This screening will be introduced by Irish experimental filmmaker Pat Murphy, a founding member of CIRCLES, the feminist film network that originally distributed Nightshift upon its release in 1981. Adopting the CIRCLES policy of screening work by women of different generations together, Pat has selected Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon to precede the screening of Nightshift.

Shot over five nights at the Portobello Hotel where Robina Rose worked at the time, Nightshift reveals the distinctive vision of a key contributor to the British avant-garde, a filmmaker that Derek Jarman cited in 1983 as sorely deserving of wider recognition. A proponent of a deeply personal kind of cinema, shaped by direct experience and often overlooked by the mainstream, Nightshift exemplifies Rose’s unique eye for identifying key collaborators, enlisting American independent filmmaker Jon Jost as cinematographer, Simon Jeffes of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra as composer of the film’s soundtrack and artist Nicola Lane to work with her on the script. Nightshift also reveals Rose’s profoundly intimate sensibility, contrasting the monotony of the work of an enigmatic desk clerk played by punk icon Jordan (from Jarman’s Jubilee) with dreamlike sequences featuring an eccentric array of hotel guests brought to life by countercultural poet and actor Heathcote Williams and experimental filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg.

Nightshift was digitally restored on behalf of Lightbox Film Center (Philadelphia) in collaboration with The British Film Institute & Cinenova. Restoration funding provided by Ron and Suzanne Naples. Restoration supervised by: Ross Lipman, Corpus Fluxus.

FILM INFO:
Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, 1943, U.S.A., 15 minutes
Nightshift, Robina Rose, 1981, U.K., 68 minutes
Total running time 83 minutes

PAT MURPHY
Pat Murphy is a film maker who works across a range of practices. Her art studies began at the Ulster College of Art and Design and continued at Hornsey College of Art where she graduated in Fine Art. She received an MA in Film and Television from the Royal College and won a scholarship to attend the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in New York. She has participated in a number of exhibitions including P(ages) at City Gallery Limerick, “The Muybridge Solo” at Vehicule Art, in Montreal and Film As Film at the Hayward Gallery in London. In 1992, she made a film installation for the Strokestown Famine Museum in County Roscommon. In association with the IFI, Pat curated a number of film programmes to accompany From Beyond the Pale (1994) and The  Event Horizon (1997) at IMMA. Maeve, her first feature for cinema was screened in competition at a number of international festivals including Venice and won the  Best Irish Film Award in Cork 1981. Anne Devlin, her second feature was completed in 1983. Both films were distributed internationally and broadcast on television. Nora, starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch, was an international co-production Awards include the First Prize at the Trieste Film Festival, Best Script at the Abruzzo Festival and the UIP Director’s award in 2000. Documentaries include Sean MacBride Remembers and This is us we’re talking about…. In recent years Pat was Associate Arts Professor on the Graduate Film Program at NYU Tisch Asia in Singapore.  In July 2011, the IFI presented a retrospective of her work.

MAYA DEREN
Maya Deren was born Eleonora Derenkowsky in Kiev in 1917. In September 1922 she and her family emigrated to America and settled in Syracuse, New York. In 1938 she gained a Master of Arts Degree in literature at Smith College. During the 1930s she was active in the American Socialist Party. She became involved in modern dance, and while working as publicity assistant and secretary to the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on tour, met the Czech emigre film-maker Alexander Hammid, whom she subsequently married. Hammid collaborated with Deren on her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon which was shot using a 16mm Bolex in two weeks in 1943. At Land followed in 1944, A Study in Choreography For The Camera in 1945 and Ritual In Transfigured Time in 1946. During this time Deren also worked on the uncompleted film Witches’ Cradle. In 1947 she was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for work in ‘creative motion pictures’ and went to Haiti to film Voudoun rituals and dances. Her book on Haitian Voudoun, The Divine Horsemen, was for many years the definitive work on the subject. She never completed the film of the same name which she worked on, but this was edited after her death by her widower Teiji Ito and his second wife Cheryl. Deren completed two more films: Meditation on Violence (1948) and The Very Eye of Night (1955). Maya Deren worked ceaselessly to establish facilities and funding for the independent film movement which subsequently grew up in America. She founded the Creative Film Foundation and her work led ultimately to the establishment of the first Film-Makers Co-op in New York. She wrote numerous theoretical and technical articles for film magazines, but also wrote articles on film-making for mainstream women’s magazines and in 1946 published a pamphlet: ‘Anagram Of Ideas On Art, Form and Film’. She died following a brain haemorrhage in 1961. (text adapted from Maya Deren: A programme of films representing her work selected by Judith Higginbottom & Felicity Sparrow, CIRCLES 1984 – now Cinenova)

ROBINA ROSE
Born in 1951 to Danish and German parents, Robina grew up in Notting Hill, London. After leaving school, she became a film projectionist at the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, Covent Garden. She later attended the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1977, where she worked as a camera operator on Celestino Coronado’s Hamlet, starring Helen Mirren and Quentin Crisp. Robina created three brilliantly distinctive and compelling experimental films: Birth Rites (1977), documenting a friend’s home birth; Jigsaw (1980), made in collaboration with a group of autistic children in London; and Nightshift (1981), featuring punk icon Jordan as a hotel receptionist at the Portobello Hotel in West London, where Robina herself was working at the time. Nightshift premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival (1981) and was shown at Berlin’s 12th International Forum of New Cinema (1982). It was later screened in New York and acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship, Robina moved to Berlin, where she was later invited to teach at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). She later returned to the UK to work for the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, where she made several films, including the first about the use of pesticides in agriculture. Beyond her filmmaking career, Robina studied landscape history at the Architectural Association and became chair of the London branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. She played a key role in drafting the CPRE’s original London Plan (2004), advocating for improvements in air quality, green spaces, and housing. Passionate about community activism, she co-founded the Friends of Portobello and the Save Portobello campaigns. In 2015, she ran as the Green Party candidate for Kensington. Robina was fiercely intelligent and witty – always questioning and challenging injustice and hypocrisy wherever she saw it. She appreciated the renewed interest in her films, particularly through the Tate Britain exhibition Women in Revolt!, which featured Birth Rites, and the recent festival presentations of the newly restored Nightshift. Robina died in January 2025. (text sourced from https://cinenova.org/robina-rose-1951-2025/)