‘The police were constantly at our door, looking for Horace,” says the actor Indra Ové reflecting on her film-maker father, who died last month. “They claimed to have gotten wind that Horace was probably inciting violence somewhere. With his camera!” In fact, Ové was most often simply documenting the hostility that black people endured in 1960s Britain and the decades that followed; recording the rising tensions and after effects on the black body and psyche that crystallised in his best known feature, Pressure, in 1975.
When I contacted them, family members, friends and colleagues, whether in Britain, Nigeria or the US, were all keen to convey the brilliance of Horace Ové, now the subject of a major retrospective at the BFI in London. Watching Pressure as black teenagers, my siblings and I were awed. For the first time we saw ourselves on screen. That sentiment was shared by Horace’s son, the artist Zak Ové, who like us grew up confused, “with no knowledge of where we were supposed to have come from. Your parents talked about the tropics, palm trees and beautiful beaches – none of which you had any claim to growing up on council estates and only ever being seen as immigrants who should go back home.”
Originally called The Immigrant, and co-written with Sam Selvon, the author of The Lonely Londoners, Pressure depicted a black English teenager in 1970s London, the son of a family from Trinidad, unsettled between two cultures and dramatically wrestling with his identity. The film was prescient. The summer after its London film festival screening, black youths battled with police at the Notting Hill Carnival. The film was shelved by the BFI – effectively banned – Margaret Busby remembers, because “the riots frightened the life out of the establishment” and they didn’t want Pressure adding fuel to the fire. They didn’t want the truth. Throughout his films, Ové introduced scenes of black lives, both interracial and intergenerational, Busby argues, that showed the cross currents in society “in ways that had never been seen before”.
“Horace Ové emerged as a film-maker and documentarian at a time when it became increasingly important to imprint ourselves in the art and culture of Britain as part of a political resistance to racism,” says the equal rights campaigner Gus John. The 70s and 80s were a golden age, he believes, that saw philosophers, artists and activists converge in ways akin to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, to seize an opportunity through the arts to achieve, in David Levering Lewis’s words, “civil rights by copyright”. “With Pressure, Ové provided a tool for the nation to interpret itself, to force it to look its ugly self in the face,” says John.
“Pressure was remarkable,” says the Jamaican writer Lyndsey Barrett, an early collaborator of Ové’s. “The film’s approach was unusually revelatory and Horace had a way of making the actors feel they were not mouthing the writer’s words but their own. He was not self-consciously intellectual but a man of the street, streetwise,” It was an attitude that was clearly grounded in his Trinidadian upbringing.
“Ové was fortunate to be born in the Belmont area of Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1936. The small Caribbean island spurned parochialism,” says the director and actor Burt Caesar, and Belmont in particular was fertile ground, seeding the creative imagination of the young Ové: “It was outward-looking, a cosmopolitan concatenation, a spicy callaloo of a place with a Bohemian reputation.”
Ové arrived in Britain in 1959 with ambitions of becoming an artist. After a few pit stops in part-time jobs as a hospital porter, a mortuary assistant and on a North Sea fishing trawler, he landed a role as a featured extra in Cleopatra (1963). That film was partly shot in Rome, where he surrendered, Indra believes, to the spirit of La Dolce Vita; to the romance and majesty of Federico Fellini. Subsequently, French films were more impactful on him, says Barrett. “He was inspired by the New Wave in France and encouraged a lot of improvisation.” His actors, including the non-professional cast, were coached in “a seemingly naturalistic approach” similar to that adopted by Jean-Paul Belmondo.
On returning from Rome in the 60s, Ové studied at the London School of Film Technique (now London Film School). His early short films, much admired by the artist and director John Akomfrah, had a surreal quality that invoked what George Lamming called “an aura of strangeness”. Those shorts capture the enigma of migration and arrival, says Akomfrah, “when everything feels strange. After a while the newcomers, too, become strange.” The films exhibited the emotional outlines of what would now be called Afrofuturism.
The 1973 satirical film Black Safari, in which Ové appeared alongside fellow explorers as they embark on an “expedition from Africa to the centre of primitive Britain” was a way out of that Afrofuturistic phase. In this inversion of the great white European adventurer stories that were a regular feature of British TV and books at the time, Ové’s idiosyncratic and mischievous Trinidadian side was in full flow. In Black Safari, his African adventurers sail to Wigan, and along the route they rename British fauna and flora after great African royalty.
Those African kings and queens found their modern Carnival equivalents on the streets of Chapeltown in Leeds, Notting Hill in London and Port of Spain; their feathered and sequined exuberance, together with their costume-makers (glue gun revolutionaries), burst from the screen in Ové’s documentary King Carnival (1973). At that time, Notting Hill, and Ladbroke Grove in particular, were the beating heart of Black political London. Horace Ové was at the centre, often to be found debating in the Mangrove cafe. This club and cafe was a crucible of political engagement and racial sacrament, as commemorated recently in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series – but it was first captured in a documentary co-produced by Ové decades before, called The Mangrove Nine (1973).
As a film-maker, Horace Ové lived on the frontline. He was attuned to his collaborators’ anxieties and teased out raw and authentic performances. In a famous scene in Pressure, the police barrel in on a Black Power meeting. Albert Bailey, who got his first break as an electrician on the film, chuckles at the memory that Ové had withheld from the cast how the scene would unfold. They were in such a heightened state that “they believed it to be an actual raid and had to be restrained by Ové” from their forceful response to the extras playing the police officers.
Ové’s later films were mostly TV dramas, exerting the same urgency and rhythm of storytelling. The BBC Play for Today drama A Hole in Babylon (1979) may on the surface have been an exposé of the debacle of a real-life bungled burglary of an Italian restaurant, but it was in essence an exploration of the sentiments behind a burgeoning Black Power Movement. However misguided, the protagonists saw the Spaghetti House siege (as it was later dubbed) as a revolutionary corrective of the plunder of empire and colonialism. The funds from the raid were in part intended to be used in the fight for black education. “Had Ové not been black, that film would have been heralded,” says Akomfrah. “His understanding of contours of drama-documentary was years ahead of his contemporaries’, even as it echoed the new realism of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966).”
Enthusiasm for the film-maker is marked by every interviewee and words fly like butterflies from Zak Ové’s lips as he warms to one of the themes that made his father so special: his intuitive use of “long shots that allowed scenes to build, giving you a sense of involvement in the moment”. Akomfrah agrees. Rather than an emphasis on performance, Ové was more concerned about the environment of a scene and what was happening within the frame. “The freedom of the camera allows the viewer’s eye to roam, to participate in the action,” says Akomfrah. In A Hole In Babylon we become complicit in the drama. That immediacy is evident also in documentaries such as Dabbawallahs (1985), shot sympathetically from the point of view of Mumbai dabbawalla porters who race through the streets with trolleys teetering with myriad lunchboxes; it’s an extraordinarily empathic portrayal.
Everyone I spoke to attests to the warm, inviting and mischievous atmosphere Ové created on his sets. Given the seriousness of his subject matter, the tales of his playfulness are surprising. The humour, though, always had an edge to it, as was particularly evident in Playing Away (1987), a comic drama written by Caryl Phillips about a south London cricket team who travel to the English countryside for a tournament. “The tone of that film was very different to contemporary dramas about issues and conflicts,” says Phillips, dropping in and out of reception as his train hurtles between Princeton and NYC. “Horace fully understood the nuances of British society.” Playing Away highlighted those commonalities, for instance, centred on class, that trumped race.
He was a charismatic man who galvanised collaborators. On learning about James Baldwin’s appearance at the West Indian Student Centre in London’s Earls Court in 1963, he quickly assembled a crew and headed to the venue. There Ové charmed Baldwin and Dick Gregory into allowing him to shoot footage and capture the fierce intellectual exchanges that echoed through the rafters that evening to produce the film he later confidently called Baldwin’s Nigger. This title was a reference to a descriptive phrase Baldwin himself used in the debate and documentary. The writer and civil rights activist explained that he was descended from people enslaved by a white man called Baldwin, who would refer to these enslaved people with that pejorative term.
“Horace Ové’s influence was huge,” says Gus John. “He represented to black people in Britain what Wole Soyinka and Fela Kuti represented to Nigerians.” I’d also make the comparison to the way James Baldwin represented African Americans. “Fearless” was the word people most repeatedly reached for when describing Ové, followed closely by “generous”. “He licensed black trust,” recalls Akomfrah. “He made us feel that working as a black collective towards a shared end was legitimate.” He leaves an indelible mark on generations of black creatives. “After meeting Horace, nothing scares me.”
Zak Ové offers the final tribute by saying his father pulled down barriers that were determined to confine black artists to arenas characterised by the defence of themselves against racism; that tried to lock them into the reductive over-identification with race as their subject. “He made it possible to imagine ourselves beyond those constraints and fly free.”
• Power to the People: Horace Ové’s Radical Vision is at the BFI, London, until 30 November. A restored version of Pressure opens in UK cinemas on 3 November
