'36 to '77

This curious movie began life as Nightcleaners 2 by the Berwick Street Collective, and ended up as a kind of portrait of a Grenadan woman called Myrtle Wardally (born in 1936 - hence the title), credited to four members of the former Collective. Ms Wardally was a leader of the Cleaners' Action Group strike in Fulham in 1972, and she here reminisces about the limited success of that campaign, but also describes her childhood in Grenada and speaks about her present life. There is rigorous separation of sound and image throughout, to the extent that the film is less about social politics than about the politics of film-form. There are visual recollections from Nightcleaners, but most of the image-track comprises shots of Ms Wardally's face, frames frozen and then slowly animated, out of synch with her words. Curious.