Hello and welcome to this microdose from ACFM, the home of the weird left.

This is one of those microdoses with the three of us because we were recording the episode

on strikes that has just come out in February 2023 and we thought well there's so many films

about strikes we'd like to have a chat about them and share our insights. So this microdose

today is going to be all about films about strikes. We're starting in the 1920s so Jeremy would

you like to kick us off with a film that you've seen? Yeah sure. So the first film I know of

about a strike is called Strike or rather the Russian title I think is Staka and it's Sergei

Eisenstein's 1925 film so guys and Stein the great Soviet filmmaker of the early revolutionary

in the media have the immediately post-revolutionary period. One of the great pioneers of the

montage technique and his most famous film that we familiar to people is Battleship Potemkin. Strike

like Battleship Potemkin is essentially it's revolutionary Soviet Russia producing the story

of its own immediate history. So they were supposed to be part of a sequence of films which told the

story of how the history building up to the revolution. So Strike is a dramatization of a film

of a factory strike in 1903 which is in the run up to the 1905 revolution which is a sort of pre-cursive

to the 1917 revolution in Russia and like Battleship Potemkin what it does is it really it treats

cinema as an art form whose narrative function and representative function is really completely

different from what it becomes in mainstream cinema from the 1930s onwards really which is from

the 1930s onwards cinema becomes basically a narrative form whose primary concern is interpersonal

relationships and individual experience I would say from the beginning of the talkies and with

the popularisation of techniques like the close up on the point of the individual point of

view shot basically cinema becomes about a kind of extension of the bourgeois literary project

of producing a vision of the world according to which it is the private experience of individuals

...