Pressure (Movie)

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    ‘Pressure’: The ‘Mean Streets’ of Brixton

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    Newly restored, Horace Ové’s film about a Trinidadian family in London makes a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The title “Pressure” suggests the force with which this first feature by the Trinidadian British director Horace Ové struck the conscience of a country. The movie, which premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival, was praised by critics and then shelved for three years. Apparently, its producer, the British Film Institute, deemed the public unready for Ové’s blunt depiction of the police violence and racial animus directed at London’s West Indian residents in Brixton.The film’s landmark status has since been recognized by the institute and its maker knighted. Newly restored, the movie is making a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a 16-millimeter version was previously shown in 2016.With consummate irony, “Pressure” was originally titled “The Immigrant.” Anxiously watched by his Trinidadian family, Tony (Herbert Norville), born and educated in London, attempts to join, and is repeatedly rejected by, the white British world. His mother (Lucita Lijertwood), an overworked house cleaner, is perpetually, vociferously anxious. His father (Frank Singuineau), an accountant turned grocer, is resigned. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), a Black Power militant who is unemployed, is contemptuous. (The casting mirrors the situation: All but Norville were born in Trinidad.)Written with the Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, “Pressure” is a didactic film, opening with Tony’s mother frying up a traditional English breakfast, with greasy bacon shown in unappetizing close-up, triggering Colin’s disdain for the local cuisine. (He peels and devours an avocado swiped from his father’s store.)Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is exposed to Brixton life — suffering a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black thoughts from your hearts.” Alongside these set pieces, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black people they pass on the street. Indeed, the streets provide Tony’s education in double consciousness. “Learn how to thieve constructively — for the struggle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.Colin likes to posture. His associate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) provides the speechifying. Her political line, racially aware and class-conscious — synthesizing the thinking of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the power of the state in the form of riot police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      Horace Ové, Pioneering Black Filmmaker in Britain, Dies at 86

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      His feature-length film, “Pressure,” mapped the struggles of Black Britons in an era of unyielding racism. He was knighted in 2022.Horace Ové, a prolific and groundbreaking Trinidad-born filmmaker and photographer whose 1975 film, “Pressure,” explored the fraught experience of Black Britons and is considered the first feature film by a Black British director, died on Sept. 16 in London. He was 86.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Zak.“Pressure” was made on a shoestring, shot in West London with neighborhood characters and Mr. Ové’s friends from film school volunteering their expertise. It was written with Samuel Selvon, a novelist from Trinidad, and it tells the story of Tony, a first-generation Briton and top student who has just graduated from school shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition, and navigating a community on the boil.As he looks for a job to match his talents, he slowly realizes his is a fool’s errand in racist London. Tony’s older brother is a Black militant — born in the West Indies, he has no illusions about the limitations of the society he has landed in — and he exhorts Tony to join his activist struggle.“Pressure” won awards and critical accolades when it was shown in film festivals in 1975, but it would take three more years to be widely released, as the British Film Institute, which had partly funded the movie, felt its depictions of police racism were incendiary. But Mr. Ové was documenting the climate of the times, and his own experience.“The English ‘Deep South’ has always been the West Indies and Africa,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971. “Until recently, they managed to keep it out of the country. The problem is more complicated in England than in America. In America it’s a visible thing. In England, it’s more of a mental violence.”When “Pressure” was finally released in 1978, critics celebrated Mr. Ové as a significant Black filmmaker — “a talent with which we should reckon,” wrote The Sunday Telegraph — and roundly upbraided the British Film Institute.“It seems palpably absurd to be welcoming Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ when the film, one of the most important and relevant the British Film Institute’s Production Board has ever made, was actually shot in 1974 and completed in 1975,” Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian. “The BFI should hang its head in corporate shame.”In “Pressure,” Herbert Norville played the lead role of Tony, a recent graduate shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition.BFI National Archive & The Film FoundationMr. Ové had came of age as an artist in West London in the 1960s. It was a dynamic neighborhood, the heart of the British counterculture and also the Black Power Movement, of which Mr. Ové was an ardent participant.He was a skilled photographer who captured the movement’s leaders and events, as well as his artist peers and Carnival, the ebullient multicultural Caribbean festival that had been exported to Notting Hill in the late 1960s by community activists as a way to celebrate their heritage and ease cultural tensions.He met his second wife, Mary Irvine, at a socialist worker’s meeting; she was the fiercely political owner of a hip women’s clothing boutique called Dudu’s. (It sold no polyester or high-heeled shoes because she felt they were bad for women.)They were a formidable duo. Their West Hampstead apartment became a hub for artists and radicals of all stripes. Michael X, the civil rights activist born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, lived upstairs. Mealtimes began with the family raising their fists and declaring “Power to the people,” Zak Ové recalled.James Baldwin was a family friend, and when he lectured at a West Indian student center with Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, Mr. Ové made a compelling short documentary about it.A 1967 photograph by Mr. Ové of Michael X, a civil rights activist, and the Black Power boys in Paddington Station.Horace Ové, via the Estate of Horace OvéMr. Ové was a documentarian at heart — his aesthetic was naturalistic — and he made a number of films for the BBC. “Reggae” (1971) was live footage and interviews that some critics described as that culture’s “Woodstock” movie. “King Carnival” (1973) was a critically acclaimed history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Skateboard Kings” (1978) chronicled the star skateboarders — the Dogtown crew — of Southern California.“You can imagine Horace showing up in Venice Beach in a massive caftan swathed in African jewelry,” said Zak Ové. “Those kids looked at him and just fell in love.”And then there’s “Black Safari” (1972). It’s a Pythonesque mockumentary about a group of African explorers searching “darkest Lancashire” for the heart of England along the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a good-humored spoof of the traditional colonial narratives.Their boat is called the Queen of Spades, and Mr. Ové is its captain, a character named Horace Ové. Along the way, he and his crew mates have all sorts of adventures, like getting stuck in a lock, coming down with the flu and losing their tempers, witnessing the mysteries of clog dancing and suffering the noise of an oompah band.Mr. Ové in 1979 on the set of “The Latch Key Children,” a television series he directed. via the Estate of Horace Ové“For me, a director is a director no matter what color he is,” Mr. Ové told an interviewer in 2020. “Here in England there is a danger, if you are Black, that all you are allowed to make is films about Black people and their problems. White filmmakers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you, we have to study you in order to survive.”Horace Courtenay Jones was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His parents, Lawrence and Lorna (Rocke) Jones, ran a cafe and hardware store that sold basically everything, including goods for Carnival makers.Horace changed his name to Horace Shango Ové when he emigrated to Britain in 1960. Like many who were involved in the Black Power movement, he wanted to shed his so-called slave name for one that reflected his African heritage. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning and justice. But the meaning of “Ové” is still a mystery, Zak Ové said. “It’s a bit like Rosebud,” he said. “I never got a proper answer.”Mr. Ové in the early 1940s in Belmont, Trinidad, with his grandmother, Imelda. The Estate of Horace OveHorace Ové was 24 when he left for England to pursue a career as an artist or an interior designer. He lived in Brixton and West Hampstead, communities populated by West Indian immigrants who had been lured to Britain in the post World War II years by the promise of good jobs, only to be met by offers of menial work and abject racism; Mr. Ové recalled the “No Blacks” signs in the windows of boardinghouses there.He worked as a porter in a hotel, on a fishing boat in the North Sea and as a film extra. When he was cast as a slave in the 1963 film “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the production moved to Rome. He stayed three years, working as a painter and a photographer, and he returned to London determined to make movies, having been deeply influenced by the Italian naturalist approach to filmmaking.Back in London in 1965, Mr. Ové studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).Over his long career he worked extensively in film and television. His documentary about the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed at least 2,000 people, “Who Shall We Tell,” aired in 1985.A feature film, “Playing Away” (1987), is an amiable comedy of cultures gently clashing when a West Indian cricket team from London is invited to a match in a quaint and insular fictional Suffolk village. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a “movie about the comic pretensions of social and political organisms — the kind of community-comedy at which British moviemakers have excelled.”In addition to his son Zak, from his second marriage, Mr. Ové is survived by his daughter Genieve Sweeney, from his first marriage, to Jean Balosingh; a daughter, Indra, from his second marriage; and a daughter, Ezana, and a son, Kaz, from his third marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, a producer of “Pressure” and many of Mr. Ové’s films. All three marriages ended in divorce.Mr. Ové, left, with the writer James Baldwin in 1984 at the opening of the exhibition “Breaking Loose,” a retrospective of Mr. Ové’s photographic work. via the Estate of Horace OvéIn 2022, Mr. Ové was knighted for his “services to media.” In 2007, he was made a commander of the British Empire; while he was in a taxi on the way to the palace for the ceremony, Mr. Ové pulled out a CD of James Brown’s funk anthem “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and asked the African cabby to play it at full volume, which he was delighted to do.“I’m always interested in characters,” Mr. Ové told the Black Film Bulletin in 1996. “I’m interested in people that are trapped, Black, white, whatever race: That is what attracts me to the dramatic film, the trap that we are all in and how we try to get out of it, how we survive and the effects of that trap.” More