+ intro by Jon Jost, filmmaker, cinematographer and friend of Robina Rose
Legendary punk stayover The Portobello Hotel provides the location for Robina Rose’s stunning, psycho-dramatic long-night-of-the-soul. The thankless, dreamlike monotony and stillness of nocturnal reception work shifts and mutates with the eruptive arrival of eccentric guests from London’s counterculture, including Heathcote Williams and Anne Rees-Mogg. The Penguin Café Orchestra’s Simon Jeffes soundtracks the uncanny temporal fluctuations and strange events. Tonight’s screening is dedicated to the memory of Robina Rose, who died in January.
bfi.org.uk
Nightshift was filmed in five nights over Christmas 1980. The budget (in the region of £6,000) was possible as a result of the entire cast and crew working for nothing.
The director and scriptwriters had worked as night receptionists at the hotel over a long period, and the film grew out of this accumulative experience.
The script took the form of a very precise storyboard/cartoon … with the dialogue being worked out largely in collaboration with the performers.
From behind her desk the hotel receptionist watches guests, staff and outsiders move across the reception area – dreamlike set pieces that lie somewhere between vaudeville and Last Year in Marienbad. She performs her tasks … participating both in the mechanics of the hotel and (vicariously) in the fantasy it represents.
Robina Rose, 25th London Film Festival programme notes
Contemporary reviews
The receptionist on the nightshift at the Portobello Hotel has a face like a beautiful Japanese doll, very white and impassive with deep-set, almond-shaped eyes. With her head tilted slightly to one side, framed in the reds and browns of the dimly lit hotel lobby, a lamp to her right completing the composition, she observes the comings and goings of her shift, accomplishing the appropriate gestures at the appropriate moments, answering the telephone, taking a message, handing over a key. She is like the camera she faces and which often shows what she sees: unhurried, deliberate, receptive without displaying emotion, often immobile for what seem like hours on end. Yet the world is contained in the hotel oyster, and all human life really is here: a middle-aged spinster tourist; a pop group called The Urban Guerillas whose distraught manager tries to keep his lads from drinking; two young executives discussing ‘percentages’ in their best mid-Atlantic accents; a conjuror; a woman in black who announces she is the wife of Room 16; some Black musicians who stage an impromptu session in the lounge; the Countess Vivianna, draped in gold brocade, who descends the stairs majestically and takes up a position beside the telephone. Time passes gradually.
Nightshift shows what film can do if the conventional pace of narrative is slowed down and montage diminished. It is not a new idea, of course, but the way it is done here is both absorbing to look at and satisfying from the moral point of view. For in making the audience conscious of watching, it invests the most mundane aspects of work and one of the most stultifying of jobs with dignity and significance. It is true that events are ‘enlivened’ somewhat with the occasional shot of a room or the lift going up or down, but Robina Rose uses these interpolations to point to ellipses of time rather than to revive the audience’s attention. In any case, in emphasising the quirkiness of the hotel’s clients, Rose only makes us believe all the more readily that what we are seeing is fortuitous, fascinating and, somehow, superreal. Nightshift surprises its audience into being interested and makes banality the secret of success.
Jill Forbes, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1982
The best British film of this year – and the best of the [Edinburgh] festival – was shown at midnight, and the fact that it benefited from this is a strong indication of its success. It’s called Nightshift. Robina Rose and her co-writer Nicola Lane worked for a long time as night porters in a hotel, and the film grew out of their experiences. Through the eyes of the young woman behind the reception desk, we see what happens in the nighttime foyer of a small hotel: virtually nothing. Of course, once our eyes have become accustomed to the old-fashioned warm red and gold tones (Jon Jost, himself an excellent American filmmaker, operated the camera), once we have adjusted to the slowed-down rhythm of nighttime movements, then our minds begin to wander leisurely, and we piece together the story, the stories of the people who, as if lost in a dream, are dragging their bags through the nighttime foyer. And with us, the young woman, Nightshift begins to dream gently, almost imperceptibly: an older woman, framed by her twitching shadow, cast by the television on the wall behind her; the young wife of a gnome-like film director dressed all in white; a pillow fight, a shower of feathers in slow motion. With the simplest of techniques, Robina Rose has created an enchantingly serene film.
Kraft Wetzel, Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 September 1981
Robina Rose was born in 1951 to Danish and German parents and grew up in Notting Hill, London. After leaving school, she became a film projectionist at the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, Covent Garden. Rose graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1977, where she did camera work on Celestino Coronado’s Hamlet starring Helen Mirren and Quentin Crisp. Rose was awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship and moved to Berlin, where she was later invited to teach at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) and remained there for the rest of the 1980s. On her return from Berlin she worked for the Community Programme Unit of the BBC.
Nightshift
Director: Robina Rose
Production Company: Robina Rose
With assistance from: Arts Council of Great Britain
Producer: Mary Rose
Production Supervisor: Alicia Wille
Production Assistants: Nicola Lane, Max Handley, Christina Birrer, Deborah Kingsland
Written by: Robina Rose, Nicola Lane
Additional Dialogue: Max Handley, Mike Lesser, Jonathan Gems
Photography: Jon Jost
Editors: Janet Revell, Robina Rose
Music for Hoover: Simon Jeffes
Music for lounge: Eye Level
Music for bar: The Stroke, Famous Names
Sound: Stephen Brown
Cast
Jordan (night receptionist)
Anne Rees-Mogg
Mitch Davies
Jon Jost
Max Handley
Barbara Jung
Tom The Milk
Vivianna de Blonville
Heathcote Williams
Phil Turner
Sibylle Oellerich
Oscar X
Sam Jones
Mikey Nelson
Joe Dworniak
Yvonne Munro
Dan Bowling
Marga Wille
Lore Sproule
Claudia Bolton
Lin Solomons
Wanda Gusynski
Shaun Lawton
Kristin Birrer
Philip Oellerich
UK 1981
68 mins
Digital 4K
Digitally restored in 4K on behalf of Lightbox Film Center (Philadelphia) in collaboration with the British Film Institute and Cinenova. Restoration funding provided by Ron and Suzanne Naples
Presented in partnership with Cinenova
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email