In Nightshift (1981), Robina Rose’s third and final film (she sadly passed away this January), the lobby of West London’s Portobello Hotel becomes the stage for late-night lodgers to perform their lives before a one-woman audience working reception. Guests of all stripes, from punk to bourgeois, provide glimpses of themselves to a woman whose labor often slips into invisibility, though Rose keeps it in the foreground. She and much of her film’s cast worked at the Portebello off-and-on—even the idea of making an oneiric front-desk film came from fellow hotel co-worker Nicola Lane.
Portobello, the road and the hotel, were once throughways of London's underground art scene and Rose was much more than a sojourner in the area. She worked as a political activist and spent decades fighting for the preservation of the Notting Hill community on Portobello Road, even running for Parliament as a Green Party candidate in 2015. In her film, the Portobello Hotel acts as a spectral microcosm for ‘80s Notting Hill—a neighborhood that was clashing between its roots as a suburb for the landed gentry and its dive-y 20th century reputation. The urbanization of Notting Hill created overcrowded working class slums, becoming a multicultural hub in the postwar era, particularly for Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Nightshift presents the Portobello as a place for the ghosts of Notting Hill; ghostly, first in their oneiric, witching hour appearances, and more ghostly now that the neighborhood has been gentrified and the hotel uses its bohemian past for ad copy. Notting Hill is now the place where you can find both Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and former PM David Cameron.
In Nightshift, the receptionist whose eyes we see the night through is played by the punk legend Jordan, who also stars in Jubilee (1978). Other idiosyncratic guests in the film include the poet Heathcote Williams and the filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg, who broke with her conservative publishing family and became the godmother to a generation of the British avant-garde. The film also features a score from Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Simon Jeffes and was shot by the stalwart independent filmmaker Jon Jost, who has a brief cameo. Jost recalled his work and relationship with Rose in Facebook posts on March 6 and 7, remembering that the last time he saw her she said, “We were never lovers, but we love(d) each other, and maybe that is best.” Their artistic trust ran deep, with Jost managing much of the shoot’s technicalities under Rose’s direction after she got sick on the second day of the five day shoot. The result is a unique vision that—as Elena Gorfinkel points out in Notebook—has echoes of Jean Vigo, Chantal Akerman, and Marguerite Duras while still feeling wholly of its own, like one woman’s half-waking dream as another late night at work trudges on.
Nightshift runs March 14-March 20 at Anthology Film Archives.
