14 labor union movies to organize your summer

polygon.com:

It’s a hot labor summer. It’s never a bad time to celebrate organized labor and collective action, but it just feels right this June. So we’ve collected a group of movies on that topic and theme for you to enjoy at home.

Some of the most legendary labor movies (like Matewan and Norma Rae) aren’t currently available to watch at home, as well as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (ed note: one of Pete’s all-time favorite movies). But there’s still no shortage of great labor- and union-focused movies available on streaming platforms and digital VOD services. We’ll start with some movies explicitly about labor unions before moving onto others that fit for thematic or narrative reasons.

The legendary Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein is perhaps best known for his role in the theory and development of montage as a film technique, and for his 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. But Potemkin was his second film of 1925, following his terrific and powerful feature debut, Strike.

The movie presents a strike by factory workers at the turn of the 20th century, and the brutal measures the owners turn to in an attempt to suppress the collective actions of the laborers. Eisenstein creates evocative visual imagery throughout, often comparing the treatment of the workers to the treatment of cattle, including an infamous scene where violence towards the workers is interspersed with the slaughter of cattle. A stunning work from one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers to ever live, Strike remains powerful nearly a century later. —Pete Volk

Strikeis available to stream on Criterion Channel and on Kanopy for free with a library card.

One of the finest American documentaries ever made, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA follows a 1973