It is night-time in Notting Hill and there are croissants to be wrapped. In a sleepy West London hotel, a receptionist moves through her tasks as the hours stubbornly drag on. Keys must be handed out, forms filled, cellophane slit. The hubbub of conversation and deep basslines of reggae trickle down to the ground floor where she sits, silently: manicured hands kept busy while her face stays statue-still. As businessmen and other transient folk flitter in and out of the hotel lobby, the receptionist remains a constant in the night shift’s wearisome unfolding, waiting out the witching hours until she is finally free to leave.

In Nightshift (1981), Robina Rose’s only feature film, the drudgery of service takes on the visual language of dream, as a hotel transforms into a stage-set for the liminal activities of its eccentric clientele. Opening as the sun sets on Stanley Gardens, the film takes place across the span of a single night at The Portobello Hotel, a venue that was once a mecca for insurgent countercultural activity – London’s equivalent to the Chelsea Hotel.Once a temporary lay-by for touring musicians – everyone from Patti Smith, Nico, Carly Simon and Alice Cooper stayed there – the Portobello Hotel now belongs to a chain of luxury boutique guest houses at the epicentre of London’s wealthiest, but no less misunderstood, borough. West London makes convincing claims to being the birthplace of the 1970s London punk scene, as home to bands like The Clash and TV Personalities, and the nascent squatting scene. Nightshift, then, can be seen as a cinematic time capsule of the area before consecutive waves of gentrification transformed it into the ‘Notting Hell’ of today: a pastel-saturated, Instagram backdrop for Richard Curtis-coded whimsy. As Jules O’Dwyer writes, the commercial appeal of paid temporary lodgings hinges on ‘successfully concealing the arduous work that transpires behind the scenes’, offering guests a temporary respite from their routine.Jules O’Dwyer, Hotels (Fordham University Press, 2025), 24. In Rose’s film, that behind the scenes is brought front and centre, with the cycle of the shift acting as its structuring principle, the rhythms of industry its incidental soundtrack. In the film’s opening moments, a Victorian coin-operated music box cranks into life, its revolving metal cylinders seemingly setting the film in motion: a reminder that what we are watching is less a city symphony than a service one.

Jon Jost’s camera makes strange the humble toil of the night porter, often framing her in ways that reinforce the physical and social tiers of the hotel. High-angle shots evoke the building’s many levels but also suggest something of the stratification of the service industry: from cleaning windows to hoovering the carpet, or managing the hotel bar, hospitality is pointedly portrayed as women’s work. At a neighbourhood memorial for Robina Rose, who died in January this year, Nightshift’s co-writer Nicola Lane – who, like Rose, worked part-time at the Portobello Hotel – described its tiered hiring process. Staff had to prove themselves on the night shift before graduating to the less-demanding afternoon slot.Nicola Lane, introduction to Nightshift at 'A Celebration of Robina Rose', Portobello Film Festival, 29 August. But, she went on, it was these nocturnal challenges that informed the film’s narrative and score, with Rose and Lane documenting the rituals and sounds of the shift on the hotel typewriter ‘during the long dead hours between 4a.m.and 8 a.m.’. Work is not just a source of alienation but an opportunity for drift.

Though Nightshift paints a picture of the monotony of gendered labour in an industry that does all it can to keep that labour hidden, humour and the surreal never stray far from the front desk. A motley assortment of musicians, businessmen and down-at-heel aristocrats enact their bizarre private dramas and magical high jinks before the unresponsive night porter. The cast comprised willing friends and colleagues, who were paid with wine and little else. Some, like the Countess Vivianna de Blonville, play versions of themselves, while others, like Mike Lesser and Max Handley (both members of the underground press), take on unlikely roles as high-flying businessmen. Many came from the worlds of radical fringe theatre – including the feminist group Beryl and the Perils, with which Lane was involved – and the squatting scene. Heathcote Williams, a poet, playwright and star of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979), features in the film and was also one of the founders of Ruff Tuff Cream Puff, the world’s first estate agency for squatters. This was a time, Lane has noted, of ‘creativity fuelled by the dole’.

A wild-haired man (Williams) pulls a cigarette out of his ear and chews it gleefully. An older woman in white (experimental filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg, in a perfect comic performance) watches television catatonically, as the cathode-ray static creates ghostly auras around her. The beleaguered band manager of a local punk group, the Urban Guerillas, cajoles his fag-toting upstarts into signing forms. ‘Is there any way of stopping them overspending my limit? Between them all, they could drink the bar fucking dry,’ he tells the receptionist, who, in a neat stroke of meta-casting, is played by Pamela Rooke, better known as Jordan. At the time of filming, Jordan was managing Adam and the Ants and was known to prop up the hotel bar on occasion.

The work of running the hotel is portrayed aesthetically but never romanticised. Day-to-day tasks are defamiliarised through high-key lighting, gauzy textures, and the music-box minimalism of Simon Jeffes’s soundtrack with the avant-garde pop group, Penguin Cafe Orchestra. I don’t think it’s incidental that the idea for the band, which came to Jeffes in a delirious vision induced by food poisoning, was inspired by the bleak desolation of ‘a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of concrete.’'The birth of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra',The Independent, 1 December 2001. It is precisely that Ballardian anonymity – the atomisation of characters living out their psychodramas in lonely, green-walled rooms – that gives Nightshift its meandering and dream-like qualities. A hotel, O’Dwyer suggests, does not always constitute a plot; 'it can also be synonymous with plotlessness.’O’Dwyer, Hotels,48. (Some of the examples O’Dwyer gives of ‘plotless’ hotel films include Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey (1972) and Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), the latter a visible influence on Nightshift.) The micro-narratives of the hotel guests meander and rarely intersect, even as some of these characters come together briefly on the staircase’s landing. This is underscored by the abruptness of the edit, which cuts between characters without smooth transitions. It reminds us that these figures are brought together only by their shared lodgings, which offer an opportunity for random action and spontaneous interaction.

The hotel in Nightshift offers more than just lodging for the poor, solitary, and down-and-out. It is a psychic space for projecting unrestricted fantasies. One particularly memorable sequence involves the raven-haired Countess Vivianna de Blonville, a Gothic upper-class recluse, prattling over the phone to her aunt about finding a lover. Her high-society standing has clearly gone to seed; apt, then, that she is often filmed descending the floors of the hotel, cloaked in shadows, via a creaky mechanical lift. A year after Nightshift’s release, the Countess was a photographic subject in Jim Blomberg’s legendary photo book, Rich and Poor (1985), which dramatised the loneliness and wealth disparity of those living in temporary lodgings. From 1977 to 1985, the American photographer traversed San Francisco welfare hostels photographing residents, later inviting them to comment on the final image. For her photograph, the Countess mourned in her elegant scrawl: ‘I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me—I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to.’Jim Goldberg, Countess Vivianna de Blonville, negative 1982, printed 1983, Seattle Art Museum, https://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/43890/countess-vivianna-de-blonville?ctx=1235e9ac-a524-4c4e-9c6a-fb9a3924364b&idx=10.

Nightshift’s receptionist still has her dreams, too: nocturnal reveries that help her while away the dead time. Like other women-fronted films adjacent to the punk movement, including Simone Barbès ou la Vertu (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980) and Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983) – to which Nightshift has been compared – as well as Sleep Walk (Sara Driver, 1986), Nightshift shows a woman overcoming the indignities of the workplace through strategies of reverie and refusal.Elena Gorfinkel, “Sleepless Nocturne: On Nightshift,” Notebook, 17 January 2025, https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/sleepless-nocturne-on-nightshift. The film’s defining afterimage is contained in the receptionist’s distracted gaze – moon-like, affectless, both there and not there. It is a face that defies you to start a conversation. If you’ve worked a customer-facing job, you will know this as a survival strategy, because behind the counter you are vulnerable to every lonely drifter looking for somebody to talk to. Although one of very few in the film not to have worked at the Portobello Hotel, Jordan had had her own experience in customer-facing roles, having worked the counter at SEX/Seditionaries, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique. A feature in Honey magazine around that time invited teenage readers to go ‘down to SEX, if not for the clothes then just to see the strange girl inside.’Quoted in Richard Cabut, “Jordan Mooney,” International Times, 9 April, 2022, https://internationaltimes.it/jordan-mooney/ While Nighshift certainly revels in Rooke’s alien strangeness, she is not there to be gawked at by Honey-toting teenagers. Instead, we are invited to share her point of view on the hotel’s ceaseless flow.

Known for her signature bleached bouffant and Mondrian eyeliner, Jordan had crafted a subculture-defining look that Jarman – who directed her in a number of films, including a lead role in the post-apocalyptic punk drama Jubilee (1978) – memorably described as ‘art history as make-up’. In Nightshift, the geometric warpaint has been stripped off in favour of a chalk-white face and pink-puffed eyes. Rose claimed Jordan’s look in the film was inspired by Japanese Noh theatre and the ‘face that is a catalyst… a double mask’. After a long night of mind-numbing work, we watch her wipe this face clean with cold cream. The mask is off, and the last grubby traces of work are ritualistically rubbed away.