilities of socialist realism in its various permutations, so often dismissed in the West; and defense of the recreation or staging of scenes long after this practice had been denounced as anathema, Ivens has been acclaimed and decried in equal measure. Thomas Waugh, perhaps his greatest contemporary advocate, cites a particularly gruesome and telling dismissal of Ivens by the film critic Édouard Waintrop—made in Ivens’s 1989 Libération obituary no less—which cannot help but seem almost quaint in its vulgar anticommunism: “‘the Leni Riefenstahl of Stalinism” (Waintrop quoted in Waugh, 2016, p. 25).

[6] Waugh (2016) connects Ivens and Storck’s concerns about the aestheticization of poverty with Walter Benjamin’s contemporary critique of the New Objectivity photography movement expressed in his seminal 1934 essay “The Author as Producer” (pp. 181-185).

Works Cited

Anker, E. (2012). Left melodrama. Contemporary Political Theory 11(2), 130-152. doi:10.1057/cpt.2011.10

Clover, J. (2016). Riot. Strike. Riot: The new era of uprisings. London and New York: Verso.

Gaines, J. (1995). Revolutionary theory/Prerevolutionary melodrama. Discourse 17(3), 101-118. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/41389388

Gaines, J. M. (1999). Political mimesis. In J. M. Gaines & M. Renov (Eds.), Collecting visible evidence (pp. 84-102). Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Nichols, B. (1991). Representing reality: Issues and concepts in documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Nichols, B. (1994). Blurred boundaries: Questions of meaning in contemporary culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Nichols, B. (2016). Speaking truths with film: Evidence, ethics, politics in documentary. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

Robin, R. (1992). Socialist realism: An impossible aesthetic (C. Porter, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

Waugh, T. (2016). The conscience of cinema: The works of Joris Ivens, 1926-1989. Amsterdamn: Amsterdam University Press.

Williams, L. (2014). On The Wire. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.