Community Cinema: A report based on material held at The Rio, Dalston

‘Two classic films by Eisenstein. October depicts the Russian revolution of 1917. Exhilarating!!!’ Such was the Sunday afternoon programme promised in a leaflet advertising the screenings at the Rio, Kingsland High Street, Dalston, in the London Borough of Hackney, for February, 1983. The exhilaration of the afternoon – for audiences who paid the Rio’s £2 admission charge (£1 for under 16s and UB40s, 50p for pensioners) – was to be found not only in the experience of watching Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 experiment in intellectual montage, but also in the rarer opportunity of viewing Time in the Sun, Marie Seaton’s reconstruction of the Russian director’s unfinished 1931 film about life and culture in Mexico. [Opening paragraph]