Abstract
John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Stuart Hall Project (2012) bookend the British filmmaker’s career in a uniquely political sense. Both are implicitly concerned with the film archive, with the potential it accorded for poetic and political ends. Stuart Hall famously responded to the criticism of Handsworth Songs by Salman Rushdie at the time of the film’s release, championing the Black Audio Film Collective, which Akomfrah was a founding member of, in their attempts to forge a new cinematic language to represent post-migrant minorities. Akomfrah’s method, in both films, is interesting in this regard; using archival footage, it constructs a collage-based film used to challenge hegemonic constructions of sound and image with regard to political representation in film. This article addresses this method. It takes the ‘utopian promise’, which Akomfrah associates with the archive, as a starting point to explore the theoretical alignment between the archival image and the future. As a result, the article pushes against responses to Akomfrah films that have sought to situate their content as exclusively concerned with issues of political representation in the present, exploring an Akomfrah poetics that comes out of a utopian tradition of thought concerned with thinking about the future; or at least, the possibilities of the future.
Highlights
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Stuart Hall famously responded to the criticism of Handsworth Songs by Salman Rushdie at the time of the film’s release, championing the Black Audio Film Collective, which Akomfrah was a founding member of, in their attempts to forge a new cinematic language to represent post-migrant minorities
Akomfrah’s method, in both films, is interesting in this regard; using archival footage, it constructs a collage-based film used to challenge hegemonic constructions of sound and image with regard to political representation in film. This article addresses this method. It takes the ‘utopian promise’, which Akomfrah associates with the archive, as a starting point to explore the theoretical alignment between the archival image and the future
Summary
John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Stuart Hall Project (2012) bookend the British filmmaker’s career in a uniquely political sense. For Rushdie, the film’s formalism (which I argue is designed to etch out a grammar for a new black British Identity, whose secondary aim is to address the hegemony of certain media forms) clouds out the narrative voices, and the rich language of those who witnessed the riots In this sense, Rushdie’s criticism cuts right into the discourse surrounding documentary forms, when experimentation is given precedence over a common vocabulary that everyone supposedly understands. This discursive debate tends to pit those for whom a framework for the documentary mediation of stories serves as a ‘common vocabulary’ – call it ‘reportage’ – against those for whom it is necessary to build a grammar of the future that could allow for new political reference points Even if it involves blocking out diegetic sound in favour of an abstract ambient soundtrack, this latter approach may well have irritated a curious Rushdie, who expressed his concern for the lack of context given to the subjects of the Handsworth district. In its use of sound and montage it experiments with formal strategies, there is a clear engagement with the tradition of British documentary in the way voiceover is used, for the integration of interviews, so as to illustrate the manner in which tradition is internalised while at the same time resisted
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