Between Times (1993) looks at the fate of the British Left in the wake of Thatcherism. Over a cup of tea, A, the socialist, and Z, the post-modernist, investigate what now constitutes the men and women, individuals or collectives, who saw themselves as being the agency of change, i.e. until then the working class.

After the 1992 General Election defeat, the British Left were in a state of paralysis. Like today, the Left, swamped by the loudly proclaimed ‘end of history’ so often twinned with the death of Socialism, were searching for a viable alternative to the entrenched neo-liberal ideology.

In light of this, the film reveals the tension that existed between the ‘working class’ and the ‘political class’ in the early 1990s after a  decade of shifting class perceptions and individual aspirations. From his notebooks at the time Karlin writes, ‘the subjects feel ill at ease in the political class’ tightly constructed corset or straight-jacket. Political language and culture does not correspond to the subject’s intimate and intuitive understanding of itself  and its circumstances’.

Between Times explores the need for alternatives, new spaces and new realities that socialism, particularly the British bureaucratic variant, tended to exclude and abandon.  ‘A’ notes, ‘we are taking a second breath’ and inhales fresh optimism from the Thurcroft miners attempt to buy their colliery from British Coal. To ‘Z’, however, this is just temporary turbulence. ‘Z’ used to believe these incidents added up to an organised, articulated political project, that each image was part of a continuing narrative, but now, he has come to distrust the Left’s history and its propensity to cling to, what he now believes to be, disparate imagery.

In a letter to his cinematographer Jonathan Bloom, Karlin states,

Between Times Fax © The Marc Karlin Archive

The Q&A includes Kodwo Eshun, artist, theorist and co-founder of the Otolith Group, Steve Sprung, filmmaker and editor of Between Times, and Picture This’ director Dan Kidner.