26.01.2023

Farewell to an inspiration

Obituary: Gustav (Schlacke) Lamche, director and producer for Cinema Action, August 25 1933-January 15 2023

It is with a heavy heart that I report the death of my dear friend and comrade, Schlacke Lamche. He was a revolutionary German film-maker, and an inspiration for the radical collective, Cinema Action.

Cinema Action was the propaganda unit of the rank-and-file workers’ movement of the 1970s and an inspiration for a younger generation of revolutionary film-makers who followed them and had been their students - one thinks here of Chris Reeves and Platform Films among a number of others. The front lines of working class struggles were prominent in Cinema Action - a platform for shop stewards, workers’ committees and union branches to tell their own story and set their struggles in a political context.

There were tours around the country, when films were screened in pubs, clubs and colleges - for example, during the workers’ occupation of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971 they were projected against the vast warehouse walls of the shipyard with an audience of hundreds of shipyard workers. This was the stuff of Soviet film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, with its larger-than-life revolutionary films.

Cool

Schlacke, with his heavy German accent, was always a source of enthusiasm - he was brilliant behind the camera or working on infinite detail on the selection of cuts, placements, contrasts and juxtapositions. That applied whether he was knee-deep in the mud of building sites, up a crane in a shipyard, on a pit site, at a mass factory meeting, on a picket line or at a packed student meeting or college occupation. Cinema Action was our eyes and ears - and, more importantly, our voice. Here was the confirmation that, yes, there was a class war. We all knew that, of course, but now it was verified on a screen that was filled with class anger and confidence - something that was unique then and, apart from Chris, Platforms Films and a few others, has been lacking since.

Our pit house in the heart of the Doncaster coalfield in the early 70s was something of a revolutionary centre - a network, national and international, for comrades passing through from one centre of struggle to the next. So it was that the big battered van of Cinema Action rolled onto the path in front of our house, coming back from the UCS in Scotland. That occupation was something of a novel tactic for the British working class. It caught the imagination of thousands and like wildfire spread down the country, with firm after firm under occupation. Sometimes there were other work-ins, where workers continued to produce and sell their products directly to whoever wanted them.

On this occasion the crew got out their big projectors and shot the uncut film about the UCS occupation onto our living room wall. It gave off a ghostly silver light outside, as if the Martians had landed (you might say that they had!). Here on our wall, larger than life, solid-jawed, firm as a rock was Jimmy Reid, leader of the UCS occupation: “Today the Clyde speaks. Today Scotland speaks. Not the Scotland of the lairds and lackeys, but the Scotland of the working class.” Folk drifted into our living room and watched, spellbound and inspired. One and all, we felt that something big was really happening - this had gone too far to stop now - and Cinema Action acted as a verification of it all.

The team lived in squats, moving from one palatial empty house to another - usually one step ahead of the law. With their German connections, they were always under suspicion of being linked - as indeed in one way and another most of the movement was - with the German guerrilla group, Red Army Faction. In their studio in Camden, which Ken Livingstone helped to provide for them as a councillor, there were noisy arguments, sometimes going on all night, over what exactly should be cut in a given film, not to mention how it all fitted into the wider political story. They debated - nay, they screamed at each other - they literally sweated and toiled and rarely slept during the making of the films. They took over from each other in shifts, dropping onto the mattresses their comrades had just left. They were poorer than town mice, but what they had they shared, such as collectively made food, and they lived the life of true communards, pooling everything. And they had a regular circuit of film stars, professional producers and film-makers who they tapped for sponsorship and funds (and even bags of spaghetti!). It made the luvvies who fed hungry revolutionaries feel part of the movement.

I will not indulge here with a review of their many inspiring works. The miners’ film is perhaps for me the most telling, with its story of the 1970s, when we seemed to be in the ascendancy and pushing all before us. There was also Arise, ye workers about the dockers’ strikes, the arrest and jailing of their leaders, filmed on the spot, as it happened. The cause of Ireland was their longest film. It has no blood and guts, no drama, but it explored in great detail the central source of the conflict - the torn loyalties, the class confusion, which at that time was rife among the British working class, on the armed struggle in Ireland and the nature of the state (a confusion which pervaded the so-called Marxist groups too).

I could sit all night talking about this dear comrade (and sometimes actually do!), but one story comes to mind. In the mid-70s a delegation of miners, Young Socialists, Trotskyists and Troops Out supporters went en masse to the constituency surgery of Labour MP Edmund Marshall, the home secretary’s parliamentary private secretary. We were outraged by the situation in Northern Ireland, particularly an onslaught of British troops and the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the ‘men behind the wire’. Convoys of ambulances had ferried to hospital the unarmed, half-naked republican prisoners, beaten to within inches of their lives. They had been mistreated so severely that hospital staff of both Northern Ireland communities filmed and photographed them.

Accent

At the meeting at the surgery I at first tried to keep my cool while speaking for our group, demanding justice and an enquiry, when the outraged MP rose to his feet to demand which relatives we had in the camps and who had republican affiliations. That caused me to jump to my feet and bang his table, and shout, “If you stand with imperialism, you can expect to pay the price!” At which point Marshall froze and turned white before my eyes. When I looked over my shoulder, Schlacke, who had been wearing a large nightrider-type cowboy raincoat, had stood up and pulled it aside like Clint Eastwood did with his poncho in A fistful of dollars, and started to take out what some at first thought was a big machine gun! In fact it was a large movie camera and, while he filmed, he announced in his heavy German accent: “You are facing the British trade union movement.” The MP later claimed that a large party of men in dark hats and disguised voices had threatened his life!

I believe there will be a memorial in tribute of Schlacke Lamche at May Day Hall, Fleet Street, on February 5, although, as I write, the details are still being finalised. Farewell, my dear comrade and friend. You were a pleasure to know - and to work and fight alongside!

David John Douglass