Workers of the world unite with these classic films for Labor Day

was Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature-length film, and it was intended as the first part of an ambitious, six-part epic that—like a lot of grand ideas hatched in Lenin’s name—somehow never got completed. Like his next film, Battleship Potemkin, it’s a propaganda film, based on an actual incident from recent, pre-revolutionary history and designed to remind everyone why the Tsar had to go. The workers at a factory—overworked, underpaid, spied on—finally rise up and demand reforms after one of their own is accused of theft and driven to suicide. Their temporary victory proves that there’s strength in numbers. But eventually the bosses squash the rebellion, partly with the help of the “King Of The Bums,” a class traitor who lives in a junk heap and rules over a makeshift community of “unscrupulous men,” but ultimately through the unprincipled use of force and head-cracking violence. Eisenstein uses symbolic animal imagery heavily throughout, and when the powers that be are running amok, beating and executing people, he intercuts the action with scenes of barnyard animals being slaughtered, arguably not the most flattering comparison for anyone involved.