‘36 to ‘77 (1978)

United Kingdom, 1978

90 minutes, Colour, Stereo, 4:3

Original format: 16mm film

On Sunday, 30th July 1972, an official stike was called by the CSU (Civil Service Union) on behalf of the cleaners working on the Ministry of Defense building in London.  One of the cleaners involved was Myrtle Wardally (born in 1936 in Jamaica).  Five years after this successful strike, in 1977, the filmmakers, Marc Karlin, James Scott, Humphry Trevelyan and Jon Sanders came together to begin work on a sequel to Nightcleaners (Part 1). 

The film ('36 to '77) was to become a portrait of Myrtle Wardally who was by then out of work at home, looking after her children and babysitting for friends. Represented in a series of re-filmed time lapse portraits and audio recordings, she reflects on her childhood in Grenada, the comradeship of the cleaners in struggle, the burdens of childbirth and childcare, and her isolation in a disinterested world. ‘36 to ‘77 inverts conventional documentary narratives, integrating the struggle for memory with the struggle for representation itself; not only for Wardally, but for the filmmakers and viewers, whose expectations of film narrative are challenged and transformed during the slow progression of ‘ improvisations with the materiality of sounds, images, colours, illumination, darkness, interruptions, voices and noises’ (Kodwo Eshun 2018)