Writers: Horace Ové and Sam Selvon
Director: Horace Ové
It is tempting to think so much must have changed since Horace Ové’s film Pressure debuted in 1975, one of the first films to capture the complexity of the Black British experience in London as immigrant and first-generation families contend with systemic racism and police brutality against the organised rise of the Black Power movement. Now a classic that would clearly go on to inspire Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series among others, Pressure receives a newly restored BFI re-release.
Fresh from school, Tony has struggled to get a job and a hoped-for office opportunity soon disappears when the manager notices the colour of his skin. The first generation of young men with Caribbean heritage born in the UK, Tony believes his British identity holds a unique value but it sets him against his parents, friends and particularly his brother who insists that organised resistance and distinct individuality is essential to a community voice.
Ové’s film – showing as part of a wider retrospective of his work at the BFI – is a social history of the late 1970s for Black British families living and working in Ladbroke Grove, capturing the challenges and domestic arrangements of Tony’s (Herbert Norville) family living in close quarters in a terraced house but also the social lives of the characters who go to meetings and parties, as well as tramping the streets and markets of their area. It is easy to see the connections that McQueen later made to his own films Lover’s Rock and Mangrove for the BBC, the former most notably inspired by Pressure’s main house party scene infused with music, crowds and dancing.
Visually, Ové creates an incredibly vibrant film, one infused with the colours and textures of Caribbean cultures and their contrast with dull-toned British equivalents. Tony’s full English breakfast is a riot of hues so striking the viewer can almost taste it along the with character, while the stylish 70s fashions change with Tony’s character across the story, a coming-of-age experience told through costume as the idea of Britain that the protagonist believes in and his growing disillusionment with it alter his perspective across its 2 hour and 15-minute running time. Ové finds beauty and life in the domestic, told through the visual experience of the film as well as the expression of pattern and colour that is carefully and celebratorily constructed.
And all of that is certainly clear in the restoration, amplifying colour and music to give a rich depth to the scenes that demand big screen viewing. And while this film may be 50 years old, it feels fresh and eternally relevant in its exploration of conflicted and inherited identities and the price of a nationality that not everyone can agree on. Ové’s work has been an inspiration, not just to McQueen but to film and theatremakers who have followed in his wake, and this re-release of Pressure offers the clearest example of his influence and multi-dimensional way in which the Black British experience has been portrayed on screen.
Pressure is released in UK-wide cinemas on 3 November 2023.
