Battleship Potemkin/Drifters

Double bill of silent features from the 1920s. 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), masterpiece of Russian silent film pioneer Sergei M. Eisenstein, is a dramatised account of the naval mutiny and street riots at the sea port of Odessa that sparked off the 1905 Russian Revolution. When the crew of the Potemkin protests after being given rotten meat as rations, the captain responds by ordering the execution of the dissidents. Outrage at this injustice quickly ignites and the townspeople have soon surrounded the harbour in a mass demonstration - but the scene gives way to tragedy and brutality as the authorities move in to quell the uprising. In British documentary 'Drifters' (1929), which was influenced by and originally screened alongside 'Battleship Potemkin' in the UK, director John Grierson looks at the North Sea herring fleets and the men who worked them. The film pays particular attention to how the once traditional industry has become a more modern enterprise.