3 February
–
23 April 2006
Films:
Section 3: Gender, Race and SocietyBerwick Street Film Collective
Nightcleaners 1975
© Berwick Street Collective / Lux
Nightcleaners 1975 was conceived as a campaign film about the struggle to unionise women working as contract night cleaners in office blocks. The film was shot in a straightforward observational way but was later edited in an experimental manner. For art theorist Griselda Pollock it addresses 'the fundamental contradiction between the typical cinematic means of producing a 'truth' about working-class life...and the political aesthetics of a film that advertised its own manufacture.' Several years in the making, it stands as a landmark in British political cinema and of collective and feminist filmmaking.