Night Cleaners @ WORM - 23rd of January 2008

Subject: Night Cleaners @ WORM - 23rd of January 2008 Wed Jan 09, 2008 12:32 pm

Quote :: A rare opportunity to see this landmark of British political cinema and collective filmmaking. Nightcleaners was originally conceived as a campaign film highlighting attempts to unionise women working at night as contract cleaners in London’s large office blocks.

During editing, the conventional TV style documentary footage they had shot was reworked through experimental montage techniques in an attempt to avoid constructing a cinematic ‘truth’ about working class life.

Nightcleaners asserts that realism in the cinema is only ever a product of the apparatus used to construct it. The Berwick Street Collective was a London based group making political films between 1970–8, they were joined for Nightcleaners by US artist and filmmaker Mary Kelly whose wider oeuvre of work was much in evidence at this year's Documenta 12 in Kassel.