The Nightcleaners

About

Dir. Berwick Street Film Collective 1975, 90m, 18+ 'Initially intended as a campaign film on behalf of the struggle of the women office cleaners to organise and unionise, Nightcleaners began as a cinema-verite documentary, which was then transformed by the filmmakers at the editing stage into a film which radically questioned the conventional forms of agit-prop cinema'. Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, 1985 In Nightcleaners, the complex dynamics between gender, social class and economic power are played out. Influenced by Brechtian methods such as montage, the film turns in on itself to question the nature of the women's campaign and its representations. The film challenges the idea that political cinema can ever give a true account of events, and undermines notions of the photographic real.