Robina Rose’s Nightshift: a restored vision from the punk-era British avant-garde

In an entry from his 1983 journals, Derek Jarman lamented that, while avant-garde directors were relatively well known and revered in Europe, their British counterparts remained largely unrecognised. Among the few names he listed as comparisons – including his own – was Robina Rose. He spoke of a deeply personal kind of cinema, shaped by direct experience and often overlooked by the mainstream. Rose’s films embody this, evincing a profoundly intimate sensibility, but also the importance of collaboration.

Nightshift, which has been painstakingly restored over a number of years, and will screen at BFI Southbank on 13 May, is emblematic of this spirit. This restoration, made possible through an international collaboration, brings back into focus a film and celebrates the artist behind it, who sadly died in January at the age of 73.

Like Rose’s other films Birth Rites (1977) and Jigsaw (1980), Nightshift was originally distributed by Circles, one of the two feminist film distributors that would later merge to become Cinenova in 1991. The Cinenova archive holds materials related to the distribution of these films, and some correspondence. The BFI National Archive holds the original elements for her films; however, Cinenova did not hold a physical copy of Nightshift. It wasn’t until film programmer and writer Herb Shellenberger alerted me to a VHS copy in the British Artists’ Film & Video Study Collection at Central Saint Martins that I finally saw the film. 

In 2020, I shared it with Jesse Pires of Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia, who was very taken by the film and passionate about the idea of restoring it. This marked the beginning of a multi-year project, with the complex restoration overseen by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, in collaboration with Lightbox, Cinenova, and the BFI National Archive.

Shot over five nights during the Christmas period in the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, where Robina worked at the time, the film brings together the mundane and the mythic. Co-scripted with friend and artist Nicola Lane – also working at the hotel – the film took shape in the quiet early hours while working the actual nightshift. “The structure of the nightshift, its sounds, tasks and routines… became the narrative structure of the film,” Lane recalls, noting the long script sessions typed up between 4am and 7am. “Robina’s brilliant choice of Jordan as the enigmatic receptionist” brought the film’s centre into focus.

Jordan – iconic punk figure and shop assistant at Sex, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s infamous King’s Road boutique – was best known on screen for her role in Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). In Nightshift, she leads a cast drawn from the British countercultural underground: experimental filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg, International Times editor and scientist Mike Lesser, poet Heathcote Williams, writer Max Handley, singer Barb Jungr, and local teenage punk band the Urban Guerillas. “The cast was assembled from our friends and creative colleagues,” Lane notes. “This was the time of punk, of squatting, of creative projects fuelled by the dole.”

The making of Nightshift was a feat of resourceful collaboration. The American independent filmmaker Jon Jost, who acted as cinematographer, recalled meeting and befriending Rose at the 1978 Edinburgh Film Festival. Jost, admirer of Rose’s filmmaking remarked recently that before Nightshift, “her two prior films had involved her, a camera, and her subject.” Jost brought cheap film stock, camera and expertise, while the hotel’s owners allowed the entire venue to be commandeered for the shoot. 

Another significant contribution came from Simon Jeffes of Penguin Cafe Orchestra – another close friend – whose distinctive score is integral to the film’s mood and was offered as part of the same spirit of generosity that defined the production. Everyone worked for free and the film was funded by a small Arts Council grant and money from the pension of Rose’s mother, Mary. “Mary installed herself in the hotel kitchen and looked after all the eccentric, demanding and diverse cast and crew,” Lane remembers.

This deep, immersive way of working was characteristic of Rose’s filmmaking. Sibylle Oellerich, whose brother’s home birth is featured in Birth Rites, Rose’s 1977 Royal College of Art graduation film, recalls: “She literally became part of our family for that time. She was there so much and she was gentle and kind… Everything about her felt vibrant and interesting.” Sibylle and her brother Philip are also part of the cast of Nightshift.

Across her work, Rose created films that were intimate yet expansive, rich in texture but grounded in real lives and relationships. The restoration of Nightshift is not the recovery of a lost film, but a celebration of an artist who, as Jarman and her other peers and collaborators recognised, had a unique visual language.

Rose was very involved in the restoration of Nightshift from the start. This project was of great importance to her, and she was delighted, once the work was finished, to watch the results projected together. She had great trust in the process – particularly in Ross Lipman, as a fellow filmmaker whom she felt fully understood the film. 

As Lipman reflects on the restoration: “Our goal was to recover the warm, textural qualities of Rose’s original 16mm reversal stock, and the sensual soundscape she so carefully crafted. In her vision of the hotel, language dissolves into a field of sound – more sensual than semantic.”

When Nightshift premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1981, it was hailed as the “best British film of the edition” and “the most beautiful film of the festival.” It later screened at Berlin’s International Forum of New Cinema and was acquired by MoMA for their collection. The restored version premiered in Berlin and New York in 2024 – and now, finally, returns home to London, with many of the original cast in attendance.