"This was the era of the growth of Hollywood, the era of the first international stars, the age of the comedians, the celluloid sweethearts and the tough guys. As the lines of unemployed grew longer and longer, so the gigantic baroque palaces of Hollywood's new art form grew more and more sumptuous and the lines of high-kicking chorus girls more and more desirable. The Hollywood film of the late twenties and early thirties was the staple diet of the vast army of unemployed and I would venture to suggest that it provided the main art fare for the entire working class. It was certainly one of the most important artistic influences in my life up until late 1929.

In the autumn of that year the Deansgate cinema ran a season of Russian films. This was long before the art-cinema concept first appeared and it must have been a financial flop for I remember going there for several weeks and sitting in splendid isolation as the great epics of Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko unrolled on the screen. It was, I think, Eisenstein's October and Pudovkin's End of St Petersburg which started me on the road I was to travel for the next twenty years.

When, in 1930, the Salford Workers' Film Society was formed, I was among its foundation members. It was, I believe, on the Labour Party's list of proscribed (communist) organisations and every Sunday morning, in a small flea-pit on Oldfield Road, it presented the cream of the world's best films.

There, in the space of the next few months, I saw Storm over Asia, The New Babylon, Pabst's Kamaradschaft, Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera, Aaron Room's Bed and Sofa and The Ghost that Never Returns, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Dovzhenko's Earth. The opportunity of seeing films of such stature compensated for some of the deprivation experienced by an ill-educated adolescent who faced the bleak prospect of trying to earn a living in the arid desert of 1929." (Ewan MacColl - Journeyman: xv-xvi)