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We even had that bunch of longhairs up from the Everyman Theatre
On January 5, 1972, in the face of closure after a dozen years of escalating redundancies, outsourcing, and revolving-door ownership, the workers of Fisher Bendix in Kirkby occupied their factory. To be exact, they stormed the offices, ran the management literally off the premises, and staged a workforce-wide sit-in that lasted twenty-five days, attracted national attention including the intervention of local MPs, and ultimately saved their jobs. By 1975, a further work-in and a change of government later, the plant had been reincorporated as the workers' co-operative of Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering. The end of the decade would prove this last an ambivalent victory, but the occupation and its aftermath remain a landmark of labor history about which I had no idea until I discovered Gael Dohany's Occupy! (1976), a politically and stylistically radical short documentary that serves as both a testament to direct action and a snapshot of ongoing struggle captured in a mix of historical footage, contemporary interviews, and theatrical interpretation.
Come for the agitprop, stay for the familiar faces. In a significant indicator of grassroots feeling, much of the local arts scene turned out to support the occupation, raising funds and entertaining the workers and their families during the long haul of round-the-clock shifts, and although the Everyman Theatre of Liverpool comes last in a list including Arthur Dooley, Adrian Henri, and the Spinners, they must have stayed involved with the co-operative in order to feature so prominently in this film, contributing less in the way of traditional dramatization than Brechtian skits and sketches, an approach as pointed as it is playful. For the record, I recognized exactly two members of the company without research, but since they were Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy, I was delighted. It is the youngest I have ever seen either actor and I am fascinated by how thoroughly from the start they were themselves. Early on they personify the clash of labor and management, Postlethwaite as the firebrand convenor for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers rallying the shop floor with lines like "Right, we're going out and it's going to be a bloody long one," Nighy with officious glasses on categorically denying that the production of washing machines will be sold off to Spain until he's handed the letter that makes him out a liar, at which the supercilious expression he's maintained up through the catcall "Well, come on, what do you say?" collapses on schedule: "Shit." We never get a look at the real Sydney Carne unless he's one of the business-suited figures hastily booking it out of the building ahead of a roomful of determined workers and a news crew from Granada TV, but the real Jack Spriggs is one of the main subjects of Occupy! and the film plays with the distance between him and Postlethwaite, notably cutting within the same speech between the actor talking to the fourth-wall audience and the union official addressing a mass meeting in the canteen. The viewer is similarly drawn into an interview with shop steward Freda Staples through an actress performing her words, switching mid-sentence to the real person in conversation with playwright Chris Bond. It's a sort of rheostat of alienation. Once the owners really get cold feet over the occupation, the shell game by which the factory was transferred from Thorn Electrical Industries to the custody of Harold King of International Property Development is raucously pantomimed as an episode of The Ivor (Made a Million) Show, shuffling around such tokens of tax evasion as Postlethwaite in drag, Nighy in a stocking mask, and Julie Walters as a sexually voracious shell corporation until the middleman of Geoffrey Durham's Ivor Gershfield can scream happily, "Is it? It must be! That's my million! Didn't I do well?" He's credited as "'Billy' – shopfloor," but I have difficulty thinking of the character played by Pip Donaghy as anyone other than the film's Moritatensänger, since he brackets the action with a scathing ballad to the tune of "Blackleg Miner." This Mr. King said he'd wipe the slate if we'd all pull together and cooperate. Now he's trying to cooperate them out of the gate! Another bloody con man . . . Next time the man with the cultured voice rolls down the window of his white Rolls-Royce and says that he's just one of the boys, then tell him where to drive it. When he takes part in the drama, he seems to embody the workers' militancy, the unknown catalyst remembered by maintenance worker Arthur Laing: "I can't think of his name now, but he was screaming at the top of his head and bouncing along and shouting and encouraging everybody. It was his activity, as you might call it, that really led the march over there." His is the last voice heard in the film, echoing and amplifying the workers' concerns—their success as a co-op, the complications of self-management, the further struggle against capitalism itself—directly to the audience. The moral goes straight back to Florence Reece.
For all its fun with docudrama, Occupy! correctly devotes the most screen time to the workers themselves and not generically, either. We get perspectives from all over the factory, captioned with their stations as well as their names, e.g. "foods," "radiators," "accounts," "maintenance," "despatch." The flashpoint of the march to oust the management is not just narrated but interrupted, annotated, and sometimes contradicted by the recollections of different participants, always reminding the audience of the polyphony of collective action instead of allowing the act of retelling to streamline just one voice. With rueful amusement, Staples recalls herself as the only woman in the crowd: "I turned round and there wasn't anybody, it was all men. It was quite chaotic, believe me." Literally white collar in his shirtsleeves and tie, John Parry from accounts describes the "terrific noise" of "hundreds of workers . . . marching through the office all shouting, 'Out with the management!'" and is politely challenged by an intercut of Roy Tongue from radiators—magnetic as an actor himself with his quick, sharp, humorous face—remembering chanting, "'We demand the right to work,' that was it." Dave Tomlinson from machine shop has a memory of the difficulty of breaching the boardroom until a respected "oldest spokesman . . . got pushed in first," after which it is generally agreed that Spriggs, already present as part of a meeting with management, produced the fantastically badass ultimatum of ten minutes to reconsider the closure plans and then five to leave the factory: "Beyond that time, I cannot guarantee your safety." Going by the shot of the canteen, the vote to continue the occupation was overwhelming to unanimous. Advance knowledge of the action, plausibly, seems to have been spottier. It is recognized as vital that the families of the workers were "in on the occupation," just as it was vital that the staff unions and the manual unions were on the same page. Even workers not interviewed by the filmmakers are showcased by the inclusion of TV footage, as when a reporter turns from Spriggs to his "men" in hopes of getting a less uncompromising answer on the merits of a sit-in over a work-in and finds them equally thoughtful, eloquent, and adamant. It is not necessarily a party line. In voiceover, we hear one man admit frankly that he hates work except when there's a strike on and another woman ask like a true anarchist, "Who made the laws? Men make laws. Why should there be laws anyway? In any case, they're not working-class laws, are they, for they're against our interest. For they're to protect capitalists, that's what the laws are for." In its attention to class, the film does not gloss over questions of gender. One of the best scenes in the documentary is the tableful of women laughing over the memory of how they chased off the receiver in 1974 in what sounds like a rather Bacchae-like confrontation, which does not mean that it ignores the occupation's internal struggle with gender equality when female workers found themselves initially relegated to the canteen instead of invited onto any of the organizing committees. It registers quietly but potently when the division of labor, scrubbing floors, staffing the canteen, is shared out equally. Solidarity, we get the picture, is tricky, contentious, necessary work, but we also get a sense of its exhilaration: "You could feel the spirit. You'd do anything." The bosses are represented entirely in news clips and stage parody, which in the case of failed-upward fruit-juice entrepreneur King doesn't take much. The film isn't about them.
Occupy! ends urgently, far more of a call to arms than a congratulatory retrospective. I left it expecting to find that the co-operative of KME had snuffed it under Thatcher; even more depressingly, it was let down by the Callaghan government and fell apart literally the day before the vote of no confidence that would bring Thatcher to power. History can get away with so much more foreshadowing than fiction. Even so, the story of Fisher Bendix is no less relevant this Striketober than it was when the BFI Production Board thought Dohany's record of it worth funding. I watched it with only a few video glitches on YouTube, but for viewers in the right country it seems to be available for free on BFI Player. The music is credited to Silly Wizard. The playwright is the same Christopher Bond responsible for overhauling Sweeney Todd into a revenge tragedy. Anyone who can identify other members of the Everyman company should please feel like doing so, since while I appreciate the democracy of the credits which run in alphabetical order, the minimalist attribution of "actor" and "actress" gives me zilch as far as figuring out actual roles. He only wears glasses for two scenes as the manager Carne, but I have seen those heavy black frames often enough on Bill Nighy in the past forty-five years that I am sincerely beginning to wonder if, like Leslie Howard, he just brings his own prescription to the part. The more important question, always, is "Who's on which side?" This action brought to you by my chaotic backers at Patreon.
Come for the agitprop, stay for the familiar faces. In a significant indicator of grassroots feeling, much of the local arts scene turned out to support the occupation, raising funds and entertaining the workers and their families during the long haul of round-the-clock shifts, and although the Everyman Theatre of Liverpool comes last in a list including Arthur Dooley, Adrian Henri, and the Spinners, they must have stayed involved with the co-operative in order to feature so prominently in this film, contributing less in the way of traditional dramatization than Brechtian skits and sketches, an approach as pointed as it is playful. For the record, I recognized exactly two members of the company without research, but since they were Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy, I was delighted. It is the youngest I have ever seen either actor and I am fascinated by how thoroughly from the start they were themselves. Early on they personify the clash of labor and management, Postlethwaite as the firebrand convenor for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers rallying the shop floor with lines like "Right, we're going out and it's going to be a bloody long one," Nighy with officious glasses on categorically denying that the production of washing machines will be sold off to Spain until he's handed the letter that makes him out a liar, at which the supercilious expression he's maintained up through the catcall "Well, come on, what do you say?" collapses on schedule: "Shit." We never get a look at the real Sydney Carne unless he's one of the business-suited figures hastily booking it out of the building ahead of a roomful of determined workers and a news crew from Granada TV, but the real Jack Spriggs is one of the main subjects of Occupy! and the film plays with the distance between him and Postlethwaite, notably cutting within the same speech between the actor talking to the fourth-wall audience and the union official addressing a mass meeting in the canteen. The viewer is similarly drawn into an interview with shop steward Freda Staples through an actress performing her words, switching mid-sentence to the real person in conversation with playwright Chris Bond. It's a sort of rheostat of alienation. Once the owners really get cold feet over the occupation, the shell game by which the factory was transferred from Thorn Electrical Industries to the custody of Harold King of International Property Development is raucously pantomimed as an episode of The Ivor (Made a Million) Show, shuffling around such tokens of tax evasion as Postlethwaite in drag, Nighy in a stocking mask, and Julie Walters as a sexually voracious shell corporation until the middleman of Geoffrey Durham's Ivor Gershfield can scream happily, "Is it? It must be! That's my million! Didn't I do well?" He's credited as "'Billy' – shopfloor," but I have difficulty thinking of the character played by Pip Donaghy as anyone other than the film's Moritatensänger, since he brackets the action with a scathing ballad to the tune of "Blackleg Miner." This Mr. King said he'd wipe the slate if we'd all pull together and cooperate. Now he's trying to cooperate them out of the gate! Another bloody con man . . . Next time the man with the cultured voice rolls down the window of his white Rolls-Royce and says that he's just one of the boys, then tell him where to drive it. When he takes part in the drama, he seems to embody the workers' militancy, the unknown catalyst remembered by maintenance worker Arthur Laing: "I can't think of his name now, but he was screaming at the top of his head and bouncing along and shouting and encouraging everybody. It was his activity, as you might call it, that really led the march over there." His is the last voice heard in the film, echoing and amplifying the workers' concerns—their success as a co-op, the complications of self-management, the further struggle against capitalism itself—directly to the audience. The moral goes straight back to Florence Reece.
For all its fun with docudrama, Occupy! correctly devotes the most screen time to the workers themselves and not generically, either. We get perspectives from all over the factory, captioned with their stations as well as their names, e.g. "foods," "radiators," "accounts," "maintenance," "despatch." The flashpoint of the march to oust the management is not just narrated but interrupted, annotated, and sometimes contradicted by the recollections of different participants, always reminding the audience of the polyphony of collective action instead of allowing the act of retelling to streamline just one voice. With rueful amusement, Staples recalls herself as the only woman in the crowd: "I turned round and there wasn't anybody, it was all men. It was quite chaotic, believe me." Literally white collar in his shirtsleeves and tie, John Parry from accounts describes the "terrific noise" of "hundreds of workers . . . marching through the office all shouting, 'Out with the management!'" and is politely challenged by an intercut of Roy Tongue from radiators—magnetic as an actor himself with his quick, sharp, humorous face—remembering chanting, "'We demand the right to work,' that was it." Dave Tomlinson from machine shop has a memory of the difficulty of breaching the boardroom until a respected "oldest spokesman . . . got pushed in first," after which it is generally agreed that Spriggs, already present as part of a meeting with management, produced the fantastically badass ultimatum of ten minutes to reconsider the closure plans and then five to leave the factory: "Beyond that time, I cannot guarantee your safety." Going by the shot of the canteen, the vote to continue the occupation was overwhelming to unanimous. Advance knowledge of the action, plausibly, seems to have been spottier. It is recognized as vital that the families of the workers were "in on the occupation," just as it was vital that the staff unions and the manual unions were on the same page. Even workers not interviewed by the filmmakers are showcased by the inclusion of TV footage, as when a reporter turns from Spriggs to his "men" in hopes of getting a less uncompromising answer on the merits of a sit-in over a work-in and finds them equally thoughtful, eloquent, and adamant. It is not necessarily a party line. In voiceover, we hear one man admit frankly that he hates work except when there's a strike on and another woman ask like a true anarchist, "Who made the laws? Men make laws. Why should there be laws anyway? In any case, they're not working-class laws, are they, for they're against our interest. For they're to protect capitalists, that's what the laws are for." In its attention to class, the film does not gloss over questions of gender. One of the best scenes in the documentary is the tableful of women laughing over the memory of how they chased off the receiver in 1974 in what sounds like a rather Bacchae-like confrontation, which does not mean that it ignores the occupation's internal struggle with gender equality when female workers found themselves initially relegated to the canteen instead of invited onto any of the organizing committees. It registers quietly but potently when the division of labor, scrubbing floors, staffing the canteen, is shared out equally. Solidarity, we get the picture, is tricky, contentious, necessary work, but we also get a sense of its exhilaration: "You could feel the spirit. You'd do anything." The bosses are represented entirely in news clips and stage parody, which in the case of failed-upward fruit-juice entrepreneur King doesn't take much. The film isn't about them.
Occupy! ends urgently, far more of a call to arms than a congratulatory retrospective. I left it expecting to find that the co-operative of KME had snuffed it under Thatcher; even more depressingly, it was let down by the Callaghan government and fell apart literally the day before the vote of no confidence that would bring Thatcher to power. History can get away with so much more foreshadowing than fiction. Even so, the story of Fisher Bendix is no less relevant this Striketober than it was when the BFI Production Board thought Dohany's record of it worth funding. I watched it with only a few video glitches on YouTube, but for viewers in the right country it seems to be available for free on BFI Player. The music is credited to Silly Wizard. The playwright is the same Christopher Bond responsible for overhauling Sweeney Todd into a revenge tragedy. Anyone who can identify other members of the Everyman company should please feel like doing so, since while I appreciate the democracy of the credits which run in alphabetical order, the minimalist attribution of "actor" and "actress" gives me zilch as far as figuring out actual roles. He only wears glasses for two scenes as the manager Carne, but I have seen those heavy black frames often enough on Bill Nighy in the past forty-five years that I am sincerely beginning to wonder if, like Leslie Howard, he just brings his own prescription to the part. The more important question, always, is "Who's on which side?" This action brought to you by my chaotic backers at Patreon.
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I didn't even know about that one! Strength to their arm.
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This seems really timely and also like the third consecutive film you have reviewed which, across genre and time, has a whiff of banana.
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I didn't even mention—partly because I have no idea who plays it—the "clapped-out merchant bank" that keels over dead at a key moment in that sketch!
(The vagueness of the credits really did give me trouble. I could mention actors by name in this review only if I either knew them on sight or was able to go back and figure out who they must have been. At least the zillion-character Nicholas Nickleby tells you who's doubling for whom.)
This seems really timely and also like the third consecutive film you have reviewed which, across genre and time, has a whiff of banana.
No more than much political art! I mean, try to describe Aristophanes or substantial portions of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight.
The Daily Show once provided an excuse for Jon Stewart to declaim grandiloquently, "One day, a god named Zeus looked down upon the people of Earth from Olympos and thought, 'I will turn myself into a bull.' Then, as a bull, he went down amongst the humans and fucked a spider. And that is why, today, we have coconuts." Do I remember the politics that provided this excuse? Absolutely not. Can I still quote whatever the hell that was? Worth it.
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Nine
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The monologue, with a little research, comes from a segment of the June 22, 2011 episode called "Battle of Duality," prescribing a philosophical remedy for the widely protested austerity measures described in the opener "Grecian Burn." The documentary should just play off YouTube!
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Nine
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It turned up in the sidebar on YouTube when I was watching a piece of British TV! It may be the only time I have been successfully recommended anything by their algorithms, but I guess if they had to be a stopped clock, this film was a good time to strike. I will now put this metaphor out of its misery.
(Thanks to looping my father in on the documentary, I am now reading about the Kirkby rent strike from the same time, which I had never heard of, either. All this history that's so important that I don't know.)
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You're welcome! What show were you researching performances and strikes for?
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