Michael O’Pray Writing Prize

Communist Dislocations

Oliver Dixon revisits the work of experimental documentary filmmakers

Berwick Street Film Collective, Nightcleaners, 1975

The Berwick Street Film Collective first screened its now revered experimental documentary Nightcleaners during the week-long event ‘Brecht and Cinema’ at the 1975 Edinburgh International Film Festival. In a post-screening discussion, the theorists and critics Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen declared that the film represented the ‘most accomplished example of political cinema’ in the UK, yet arguably this was a ‘political cinema’ thoroughly dislocated from earlier models of filmic commitment.

Capturing the expected verité-style footage of working bodies, meetings and life on picket lines, the film follows activist and former cleaner May Hobbs’s struggle to unionise a group of night cleaners in London. Over the prolonged editing process, this footage morphed into a fractured array of downturned faces and disconnected voices, refilmed grain and black leader. By doing so, the collective shifted the political documentary away from the coherent, collective efforts associated with campaign films, with their projections of working-class unity, towards the form’s blockages and impossibilities. By abandoning prior political cinema’s formal models, Berwick Street Film Collective (which comprised Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan) highlighted the inadequacy of ‘militant filmmaking’ in the face of a decomposing, precarious workforce where traditional modes of labour organisation were insufficient.In its cinematic splintering, Nightcleaners asks: how can we locate the dream of socialism in these worn-out bodies and faces, for whom emancipation is as fanciful as asking for the moon? How can we locate the communist horizon in an era of its waning? What cinema is adequate to represent this breakdown?

Such questions continued to animate Karlin’s films for over two decades – he was a key member of the Berwick Collective (and driving force of Nightcleaners’ post-production). Born in a Swiss refugee camp and raised by an English stepmother in Paris, Karlin came to cinema in London in the mid 1960s, where he made his first short film about an American deserter. Returning to Paris in 1968, Karlin was swept up in the revolutionary events of May and began to make newsreels with striking workers. He soon met Chris Marker – ‘the monk’, as he called him – and produced agit-prop material for him, before joining the collective Cinema Action to undertake similar activities in the UK. Karlin quickly became dissatisfied with Cinema Action’s militant-dogmas and went on to form the Berwick Street Film Collective with whom he made three films: Ireland Behind the Wire, 1974, a documentary on the Troubles, Nightcleaners, and ’36 to ’77, 1978, an arresting portrait of ex-cleaner Myrtle Wardally.

Karlin’s filmmaking both stemmed and was disassociated from the militancy of the late 1960s – it remains curious that Karlin is rarely read alongside other post-militant filmmakers of his time, principally Marker and Robert Kramer. Like those radicals, Karlin was haunted by the unrealised political potential of 1968. Like Marker in Guinea-Bissau or Kramer in Vietnam, Karlin searched for the communist horizon elsewhere, finding his subject in the Nicaraguan revolution (the subject forming his largest body of work). Equally, Karlin was opposed to the ‘national servitude’ of British cinema, and his films avoided hagiographies of the struggle at ‘home’. For example, in Utopias, 1989, Karlin counterposes different portraits of British socialists, clashing their almost hopeless visions without resolution – ‘the one crisis that socialists were not able to predict was their own’, opens the film’s voice-over.

The political dislocation of the 1970s was for Karlin also a spatial one. His films take the position of an outsider striving to identify with but who is ultimately distanced from their struggles. In Voyages, 1985, Karlin’s first film about Nicaragua, this distance is staged with photographer Susan Meiselas. In long tracking shots, the camera surveys Meiselas’s photographs of the Sandinistas (a left-wing political party founded in 1961 in Nicaragua), while a voice-over relays semi-fictionalised letters that defer the immediacy of the images shown: ‘I have pictures, they have a revolution.’ To produce and encounter the subsequent Nicaragua films, the spectator must take the double journey through Karlin’s role as outsider and the distinct medium of Meiselas’s still imagery. When, by the time of Karlin’s The Making of a Nation, 1985, we ‘arrive’ in Nicaragua, we recognise the ever-faltering attempt to bridge these separations, to approach a remote involvement in the reality of the revolution through his camera. Karlin traces, with necessary detachment from the Sandinistas, the failures and gaps too painful to internally recognise in the face of the Contras siege: peasants refuting collectivisation, ever-profitable black markets and disaffected cultural workers.

Equally, Karlin’s was a cinema of temporal dislocation. In the interregnum between 1968 and the long march towards neoliberalism, Karlin depicts a communism lodged ‘between times’ (the title of his 1993 film) or in a time that is ‘out of joint’ (in a letter to Meiselas, Karlin compared his indecisive, in-betweenness to that of Hamlet). Between Times narrativises a debate between the orthodox Marxist ‘A’ and post-modernist ‘Z’. Responding to a post-1985 attempt and failure by miners to collectively run a colliery, ‘Z’ rejects an orthodox communism that elevates such local stories to the status of myth. Over a montage of old militant films, he declares ‘you’re here, they’re there; the gap is unbridgeable’. Across its runtime, Between Times repeats images of Buddhist monks carefully sculpting a sand mandala before dispersing it into the Thames. This symbol of shaky renewal crystallises a wayward communism with no solid historical grounding in the contemporary. Similarly, Karlin in Nicaragua observes a revolution out of step with its historical moment and a belated communist strategy; by the late 1980s, the revolutionaries’ seizure and appropriation of the state apparatus already appeared superseded, outdated. The Nicaraguans were both too early and too late.

Like other post-militant filmmakers, the departure from militant cinema is marked in Karlin’s work through a series of formal ruptures. If the voice-over in militant cinema marked the ‘operation of forcing images’, as Serge Daney claimed, then Karlin’s fracturing of the voice-over marks the undecidability, the gaps and break points of ideological positions once easily confirmed by images. In Karlin’s work, voices no longer command but rather ‘pressurise’ images by placing their meanings under continual doubt. Images, in turn, are resistant material refusing easy codification. Contra the flatness of militant images and voices, Karlin desired a cinema that acted as a ‘dislocating lever’.

In ’36 to ’77, the voices of bosses, unionists and feminist organiser attempt to place Myrtle Wardally respectively as ‘cleaner’, ‘worker’, ‘woman’ or ‘housewife’. However, the elongated duration of Wardally’s self-composed photographic portraits that dominate the film’s image-track insist that something cannot be captured by these overdetermined categories. The experience of watching is one of fluctuation, of pulling in and out of focus, back and forth from the peculiar particularities of Myrtle’s face to the reified categories. Against the operative falseness of the voice-over’s abstracted analysis, the image of Myrtle speaks to an ever-receding world outside of capitalist value relations, it also glimpses a reality always outrunning past political paradigms. Karlin’s repeated fracturing of the militant voice-over registers as the unexpected waning of an earlier revolutionary universality and inevitability. The proselytising voice was no longer apt when faced with the decline of working-class power and decomposition of its industrial base.

Karlin’s post-militancy was also peculiar to the British context. In Britain, funding for much independent filmmaking was attached to television. Karlin’s dislocation from militant cinema also resulted from the medium’s untenability in an era of cinema’s waned centrality. ‘What if’, Karlin asked in A Dream from the Bath, 1985, ‘some of the powers of cinema … had moved from the silver screen to every location but the cinema?’ Tellingly, all Karlin’s post-Berwick work was made for TV, but this was a situation that posed its own formal challenges. Karlin argued in an interview that ‘the continuous flow and exchange of images that is going on now in television … this continuous assault … has to be changed completely by the way you work images’.

Instead of the typical, militant, Sergei Eisenstein-like montage or TV’s rostrum camera set-up, Karlin frequently deployed studio tracking shots; for example, in in the opening passage of A Dream from the Bath, we see a sequence of photographs from British cinema placed about an apartment’s domestic clutter. British cinema, and its place of ‘national servitude’, appears hopelessly entangled in the everyday fabric of life – rubbing up against a stray umbrella, children’s toy or bottle of milk. Such sequences both dislocate and foreground televisual flow by reintroducing the gaps between images, emphasising the painstaking journey between and across them to grant them a sculptural, three-dimensional quality. His tracking shots plot the symbolic relations between images that mediate everyday cognition, fantasy and memory.

Despite all these conscious dislocations in Karlin’s films, when viewed in concert – be it a Sandinista militant playing the clarinet in the street; Wardally’s smile as she recalls the mango trees of her youth; a cleaner bobbing to the sound of the jukebox; a Yorkshire-based amateur historian displaying photographs of his town in the 1930s – one encounters images that pierce the flow, as if to ‘relieve our screens from mourning’, as Berwick’s manifesto put it. For example, in For Memory, Karlin imagines a city free from remembrance. The city contains a ‘strange museum’ which, much like television, holds a mass of images that ensure no memory can be lost while also relieving the city’s inhabitants of the responsibilities of memorialisation. Contra this ahistorical imaginary, Karlin pulls images out of the flow to interrogate how they might historically position their viewers. This reflects Karlin’s desire to arrest images as sites of complex memorialisation, that might resist the histories of dislocated communism. Recalling Daney’s description of the image as ‘tomb for the eye’, Karlin observes that ‘you have to see images like monuments or tombstones’ and asks: ‘what do they call upon in you as a viewer?’

For all his dedication to the functions of memory, it is ironic that the 50th anniversary of Nightcleaners has passed with little fanfare – disheartening evidence that, even when it comes to his most revered works, Karlin is a figure who constantly recedes from memory. Nonetheless, a wider return to Karlin’s contemporaries – including recent Kramer and Laura Mulvey retrospectives, an upcoming collection of Peter Wollen’s writings and the Serge Daney season at the ICA – marks the collective desire to reactivate an era whose radicals transformed the cinematic conventions of previous decades. That the essayistic, archival and durational aspects of Karlin’s films are now tired or commonplace in much committed experimental artworks is perhaps a further irony.

Against such formal immobility, his cinema allows us to glimpse, if only momentarily, political practices and aesthetics that have become outmoded, insufficient and out of step, all while refusing to shed the memory of bygone struggles.

Oliver Dixon is an awardee of the Film and Video Umbrella and Art Monthly Michael O’Pray Prize 2025.

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Art Monthly.

2025 Selection Panel

• Ed Atkins, British contemporary artist, best known for his video art and poetry
• Belinda Zhawi, literary & sound artist, author of Small Inheritances (ignitionpress, 2018)
• Angelica Sule, director, Film and Video Umbrella
• Chris McCormack, associate editor, Art Monthly