SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending.
Pressure follows Tony, the British-born son of Trinidadian parents, as he leaves school and encounters prejudice on individual and institutional levels. He struggles to find acceptance in the country he grew up in, yet has no Caribbean home he can dream of returning to. Unemployed and caught between an aspirational mother and a radical older brother, he drifts away from schoolfriends and towards Black power politics.
Horace Ové pulls no punches, his semi-documentary style and stark location shooting conveying the bleakness of West London in the mid-1970s. Funded by the BFI’s Production Board, Pressure retains its relevance today, portraying the challenges of preserving ones heritage while trying to assimilate in a Britain wrestling with transition to a multi-cultural society.
Josephine Botting, BFI Curator
Widely regarded as the first black British feature film, Horace Ové’s neorealism-inspired Pressure focuses on the tribulations of recent school-leaver Tony (Herbert Norville). Tony, like my own father, is a British-born son of first-generation immigrant parents who came to England from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s. Facing the myriad pressures listed in the film’s sweetly intoned title track (parental, social, mental, ‘Babylon’ aka the police), the befuddled young man floats through Ové’s episodic, quasi-Bildungsroman like a pinball in slow motion. His putative romance with a friendly white girl is scotched by a hostile landlady; he can’t get a job (he’s either shut out by racist employers or overqualified for menial labour); he’s shown to be thoroughly ill-suited to the life of petty crime preferred by the group of jaded ne’er-do-wells he falls in with; and his Trinidadian parents – in particular his histrionic mother – are stuck in their ways.
Tony, however, gets the most aggravation from his older brother Colin (Oscar James), a staunch Black Power advocate. Colin laments his failure to ‘get him [Tony] to think black’, seemingly unable to grasp that Tony’s experience as a young black man born in Britain is different to his own upbringing in Trinidad. ‘You’ve got somewhere to go back to,’ Tony tells Colin, ‘You have the dream of sun, sea and palm trees. What have I got? Office blocks!’ Yet Tony eventually becomes involved in the cause; not, one suspects, through any burning desire for political agency, but rather because his other avenues of advancement have disappeared. It just so happens that the first Black Power rally the luckless Tony attends is raided by police, who apprehend Colin on confected drugs charges.
Throughout, Ové views the British Black Power movement with a mixture of respect for its overarching mission to foster black pride, and scorn for its inherent contradictions and lack of political coherence. This approach is no better illustrated than in the final scene – a ‘Free Colin’ protest outside the Old Bailey – which blends a documentarian’s sympathy with an undeniable sense of mockery of the shambolic nature of their efforts. The protest should constitute the film’s big, triumphant finish. Instead it must qualify as one of the most depressing ever realised on film. In an atmosphere of deafening silence, against a glaucous grey sky, a ragtag group of demonstrators dourly traipse around in a circle. This being England, it doesn’t take long for the heavens to open: a wicked but utterly believable deus ex machina. There’s bleak humour here – it took my third viewing to catch the delicious sight gag of a white protester unwittingly holding up a sign reading ‘White people are devils’ – but the overall vibe is one of limp defeat.
In the sequence’s final image, Tony, natty outfit now soaked through, enters the frame, evidently struggling against the elements. He gives up on the wooden pole and flings it to the ground, adding to the chaotic, debris-strewn tableau. He raises his banner above his head – its slogan ‘Power to the people’ now rendered bitterly ironic – and uses it to shield himself from the rain. In this subtle, entirely natural gesture, ideology is poetically subsumed by practicality. The frame suddenly freezes, the title song (lilting melody, bitter lyrics) plays again and the credits roll.
The first time I saw Pressure, I was shocked at the ending’s abruptness, but further viewings reveal it as making perfect sense. A conventional conclusion would not only have jarred with the film’s broadly observational style, but would also have contradicted the unresolved, work-in-progress nature of its central character; for better or worse, this is Tony’s Britain, and he’s here to stay, however grim things might be in the present.
It’s a shame that the fiercely talented Ové was unable to develop a proper career as feature filmmaker. A prolific photographer and documentarian, Ové’s only other film to hit UK cinemas was 1986’s Playing Away, although Pressure was undoubtedly influential – most obviously, the police-raid plot and the political enlightenment of a central character both featured in Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981). But wouldn’t it have been nice to have seen Tony – or at least a version of Tony – grow up on screen, reflecting a particular element of British society in the same way that the famously freeze-framed Antoine Doinel (in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959) did for the French? Sadly, the black British experience is one that’s been badly underserved in our national cinema. As such, the poignancy of _Pressure’_s final image extends far beyond the text.
Ashley Clark, Sight and Sound, December 2013
PRESSURE
Director: Horace Ové
Production Company: British Film Institute Production Board
Executive Producer for the BFI: Barry Gavin
Producer: Robert Buckler
Assistant Producer: Annabelle Alcazar
Continuity: Genise Michelle
Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon
Director of Photography: Mike Davis
Assistant Photography: Madelyn Most
Gaffers: Julian Litvinoff, Nigel Brook
Sparks: Albert Bailey
Graphic Presentation: Darrell Pockett, Haydon Young
Editor: Alan J. Cumner-Price
Assistant Editors: Cathy Rolfe, Chuma Ukpabi
Illustrations: Una Howe
Theme Song Music Artist: Boy Wonder and The Sisters
Theme Song Music: Boy Wonder
Theme Song Lyrics: Horace Ové
Sound Recordist: Chris Wangler
Sound Assistant: Frankie Hart
Dubbing Mixer: Tony Anscombe
BFI also wishes to thank the following: Keskidee Centre, And So To Bed, Ashanti Records, Trojan Records, Capital Radio, Basil Smith
Cast
Herbert Norville (Anthony ‘Tony’ Watson)
Oscar James (Colin)
Frank Singuineau (Lucas)
Lucita Lijertwood (Bopsie)
Sheila Scott-Wilkinson (Sister Louise)
Ed Deveraux (police inspector)
Norman Beaton (Preacher)
T-Bone Wilson (Junior)
Ramjohn Holder (Brother John)
John Landry (Mr Crapson)
Archie Pool (Oscar)
Whitty Vialva Forde (Reefer)
Marlene Davis (Marlene)
Dave Kinoshi (Mike)
Patrick Rennison (Winston)
Elvis Payne (Joe)
Winston Williams (Jacko)
Sharon Pearson (black sister in Portobello Road)
Ray Burdis (Dave)
Peter Newby (Pete)
John Blundell (John)
Dawn Gerron (Angie)
June Page (Sheila)
Margaret Ford (landlady)
Brendan Donnison (metal factory manager)
Philip Jackson (2nd CID officer)
Trevor Hilton (dog handler)
Sally Carey (secretary)
John Lynn (commissionaire)
Corinne Skinner (Tony’s aunt)
Thelma Kidger (woman in train)
Alfred Fagon (black man in train)
Tommy Vance (radio DJ)
UK 1975©
125 mins
Digital 4K (restoration)
A BFI release
POWER TO THE PEOPLE: HORACE OVÉ’S RADICAL VISION
Horace Ové: Reflecting the People – A Career Retrospective + panel and Q&A with actor Lennie James, producers Annabelle Alcazar, Peter Ansorge, Tara Prem and Marcus Ryder, chaired by Samira Ahmed
Mon 23 Oct 18:00
Playing Away
Tue 24 Oct 18:10 (+ intro by writer Caryl Phillips); Tue 21 Nov 20:45
The Black Safari + intro by director Colin Luke + Skateboard Kings
Sat 28 Oct 15:15
James Baldwin and the ‘N’ Word: Baldwin’s N*** + Q&A with author Colin Grant and additional guests (tbc)
Sat 4 Nov 14:10
**King Carnival + intro by Michael La Rose, George Padmore Institute + Reggae
Tue 7 Nov 18:00
Play for Today: A Hole in Babylon + Play for Today: The Garland Shai Mala Khani
Sun 12 Nov 15:00
Dabbawallahs + pre-recorded intro by producer Annabelle Alcazar + Who Shall We Tell?
Fri 24 Nov 18:00
HORACE OVÉ: FILM INFLUENCES
Pather Panchali
Wed 18 Oct 20:35; Mon 30 Oct 17:50; Tue 14 Nov 14:30
Seniors’ Free Matinee: La dolce vita + intro
Mon 23 Oct 14:00
Bicycle Thieves Ladri di biciclette
Tue 14 Nov 18:20; Sun 19 Nov 18:40; Fri 24 Nov 20:45
With special thanks to the Ové family for all their guidance and support for this season
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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