Vent d'est

An evocation of the milieu of the original (London) Film Society, and an account of its famous screening of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in November 1929 as the culmination of four years of attempts to persuade its Soviet controllers to release it, and of a parallel effort to circumvent the ban imposed upon it and other Russian films by the British authorities. This article goes on to discuss Eisenstein's London lectures as a challenge to prevailing notions of montage which was taken up less by the documentarists who assumed his legacy during the 1930s than by the mainstream narrative directors Thorold Dickinson and Michael Powell. It also reveals Eisenstein's plans to establish himself at Cambridge.