This January, we’ve commissioned a series of short essays considering film restorations from the past year. This is the first.
Nightshift (Robina Rose, 1981).
’Tis the season: that year-end rush to evaluate, organize, rank films seen in the arbitrary unit of time one calls a year. This process always privileges newness, but I have come to treasure the novelties that unpredictably emerge from historical archives. Some films arrive as though you had yourself wished them into being. One such gleaming jewel of “archive fever” from the past year is Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981), an extraordinary work of oneiric imagination, punkish sensibility, and a requiem to women’s labor in the hazy terrain of night work. Nightshift screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival in a recent restoration, supervised by Ross Lipman, the product of a collaboration between Lightbox Film Center, the British Film Institute, and Cinenova. It was shot over five sleepless days and nights in West London’s Portobello Hotel, a site where the filmmakers had themselves occasionally worked. The film is also a document of an early-’80s London underground scene. Jon Jost provides his runic cinematographic eye (and appears briefly in the film) and the film’s stunning 16mm images suspend in their gelatinous amber the dusty charms of the hotel’s Vermeer-ish ambiance, conveying the peculiar liminality of being awake while others sleep, tending to the rhythms of night’s minutiae.
Nightshift opens a portal to a different temporal logic, organized both by the hotel’s shambling panoply of guests and by the waning energy of those who labor for them. Cinematic punk darling Jordan (née Pamela Rooke, star of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, 1978), with her distinctly pallid face, epicene and deadpan, plays the hotel’s front desk receptionist. She sits like a Mona Lisa under a silver deco shell gooseneck lamp, by a carmine rotary phone, in a red-glowing proscenium. She is the all-seeing eye and simultaneously the effaced, anonymized worker who silently observes the site’s activities and conflagrations over the course of a single night. Impassive voyeuse and transactor of hotel guests’ whims and desires, she echoes the figure of the porn-booth girl seen in Simone Barbes or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980) and Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983). Indeed, however distinct, both hotel and porn theater are locations of transient lust, temporary rest, momentary encounters, and forms of embodied, intimate labor. The presentation of the receptionist’s optical point of view is part of a larger shot construction that privileges estrangement (an alienation of both worker and image) and an occasionally comic planimetric frontality. Our heroine’s stare into the camera and at the hotel’s architecture has the blankness of an automaton’s gaze, even as it reveals a flow of events that speak to the lilting and drifting qualities of a fatigued fugue state. Jordan’s long metal earrings shuffle and tinkle, as a music-box motif is sometimes heard, derived from the song “Cutting Branches from a Temporary Shelter,” composed by Simon Jeffes of the avant-pop Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Somnambules, carousers, and night-crawling guests float and flow through the hotel’s common spaces: the sinuous stairwell, the velveteen curtained parlor bathed in a luminescence of reds, and the wrought-iron elevator, which glides from floor to floor in a peekaboo manner, unveil a dialectical montage of sudden faces and sights.
A hotel is itself a scaffolding for cinematic reshuffling, its residents akin to a deck of cards. The characters who slide past Jordan’s glassy view become troubadours of multiple nights, unveiling how nocturnal activities are imbued—as the clock ticks further into darkness—with inebriation, exhaustion, or mania. An older woman (experimental filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg) asks for her room key; a troupe of wired musicians boisterously sign in for the night; a pair of sparring bros argue about investments; a pipe-smoking, barely enrobed guest slips past as though a sleepwalking specter making his paces in a mysterious chiaroscuro geometry. A long-haired resident (radical poet, artist, actor, and playwright Heathcote Williams) comes downstairs and performs a series of magic tricks with coins and a cigarette in direct address to the camera, implying the receptionist’s point of view. The hotel’s female cook lounges on the stairwell and delivers a monologic litany of the depredations of kitchen work and the guests’ absurd requests, as one has demanded free-range eggs (they must have thin shells). In one incredible staging of image in relationship to sound, a posh contessa (Countess Vivianna de Blonville) in feathered chapeau calls her rich auntie from the velveteen parlor: she prattles on about her existential boredom and her project of hunting for another husband (“Just one more husband!”) while her aunt expresses disdain for the riffraff with whom she associates. As their conversation continues, the camera shifts from a long shot of de Blonville to station itself above the red-lacquered receptionist’s desk, at which Jordan wraps the next morning’s croissants in perfectly cut squares of cellophane, one by one. In the demonstration of an action, a woman’s invisible labor is reframed at once as an aesthetic act and conferred a hypnotic charge. Croissants cannot wrap themselves, after all.
Nightshift (Robina Rose, 1981).
As night rolls on, reality and its others shade together, and perception unpeels itself from its object, the layers unfurling between what is seen from its constituent parts. In one extraordinary scene, in the deepest of night, the camera is positioned at the wall facing the parlor, set close to the floor, and we gradually discern a darkened figure, the receptionist, moving a gleaming vacuum cleaner to and fro as she nears the camera’s station. The machine’s proximate buzzing slowly blends with the muffled melody of a woman humming (credited as another composition by Jeffes, “Hoover Music”). The mechanized sounds of enervation register as mundane yet transformative. Internalized sensation—deadening tiredness and the circuitry of empty time—is externalized as routine. The night-worker labors into the aurora of morning, senses dimmed and bent by the fog of fatigue. New hotel guests appear suddenly as wraiths and visitors from other domains; the wife of the man in Room 16 presents a diorama of their past through totemic objects toted in a tied-up scarf, a show-and-tell from the beyond. Is she a ghost, or a teller of ghost stories? In the film's most pointed cinephile homage, the slow-motion pillow fight of Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) is restaged as raucous femme fantasia. An upside-down tableau of a male sleeper (Shaun Lawton) writhing in bed, shot through what seems to be a pane of weathered glass, portrays the event of sleep as a tormented agony, his involuntary gestures and rococo contortions a corporeal melodrama of dreamt disturbance. The music-box tune permeates these scenes, providing the phantasmic lilt of mechanical repetition—one of the film’s first images is of a coin-operated, nineteenth-century French music box, a clock of another order.
As the sun begins to rise, the receptionist too dozes briefly on the parlor’s couch, but tasks beckon. The image of a brightening London sky is suddenly fizzed over with sprayed dew as Jordan scrubs the window pane, transparency yielding another surface for labor. As if wiping the sleepy sands from our eyes, the squeaking of her cleaning rag on the glass exposes a hidden friction within the spectator’s vision. When she slathers her own moonlike face with globs of cold cream, staring directly at the camera, as if a mirror, the two gestures rhyme and jar, generating rumination. In the emerging clarity of dawn, Jordan is simultaneously seer and vessel, the surface through which we see and a laboring mediator.
There are few films that offer the sense of exhaustion of the nocturnal wage worker as itself an investigation into new regions of cinematic temporality. Can cinema also reveal the camera’s weariness? In oscillating between extremes of phantasmagoria and the flat planes of automatism, Nightshift seems to answer this query in the affirmative. Whereas the broad range of films that fall under the rubric of “slow cinema” continues to be framed through the work of male auteurs, it is in the history of women’s filmmaking (Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, among others) that some of the most daring uses of slowness can be found. Nightshift’sdrifts can be added to this alternate history of experimentation with cinematic time, anchored as they are to women’s occluded labors, before and behind the camera.
Historical surprise can reinvent the cinema, if one lets it, in the dialectical push and pull of the present's exigencies of living, working and making, and the past’s aesthetic possibilities. These resonate as glories of a kind of stolen, purloined time. In the temporal aperture between sundown and sunup, and in the creases of fatigue, Rose’s film offers spectators a place, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, for “dreaming off.”
Keep reading Notebook’s 2024 Year in Review.