Tagged: Sheila Rowbotham
Memory And Illumination The Films of Marc Karlin – 30 OCT, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, NYU
Marc Karlin (1943-1999) is widely regarded as Britain’s most important but least known director of the last half century. His far-reaching essay films deal with working-class and feminist politics, international leftism, historical amnesia and the struggle for collective memory, about the difficulty but also the necessity of political idealism in a darkening world.
Chris Marker hailed him as a key filmmaker, and his work has inspired or been saluted by moving-image artists and historians such as Sally Potter, Sheila Rowbotham, John Akomfrah, Luke Fowler and The Otolith Group. Yet, in large part because his passionate, ideas-rich, formally adventurous films were made for television, until recently they were lost to history.
Memory And Illumination: The Films of Marc Karlin, the first US retrospective of his work, offers a broad survey of what the latest issue of Film Comment calls “the most daring docu-essays the public at large has yet to appreciate”. They include explorations of the emergent women’s liberation movement he made as part of his early membership of the Berwick Street Film Collective, his chronicles of the 1980s aftermath of the Nicaraguan Revolution, and his enduringly resonant meditations on post-1989 politics.
SCHEDULE:
FRIDAY 30 OCTOBER 2015
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
6:30pm: NICARAGUA: VOYAGES (1985)
Voyages is composed of stills by renowned Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas taken in 1978 and 1979 during the overthrow of the fifty-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. Written in the form of a letter from Meiselas to Karlin, it is a ruminative and often profound exploration of the ethics of witnessing, the responsibilities of war photography and the politics of the still image.
8pm: SCENES FOR A REVOLUTION (1991)
A film about aftermaths and reckonings. Revisiting material for his earlier four-part series (1985), Karlin returns to Nicaragua to examine the history of the Sandinista government, consider its achievements, and assess the prospects for democracy following its defeat in the general election of 1990. (Sponsored by King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center)
SATURDAY 31 OCTOBER 2015
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
12pm: THE SERPENT (dir. Marc Karlin, 1997), 40 min
The Serpent, loosely based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a blackly funny drama-documentary about media magnate and fanatical scourge of the Left Rupert Murdoch. A mild-mannered architect dreams of destroying this Dark Prince, but is assailed by his Voice of Reason which reminds him of the complicity of the liberal establishment in allowing Murdoch to dominate public discourse.
2pm: BETWEEN TIMES (dir. Marc Karlin, 1993), 50 min
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
A strikingly resonant work, not least in the wake of the recent re-election of the Conservative party in Britain, this is a probing and sometimes agonised essay – partially framed as a debate between socialism and postmodernism – about the paralysis of the Left and the need to locate new energies, spaces and forms of being that speak to emergent realities.
3:30pm: THE OUTRAGE (dir. Marc Karlin, 1995), 50 min
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
Echoes abound of Mike Dibb and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) in this hugely compelling film about Cy Twombly, about art, about television itself. According to director Steve Sprung it’s a film not about “the art of the marketplace, but the art that most of us leave behind somewhere in childhood, in the process of being socialized into the so-called world. The art which still yearns within us.”
5-6:30pm: Roundtable – TBA
7:30pm: FOR MEMORY (dir. Marc Karlin, 1986), 104 min
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
Beginning with a powerful interview with members of the British Army Film Unit who recall the images they recorded after the liberation of Belsen concentration camp, and conceived as an antidote to the wildly successful TV series Holocaust, For Memory is a multi-layered exploration – pensive and haunted – of cultural amnesia in the era of late capitalism that features historian E.P. Thompson, anti-fascist activist Charlie Goodman and Alzheimers patients.
SUNDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2015
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
2pm: NIGHTCLEANERS (dir. Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975)
Made over three years by the Berwick Street Film Collective (Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan), Nightcleaners is a landmark documentary that follows the efforts of the women’s movement to unionize female night workers in London. It eschewed social realism and agit prop in favour of a ghostly, ambient and sonically complex fragmentage that elicited both hostile and ecstatic responses. Screen journal declared it the most “important political film to have been made in this country”, while Jump Cut claimed it was “redefining the struggle for revolutionary cinema”. (Sponsored by Gender and Sexuality Studies)
3:45pm: 36 TO 77 (dir. Berwick Street Film Collective, 1978)
Room 674, 721 Broadway (at Waverley Place)
Very rarely screened since its original release, this film was originally conceived as Nightcleaners Part 2. A portrait of Grenada-born Myrtle Wardally (b.1936), a leader of the Cleaners’ Action Group Strike in 1972, it features her discussing the partial success of that campaign and also her childhood in the Caribbean. It’s also an experiment – as probing as it is rapturous – in the politics of film form, and a fascinating deconstruction of the idea of Myrtle as a “symbol of struggle, the nightcleaners, working women, immigrants, mothers, blacks”.
MORE ON KARLIN:
Holly Aylett, Marc Karlin: Look Again (2015) http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/60519
https://spiritofmarckarlin.com/
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Presented by the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture with the support of the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University
https://memoryandillumination.wordpress.com
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QUERIES: ss162@nyu.edu
Dead Man’s Wheel and American Choice ’68 (1968)
In an interview with Sheila Rowbotham, published in her book Looking at Class. Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain written with Huw Beynon, Marc Karlin recalls his early films of the late 1960s before he entered into collective film-making with Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Collective . Sadly, no prints or negatives have been found in the Karlin’s film and video archive. This tantalising interview is the only lead so far.
Marc spent most of his childhood in Paris, Le Perreux. After being schooled in England, he later returned and became embroiled in the events of May 1968. A few years earlier, Marc filmed a conversation with an American deserter from the Vietnam War, Philip Wagner, who had landed in London on behalf of the Stop It Committee. By 1968, Wagner was in Paris. Marc, having been dissatisfied with the first film, decided to film Wagner again, this time with a French deserter from the Algeria War.
The film was called American Choice ’68. When he began to edit the film May 68 exploded. There was a strike of editors, who promptly sent Marc to a railway depot to ‘shoot reels for the revolution’. He struck up a friendship with a train driver and began filming him. The film was called Dead Man’s Wheel and focuses on the driver’s incredibly repetitive work routine. The film ends with the driver explaining this to students at the Sorbonne.
Karlin describes the scene, ‘He started explaining his work to the students, miming what he did in the train. Every fifteen seconds he had to clasp and unclasp the wheel, otherwise the train would stop. It was to stop him falling asleep and was called ‘dead man’s wheel’: he explained how ill the drivers were, because of this every fifteen seconds. It just tortured them. As he explains this, you can see the camera going round the students: they are completely bog-eyed about the worker, May 1968, the possibilities, the world that he came from. It was a hell of an introduction for me, that moment. A moment that you try to expand for years and years – but obviously you can’t‘.
In Marc’s obituary John Wyver writes the film ‘combines a deep respect for one human being with an analysis of one political, social and cultural moment’. Marc states he was very proud of the film and reveals it was shown at the NFT and remained popular in France. The hunt continues.
Sources – Looking at Class. Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, S, Rowbotham & H, Beynon, (Rivers Oram Press:2001)
British Sounds and Echoes
In the recent Marc Karlin round-table event at Picture This, Kodwo Eshun remarked this project reflected a current need to return to the archives of what Jean-Luc Godard named ‘Cine-Marxism’. Sheila Rowbotham, the Writer in Residence at the Eccles Centre for American Studies in the British Library and friend of Marc Karlin, was also on the panel. Here is a story where all these figures overlap.
In 1969 Jean-Luc Godard was in London filming British Sounds, a project he was making with Kestral Films for London Weekend Television. He approached Sheila Rowbotham for permission to use her Black Dwarf article, ‘Women: the struggle for Freedom’ written in January 1969 with the front page ‘1969: Year of the Militant Woman?’. His idea was to film her with nothing on reciting words of emancipation as she walked up and down a flight of stairs – the supposition being that eventually the voice would override the images of the body. Rowbotham declined. Consequently, another young woman agreed to walk up and down the stairs and Rowbotham did the voiceover. Here’s a section of the film.
This is an edited extract from Sheila Rowbotham’s memoir ‘Promise of a Dream’ describing the exchange with Godard.
Godard came to Hackney to convince me. He sat on the sanded floor of my bedroom, a slight dark man, his body coiled in persuasive knots. Neither Godard the man nor Godard the mythical creator of A Bout de Souffle, which I’d gone to see with Bar in Paris, were easy to contend with. I perched in discomfort on the edge of my bed and announced, ‘I think if there’s a woman with nothing on appearing on the screen no one’s going to listen to any words,’ suggesting perhaps he could film our ‘This Exploits Women’ stickers on the tube. Godard gave me a baleful look, his lip curled. ‘Don’t you think I am able to make a cunt boring?’ he exclaimed. We were locked in conflict over a fleeting ethnographic moment.
British Sounds was to have an unexpected series of repercussions which I did not grasp at the time. Humphrey Burton, then head of arts at London Weekend Television, refused to show it. The ensuing row fused with the sacking of Michael Peacock from the board of LWT in September 1969. Whereupon Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd from Kestral, along with other programme-makers, resigned in protest. LWT decided to go for higher ratings and bought in an Australian newspaper owner called Rupert Murdoch. The last thing he wanted to do was to make a cunt boring.
This is a still from Marc Karlin’s The Serpent, a film on Rupert Murdoch 28 years later.
Sources – Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. S,Rowbotham. (Verso:2002)
Picture This, Presents Marc Karlin. Nightcleaners (1975) Q&A with Mike Sperlinger and Humphry Trevelyan
The Berwick Street Collective’s Nightcleaners (1975) was filmed to support an attempt by the women’s movement to unionise London’s night cleaners. Shot in black and white, and punctuated with sections of black leader, Nightcleaners fuses political documentary with a rigorous reflection on the materiality of film and the problems of representing struggle. Here is a short scene.
The collective was founded by Marc Karlin, Humphry Treveleyan, Richard Mordaunt and James Scott. During the filming of Nightcleaners they were joined by artist Mary Kelly. Here is a bio from the early 1970s out of the archive.
Humphry Treveleyan and Marc Karlin were both members of Cinema Action, the left-wing film collective, in the late 1960s but both left dissatisfied with the group’s formal commitment to film-making. With Nightcleaners, those expecting a didactic film, found one that was nuanced and exploratory, both in terms of form and working class representation. The film used black spacing which slowly draws contemplation from the viewer and the fragmented soundtrack, together with time lapse sequences, applied pressure on the image, questioning its ability to record actuality. At the time, Screen journal declared it undoubtedly the most ‘important political film to have been made in this country’ and predicted it ‘to provide a basis for a new direction in British film-making’ . Claire Johnston’s Jump Cut review proclaimed Nightcleaners was ‘redefining the struggle for revolutionary cinema’.
The revolution failed to materialise and Nightcleaners remained firmly underground. Naturally being a collective project, Nightcleaners seeps many histories and it remains a complicated assignment to gain an exact understanding of the creative intentions of the film from those involved. To this day tensions linger, as you can witness from the exchanges between feminist writer Sheila Rowbotham, a campaigner with the Cleaners Action Group at the time, and Humphry Teveleyan in the Q&A.
That is not to say Nightcleaners ever went away. Indeed, Mike Sperlinger, LUX’s Assistant Director, states from 2002 onwards the film had regular screenings with many different audiences, striking a political chord particularly in a time where the erosion of the trade unions of the 1980s has noticeably come home to roost. Mike also observes a renewed interest in materialist film practises in oppositional film over the past ten years and Humphry Trevelyan adds the film has been adopted recently by the Occupy movement with a screening at UCL.
Nightcleaners (1974) and it’s ‘sequel’ 36′ to 77′ (1978) will soon be released by LUX on DVD.
This Q&A is chaired by Picture This director Dan Kidner with Mike Sperlinger and Humphry Treveleyan and poses the question; does a film need to explore form as well as content to be political?
Picture This Presents Marc Karlin, For Memory (1982) Q&A.
For Memory (originally TV and Memory) was a co-production between the BFI and the BBC. Marc Karlin started writing it in 1975, shot it between 1977 and 1978 and concluded editing in 1982. Ironically, a film about TV and Memory was forgotten. It remained neglected until the BBC finally broadcast the film in a sleepy afternoon slot in March 1986.
For Memory is a contemplation on cultural amnesia. Karlin, with his cinematographer Jonathan Bloom, built a model city in a studio. The camera snakes around the imagery city, seeking out fragile testimonies from voices that fail to conform to a collective history. It is an essay on a city that forgets and remembers, and how it forgets and how it remembers. Historians E.P Thompson and Cliff Williams, anti-fascist activist Charlie Goodman and Alzheimer sufferers deliver banished memories from outside the city’s bounds.
The film opens with an emotional interview with the members of the British Army Film Unit recalling the images they recorded after the liberation of the Belsen Concentration Camp. Karlin wrote For Memory as a reaction to Holocaust, Hollywood’s serialisation of the genocide. He asks: how could a documentary photograph die so soon and be taken over by a fiction?
The Q&A is chaired by Holly Aylett, documentary filmmaker, lecturer and cultural sector director, Luke Fowler, a Glasgow based artist and filmmaker, and Sheila Rowbotham, Writer in Residence at the Eccles Centre for American studies in the British Library.
Picture This presents Marc Karlin, Roundtable discussion.
This month Picture This, in association with the research project “In the Spirit of Marc Karlin”, held an exhibition and screening programme focusing on the work of British filmmaker Marc Karlin (1943-99). Marc Karlin is an important but neglected figure within the British film avant-garde of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Arnolfini, hosted a weekend of screenings and talks which began with the seminal, Nightcleaners (1974). Shot in black and white, and punctuated with sections of black leader, Nightcleaners fuses political documentary with a rigorous reflection on the materiality of film and the problems of representing struggle. The programme continued with three films that Karlin made for television in the 1980s and 90s. For Memory (1986), features E.P. Thompson, and explores historical memory, Between Times (1993) looks at the fate of the British Left in the wake of Thatcherism, and The Serpent (1997) is a drama-documentary about Rupert Murdoch told through the lens of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Each film brilliantly captures the mood of the left in Britain through the 80s and 90s, whilst the aesthetic and political issues, and questions, they raise remain relevant and urgent.
The weekend ended with a round table discussion with contributors Holly Aylett, Jonathan Bloom, Kodwo Eshun, Luke Fowler, Andy Robson, Sheila Rowbotham, Steve Sprung and hosted by Dan Kidner.Picture This presents Marc Karlin, Roundtable discussion.
The audio from the weekend’s Q&As will soon be up.
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