Schlacke Lamche [Jake Fitzjones]

GROWING up, it always seemed to me my grandfather Gustav (Schlacke) Lamche had lived not one but many lives.

He had been an architect, writer and poet; political activist and radical filmmaker. He lived through the Second World War in Germany, the “May events” of 1968 in Paris, and the industrial disputes of 1970s Britain.

Schlacke, who died last month aged 89, described his life as one shaped by “violent transitions”. He was a man who lost everything, over and over again: he told his children the only things you ever really need are a toothbrush and a diary.

Born in 1933 in Silesia, eastern Germany, he grew up during the war, and was one of the millions to be displaced when the Soviets swept into Germany. He went on to study architecture at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, a radical design school attempting to build a progressive, democratic future from the rubble of the war.

It was there Schlacke met my grandmother Ann, with whom he had his first three children. The young family moved to Paris in the 1960s, settling in the Latin Quarter.

Schlacke gave up his architectural practice and began writing, developing links to the prominent post-war literary group, Gruppe 47.

In their new city, they found themselves surrounded by artists, mostly associated with the avant-garde Fluxus and nouveau réalisme movements (Daniel Spoerri made a “snare picture” of the family breakfast table). As Paris moved towards the general strike of 1968, the family flat became a meeting place for the socialist student movement.

The couple became heavily involved in the action, organising demos and coordinating strikes and student protest.

The country was brought to a standstill with the “May Events” of 1968, and Schlacke was injured by a piece of shrapnel from a gas grenade. In the summer of that year, Schlacke and Ann were hauled before the police and the family was expelled from the country as “foreign agitators” by the French Minister of the Interior.

And so they arrived in Hampstead.

Shortly after, Ann established cinema action (stylised without capital letters), a radical film collective building on emancipative ideas of “cinema in action” developed in Paris by Jean-Luc Godard among others. In a pre-digital age – when access to tech was prohibitively expensive – cinema action offered free editing facilities and filming equipment to all.

The group would become a pioneering member of the “workshop movement”, serving as the “eyes, ears and voice” of the working class, according to Schlacke’s friend and comrade, the former miner David John Douglass. The work of the collective was shored up by the arrival of Portuguese filmmaker Eduardo Guedes, the third and final core member of the group.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cinema action made a series of documentary films charting the working-class experience in Britain, from the occupation of the shipyards by the Upper Clyde shipbuilders in UCS1 (1971) to the miners’ strikes and more reflective films made over many years, such as the remarkable So That You Can Live (1981).

In one of the collective’s early productions, Schlacke went underground in the Catholic Bogside to make People of Ireland (1973), a film exploring the class dimensions of the Troubles.

By the late 1970s, the collective moved into purpose-built premises in Swiss Cottage, receiving funding from the Arts Council and the British Film Institute. When Channel 4 began transmission in 1982, cinema action’s So That You Can Live launched its independent slot, The Eleventh Hour.

According to the late film theorist Paul Willemen, “independent cinema in Britain is unthinkable without the achievements of the innovative film collective cinema action”. Around this time Schlacke met his partner Eithne Brennan, with whom he formed another family, bringing his number of children to seven.

As the 1980s drew to a close, the political winds had changed and the group began to splinter.

The film centre in Winchester Road folded in 1991, the final “violent transition” of Schlacke’s life.

Reflecting many years later on these big moments that served as waymarks in his life, Schlacke said: “We lost all our living standard no doubt, but not our consciousness, and not our way of looking into the future, which was at all times optimistic and creative and designing a better society all around us.”

ANNA LAMCHE
Anna Lamche is the assistant editor of the Camden New Journal