Tsar to Lenin screens to sold out audiences in London and Manchester
By
our reporters
25 October 2017
Cinemas in London and Manchester recently showed Tsar to Lenin—one of the most important documentaries ever made—to sold out audiences.
The documentary was shown on October 14 at HOME, Manchester’s centre for international contemporary art, theatre and film and at the Barbican Centre in London on October 22. The Barbican performing arts centre, which includes its cinema, is the largest of its kind in Europe.
In Manchester, Chris Marsden, the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party was invited to make a 10-minute introduction to the film. At the Barbican, veteran Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter gave an introduction.
Marsden said, “It is a testament to the enduring significance of this work that it features today in the HOME Cinema’s centenary commemoration of the October Revolution, alongside classic works such as Eisenstein’s October.
“Politically, it stands to this day as one of the most important documentaries ever made. And perhaps more so than ever, given the ahistoric or even nakedly anti-communist propaganda that has characterised the efforts of the BBC and so many others to mark the centenary.
“None of you would be here if you did not have strong feelings about the October Revolution—most, I hope, sympathy or possibly active support for the anti-war, socialist and internationalist perspective and vision that guided those who made that revolution. But even if your views are shaped by official political discourse, that the Russian Revolution was a tragic mistake, the intellectual, emotional and artistic pull of a heroic mass movement encompassing millions that altered the course of…