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Occupy! is both a record of and an act of solidarity with a factory strike
and occupation. It was funded by the BFI Production Board during a brief period
of mid-1970s political radicalism when the Board also funded films by London Women's Film Group, Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Collective, whose
groundbreaking film The Night Cleaners (1975) was released the previous year.
Filmmakers like Gael Dohany were committed to representing the struggles of the
working class; at the same time they recognised a contradiction in making films
about political struggle that were not themselves a part of that political
struggle.
Liverpool's Everyman Theatre Company, which was involved in solidarity
performances around the occupation itself, features heavily in Occupy! Pete
Postlethwaite, Bill Nighy and Julie Walters, make some of their earliest
performances on film, Postlethwaite and Nighy as union convenor Jack Spriggs and
plant owner Harold King respectively, while Walters appears in two non-speaking
roles. But Dohany undercuts the dramatisation from the start by juxtaposing the
actors' performances with interview footage of the real-life 'characters' they
play. While Postlethwaite's performance as an angry union leader ("Right, we're
going out, and it's going to be a bloody long one") is instantly recognisable
from such films as Brassed Off (d. Mark Herman, 1996), its theatricality is
exposed by film of the real Jack Spriggs addressing an occupation meeting.
Spriggs is performing just as much as Postlethwaite, but the cadences of his
speech are more suited to the environment of a mass meeting than the stage.
Though the film is rich with traditional union language of 'working men',
Occupy! doesn't neglect the role of women throughout the struggle, fighting both
for parity in pay from employers and for an equal and self-organising part in
the struggle itself. The problems of self-management as a co-operative are
addressed, and one worker's admission that strikes and occupation break up the
tedium of the job he hates suggests that work itself may be the problem.
Ultimately, the struggle against capitalism is paramount.
To some extent Occupy! assumes its audience's political engagement and
therefore frees itself to engage critically with the tactic of occupation at
Fisher-Bendix. Many participants' reflections have less to do with recalling a
time of action than involvement in an ongoing fight. Their freedom to question
whether occupation was even a useful tactic gives Occupy! more power as a
document of struggle than mere propaganda.
Danny Birchall
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1. The Fisher-Bendix factory (4:23)
