50 years of Rock against Racism - two filmic reviews

Round anniversaries are actually often used to confirm identity. It may be a bit surprising that in the case of 50 Years of Punk, if the impression is not misleading, things remained rather quiet. Certainly, on arte and elsewhere, the rebellious attitude characteristic of the subculture is celebrated and the usual suspects focus on memorial literature focused on the musical dimension. The social context of punk, however, remains pale. With the well-known background image of the old Clash promo video for 'White Riot' from 1976 in mind, which shows rioting police officers during the Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976, we invite you to two small excursions into the 'scenes'.

Evening 2: Black British Cinema 

Pressure (Horace Ové, UK 1975, 120', OmE)

“Pressure” premiered at the London Film Festival in the fall of 1975 in which the black Marxist C.L.R. James' close magazine "Race Today" welcomed it as "the first full length feature film in Britain - inspired, scripted, directed and acted in the main by black people" - as a film that, despite all the weaknesses that such a pioneering work must have, attempts to uncover "the inner soul of the black condition in Britain" for the first time. Horace Ovè (1936-1923), how his co-author Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) migrated from Trinidad to London in the 1950s, describes in his documentary-realistic, low-budget film inspired by neorealism and surrealism the worlds of life and experiences as well as self-discovery processes of black young people, especially of the third generation, in the run-up to the riots of the late 1970s and 1980s. As such, “Pressure” functions as a classic not only of “black British cinema” and a subtext of later films such as Isaac Julien's “Young Soul Rebels” (1992) (which deals critically with “subculture” and “rock against racism”) or Steve McQueen's miniseries “Small Ax” (2020).

(Please note: film in English with English subtitles)

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