SIMON MATTHEWS on Ann and Eduardo Guedes’s 1986 film Rocinante.
In The Book of Left-Wing Failures – a substantial volume – one would find in the chapter covering the events that flowed from the debacle of the 1983 general election an interesting footnote about the film Rocinante. Amidst the crushing of the NUM, Rupert Murdoch’s triumph at Wapping and the wiping out of the GLC and other regional government bodies, the movie’s place there would remind the reader that the arts too suffered, with all manner of indignities being visited on them. To fully understand Rocinante, though, we need to trace our steps back to Paris, 1968.
For some, such as Gustav and Ann Schlacke, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Using their flat as a meeting place for the socialist student movement, they took part in protests and co-ordinated strikes as well as recording on film many of the violent street clashes. In one of these Gustav was injured by a piece of shrapnel from a gas grenade, an honourable wound incurred more-or-less on the barricades.
His endeavours did not go unnoticed, and with Charles de Gaulle for the moment remaining in situ, the French Minister of the Interior duly expelled both the Schlackes as ‘foreign agitators’ later that year.
The couple moved to London, and fell in with Richard Mordaunt, noted for having made the documentaries Anatomy of Violence and Voices – the former covered a conference at the Roundhouse that discussed imperialism, racism and oppression; the latter followed Jean-Luc Godard about as he filmed One Plus One. Importantly, Mordaunt had access to money and was squatting, with an abundance of film equipment, in Alexandra Road, Swiss Cottage. Renaming themselves Cinema Action, the Schlackes quickly got to work, producing Not a Penny on the Rent (1969), an attack on proposed council rent increases.
Preferring a less political approach, Mordaunt quickly split, but Cinema Action kept going. Money came in from trades unions and the British Film Institute. They visited Derry and made People of Ireland! (1970) and were then allowed, in UCS1 (1971), to record the work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipyard. This was something of a coup, given that all other press and television were excluded.
Both productions established the Schlackes’ modus operandi. Using the strap line Working Class Films, and adopting a Marxist approach without being tied to any political party, they worked with activists and radical members of the Shop Stewards’ Movement – an attempt to re-establish an organisation that had flourished circa 1920, supporting the Soviet Union and ultimately affiliating to the Comintern.
With their reputation riding high ‘on the left’ they were joined by Eduardo Guedes, a Portuguese filmmaker who had opted to live and work in the UK rather than be conscripted to fight in colonial wars in Africa. Eventually he and Ann Schlacke married, but both continued to work with Gustav, who around this time adopted the surname Lamche. In the years that followed, they moved from one large squatted house to another (London was full of them then); they were kept under observation by the security services on the grounds that their German background made it likely they had connections to the Red Army Faction. Which, given Astrid Proll was living in a feminist squat in Broadway Market at the time, was by no means illogical.
Eventually, thanks to Councillor Ken Livingstone, then passing through that part of London en-route to Brent East, they secured premises from Camden Council at 27 Winchester Road NW3. Livingstone also got them GLC funding, which together with money from the Arts Council, allowed them to produce, edit and screen films in their own space.
Founder members of the Independent Film-makers Association in 1974, they campaigned for airtime on the soon-to-be established Channel 4. The new TV channel had been recommended in 1977, and there was – remarkably, perhaps – a political consensus at the 1979 general election: it should be established quickly and should remain publicly owned, whilst raising money through screening commercials. With Edmund Dell, formerly Labour MP for Birkenhead, installed as chairman, it began broadcasting in November 1982, showing Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live early on.
Set in a small Welsh town, this followed a family over five years as they face up to the end of coal mining and the destruction of their community. It came with original music from Robert Wyatt and Scritti Politti and was hardly the type of material the Thatcher government expected, particularly in the run-up to a general election.
Despite the left and centre going down to a spectacular defeat when this took place, and even after the strategic and emotional debacle of the crushing of the NUM in 1984–85, Channel 4 commissioned Cinema Action to make a feature film. They provided £270,000 (about £1m today), which with other funding allowed for filming in colour and the manufacture of 35mm cinema prints. The budget also allowed them to hire bankable stars, in this case John Hurt and Ian Dury.
Which was quite a coup, and reflected how much this was a serious tilt at the commercial market. Hurt had excellent credentials for such a socially conscious work. He made his name on the stage in the 1960s in Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs playing the lead, as an idiotic student activist, alongside Rodney Bewes, in a college somewhere in the north.
After this he was the wretched Timothy Evans, wrongly executed in 10 Rillington Place, and wowed TV audiences as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant before bagging a couple of Academy Award nominations for Midnight Express and The Elephant Man. When offered Cinema Action’s script, his most recent hit had been playing Winston Smith in 1984, a much-liked Orwell adaptation.
Dury in contrast had exited his recording contracts with Stiff and Polydor as well as separating permanently from the Blockheads who could no longer stand his behaviour. For him, this was a chance to launch himself as an actor with the expectation that his name would ensure recognition with a young, hip audience.
The film that emerged was Rocinante written and directed by Ann and Eduardo Guedes, and produced by Gustav Lamche. Named after Don Quixote’s horse, it opens with a quote from Cervantes, which possibly implies what follows will contain a lot of tilting at windmills. We meet John Hurt, who has just quit a job delivering Christmas trees. Carrying no more than a rucksack of books, he starts out on a journey through the UK of the mid-80s, commenting as he does so: ‘Reality seems more of an invention by the hour, these days’ and ‘Moderation will get you nowhere’.
A woman in a van gives him a lift. She is played by Maureen Douglass, wife of David Douglass, a close friend of Schlacke. (Known as ‘Danny the Red’ and a significant NUM activist at Hatfield Colliery, he was also a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party (Trotskyist), a splinter group described in the Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations as ‘notorious on the left for its adoption of eccentric positions’). Her character is part of a team trying to disable the NCB main computer system post-strike, the inference being that to fight back the left needs to adopt the most up-to-date technology. Analogies are also made with hunting down a monster in a maze and slaying it. Like Hurt, Douglass is given to explanatory asides, saying, as they encounter various events, ‘It doesn’t take much to find yourself behind walls today’ and ‘Where were you in 1984? Standing well back with the rest of the crowd?’
Eventually Hurt finds an abandoned cottage on the moors. He moves in only to be disturbed by voracious estate agents and upwardly mobile clients looking for a holiday home. Without anything resembling a denouement, the film draws to a close, leaving its messages hanging in the air.
Filmed whilst the Wapping dispute was ongoing (was this another reason for urging ‘the left’ not to ignore computers?) it provides the audience with an interesting, morose, downbeat reflection on the destiny of the UK after the crushing of the miner’s strike. The photography is striking with lots of natural light amidst landscapes and stormy weather. The dialogue isn’t great, but Hurt delivers it well. As does Douglass, despite a lack of formal training. Dury, with eight scenes, provides a narration as a court jester/Greek chorus type figure. Unlike his stage persona, he is quite restrained.
It premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival on 17 August 1986. After a tour of similar UK events, there were critics-only screenings at the Bijou Review Theatre, 113 Wardour Street and finally, via a distribution deal with Artificial Eye, a public release at the Renoir, Russell Square on 16 January 1987.
Much was expected, and it was reviewed everywhere. The critics were divided. For Derek Malcolm in the Guardian it was ‘a beautiful, rather melancholy British road movie…it seems to drift in and out of nothing’. The NME called it ‘a winding path well worth viewing’ and the Monthly Film Bulletin drew comparisons with Wim Wenders. Holding the middle ground, Films and Filming under the strapline ‘Art for England’s Sake’, gave it two stars, the same as Down By Law, but lower than Salvador. Others were less kind. Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times reckoned it ‘the usual mixture of the heroic and the half-baked’, and Variety’s conclusion was ‘too deep and meaningful for its own good.’
Still, it won an award at the Berlin Film Festival in March 1987, and some must have hoped that it would be part of a turning tide: when released, Neil Kinnock’s Labour were leading Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative by 5–6 points in the polls. A warning note was sounded by Framework magazine, an extremely academic media journal, when they noted in their review ‘more than a sword and a string will be necessary to vanquish the minotaur stalking England today.’ They were right, and the hopes invested in the film counted for nothing in the general election that took place that June.
So, no socialist dawn after all. After a limited distribution, Rocinante vanished from the public domain apart from a TV screening (on Channel 4, naturally), in January 1992. Most of those associated with it either gave up or got on with other things. John Hurt went to Hollywood, which he disliked. Ian Dury never managed to appear in a leading role in a film that enjoyed commercial success, and, as a musician, never had any further hits. Maureen Douglass wrote a play, The Enemies Within, which ran at the Young Vic in July 1987, after which little was heard of her activities. David ‘Danny the Red’ Douglass remained NUM Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main down to 1994 when the pit was privatised, at which point union recognition there ceased.
Ann and Eduardo Guedes struggled on. Channel 4 declined further support, so in 1989, with funding from Portuguese TV, they made Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale. Another metaphor of contemporary Britain, this featured Tom Waits running a Punch and Judy show, with Dury in the cast again, but much lower down and with less screen time than he had in Rocinante. It attracted less attention, and worse reviews than its predecessor.
A couple of years later with unpaid rent and tax bills, Cinema Action was evicted from its premises. Most of their equipment was sold at auction, and their finished films ended up with the BFI. But incomplete footage – much of which would have been priceless – was thrown away. Thus were the dreams of the revolutionary left crushed.
What do we make of Rocinante now? Certainly no masterpiece, it’s not that bad… There are many art movies like it, and quite a few inferior.
The music, done in the same modern classical style used by Michael Nyman for The Draughtsman’s Contract, is rather good. The composer here is Jurgen Knieper, whose prior credits included Christiane F, a must for Bowie addicts. Among the twenty films he scored between 1972 and 1986 were five directed by Wim Wenders, including such art-house perennials as The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, The American Friend, and The State of Things.
The Monthly Film Bulletin’s comparison of Rocinante with Wenders is, therefore, not inappropriate. Given that Wenders co-produced Radio On, another UK travelogue/state-of-the-nation film and Paris, Texas, it is with these, and maybe Lindsay Anderson’s Oh! Lucky Man! that Rocinante should be placed.
You can watch Rocinante today by booking an appointment at the British Film Institute and viewing it on a laptop. Not many people do. It isn’t available anywhere else and Kneiper’s soundtrack has never been released. Someone really ought to put it out on DVD, with an accompanying vinyl LP of the music. An agreeable, picaresque tour of downtrodden Britain in the Thatcher years, it is part of our history and shouldn’t be forgotten.
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