If Not Now

My short essay film, If Not Now explores the assertion that in opposition to notions of waste, and dispersal, there is a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away; that resistance to nationalism in the past may be a catalyst for resistance today. Following Michel Foucault’s argument that “Where there is power, there is resistance” and Stephen Muecke’s argument that resistance may not mean a constant ‘standing firm’; there may also be interruptions. The film is located in Brick Lane in London’s East End; home to successive immigrant communities, Huguenot weavers, Jews, Bengalis; today it is semi-gentrified with hipster clothes shops, street food, beigel bakeries, Indian restaurants and sari shops. My authorial self is represented as a political resister whose Lithuanian Jewish great-great grandmother died in Brick Lane and continues to haunt my present. Avery Gordon’s view of haunting is as a struggle against the reduction of individuals “to a sequence of instantaneous experiences that leave no trace”, or whose trace (as dust) is hated as irrational, superfluous and ‘overtaken’. In 1978 Bengali workers in Brick Lane, organised the first black strike in England in protest against racist attacks and murder; but the fascist National Front, continued to carry out marches and attacks. The police protected the National Front. In If Not Now I experiment with hybrid filmic strategies of realist archive footage and a fictionalised evocation of the past; witness voice-overs, slow-motion, long takes, stills and moving image, fragments of interrupted narrative, tactical argument and disconnected sound creates a poetic montage to bring the past into the present.