‘Raising the Red Rag’: Recontextualising Working-Class Women’s Labour Through Nightcleaners (1975) and ’36 to ’77 (1978)

Produced by Britain’s Berwick Street Collective, Nightcleaners (1974) and its ‘sequel’, ’36 to ’77 (1978), are two pioneering ‘documentaries’ that examine the alienating working lives of night-time female office cleaners in London as they try to balance their back-breaking work schedules (10:00pm to 6:00am) with their domestic roles as wives and mothers. We also see feminist activists such as Sheila Rowbotham and Sally Alexander join forces with the radical union organiser, May Hobbs, to recruit the workers into the larger union movement through leafleting and hustings. Significantly, instead of utilising the realist structure of TV documentaries, Direct Cinema or Cinéma Vérité, Marc Karlin, the collective’s main director, chooses a disjunctive, non-chronological style, where the painfully slow ‘action’ is interrupted by 199 black screens and countless sound drop-outs (in Nightcleaners), or stop-motion freeze frames of a cleaner’s face (Myrtle Wardally) in ’36 to ’77, designed to accentuate the irreparable splits between the workers, the Feminists and the predominantly patriarchal unions. This Brechtian alienation effect opens up considerable space for critical and analytical thought, which, when projected forward to contemporary attacks on women’s rights, suggests that yet another radical cinematic (and political) form is needed to spur workers to viable action.