Black Audio Film Collective Research Articles

Obstinate Memory: A Radical Participatory Film-Based Research Approach

Obstinate memory is an insistent resource for communities. Migrant Media advocates the methodology of a “documentary of force” as a research tool for filmmakers and academics. As a U.K.-based collective of filmmaker-activists involved in community struggles, Migrant Media’s resistance-based work uses cameras and screens to challenge racism and police violence. Drawing on film documentary history from figures as diverse as Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Black Audio Film Collective, and Third Cinema, the Migrant Media story is revealed through attempts to ban the 2001 film Injustice and a more recent series filmed with nurses during the coronavirus pandemic. We suggest some directions for further research at the end.

The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis

Abstract liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.

Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective

Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective

Visible Things Unseen

Research Article| March 01 2020 Visible Things Unseen: Co-creation and Its Philosophical Turn Reece Auguiste Reece Auguiste Reece Auguiste is a practitioner and scholar focusing on national cinemas, transnational screen cultures, and documentary practice. He is a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective and directed Twilight City (1989), Mysteries of July (1991), Duty of the Hour (2016), and Stillness Spirit (2017). He is an associate professor of critical media practices at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2020) 47 (1): 36–41. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.471007 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Reece Auguiste; Visible Things Unseen: Co-creation and Its Philosophical Turn. Afterimage 1 March 2020; 47 (1): 36–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.471007 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In response to being called an “auteur,” the Australian director of such films as The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978) and Roxanne (1987), Fred Schepisi, scoffed: “Auteur theory just denigrates everyone else's job.”1 Unfortunately, the acts of denigration alluded to are in the name of an idea that has found expression in many critical texts and received the blessings of scholars and critics across a large spectrum of constituencies. As a result, we have witnessed theoretical battles and multiple contentious debates pursued over the historical meanings and cultural implications of “auteur theory” or single authorship in film and media arts production. The accumulative result of these historical debates is a series of competing interpretations about the legitimacy of an idea that has glacially evolved into what is now an entrenched categorical imperative in theories of the moving image. The rhetorical underpinnings of the advocates of single authorship are, more... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Call from Inside the House: Broadcasting the Black Audio Film Collective's Postcolonial Critiques on Channel 4

This article resituates four British films from the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) in the context of their televisual broadcast on Channel 4. First, the article traces the history of Channel 4's intersection with experimental film and its role in funding the BAFC's films. It then places John Akomfrah's Testament (1988) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Reece Auguiste's Twilight City (1989) and Mysteries of July (1991) in conversation with theories of televisual time. It deploys Homi Bhabha's concept of the postcolonial time-lag to explore how television theories of liveness and flow are reinterpreted by the BAFC to subvert the promise of televisual presence. In particular, it focuses on how the direct use of televisual archives and address of the television news in combination with poetic narration allow the BAFC to dwell in the personal stories of diasporic women and to mourn the deaths of black men, using the space and tools of television to show how trauma lingers long past its broadcast on the nightly news.

The Music Film as Essay: Montage as Argument in Khalil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process

The Music Film as Essay:Montage as Argument in Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process James Tobias (bio) Correction: Kahlil Joseph's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this essay. We regret the error. The online version has been updated. In conversation with the music-video form, the Black essay film advances processes of remembrance that leverage the possibilities of digital streaming but work against its instrumental logic through the double haptics of audio and vision. This essay shows this refusal and leveraging at work in Kahlil Joseph's twenty-three-minute installation Fly Paper (2018) and the visual album he directed for Sampha Sisay's 2017 album Process. The historical essay film, for all its critical value, also has a special character: it may tend toward a specific kind of engagement, projecting a generatively problematic nowness where demands made on receivers' attention and memory entwine with questions of historical memory and media memory. Chris Marker—for Timothy Corrigan, the paradigmatic practitioner of the film essay—prototypes in Sans Soleil (1983) "immersion" in the nowness of cinematic time as just this complex problem of memory—and just as "immersion" became a technical ideal in the design of "navigable" screens.1 Made on the [End Page 157] cusp of transitions to digital production, Marker's film handles memory in ways that still resonate: indexed in the audiovisual image's memorializing power, historical memory matters all the more at the moment of crisis because it struggles to cohere in the interface of the historical and the medial. As the essay film has gained in its power to convey arguments about media power, historical memory, and the desire for a different world, Black audiovisual essayism—whether that of the Black Audio Film Collective, or the call-and-response between Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989) and Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989)—has long explored this interface of media power, historical memory, and futural desire. For Corrigan, the essay film "subjects personal expression to the public domain of experience" to arrive at a moment of exterior belief "in a world always eliciting and refusing thought."2 Yet Black essayism challenges more than just a resistance to thought. The fact of working from underrepresentation to exteriorize subjective thought in the audiovisual image reorders the audiovisual image's priorities and those of its historical archive. Black film essayism thus matters as a complex material process in its own right, as thought and as force, haptics entangled with argumentation. A montage of home video, historical footage, and contemporary footage shot by Joseph, all set in Harlem, Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper makes specific the problematic of reordering audiovisual priorities and, in so doing, the historical trajectory of the film essay. Alessandra Raengo points out this work's sampling of Marker's Sans Soleil, observing the work's concern with a man who "has lost the ability to lose" memory; the film "is determined to carry the lost object(s) along, regardless of the cost."3 Fly Paper's unidentified subject models a characteristic attributed to digital networks: the lengthening extent of media memory, in contexts where we may struggle to process experience as much in terms of how we orient our moving bodies toward media objects as in terms of subjective, psychic experience. As an immersive installation, the version of Fly Paper presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles in Fall 2018 suggests the renewed relevance of an "expanded cinema" amid the politics, economics, and aesthetics of digital streaming. Rumbling with bass that filters through spectators' bodies as they sprawl on cushions spread across the gallery floor, Fly Paper lifts Alexandra Stewart's reading of a key line from the English version of Sans Soleil: "At least they will see the black." As heard in Fly Paper, by auditor-viewers experiencing something on the order of a mediatic lucid dream, the Sans Soleil quotation is shorn of context, turned toward the Black essay cinema, so that the historicity and mediating power of the essay film prioritize Afro-diasporic memory. As bass washes through gallery space otherwise oriented toward the screen, the libidinal energies of the...

John Akomfrah

This article considers recent films by the artist John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Ghana). It argues that Vertigo Sea, The Airport, and Purple exemplify a new phase of black British art production. While building on the methods and themes that characterize his time with the Black Audio Film Collective, these projects exemplify ways in which diasporic histories provide crucial insights into the early twenty-first century—notably around questions of national sovereignty, spaces of flow and mobility, and human interventions in shared ecosystems. Ultimately, these films present a way of “doing history,” a form of visual genealogy Akomfrah calls “an essay” that is suited to a landscape in which fixed temporal or spatial narratives are no longer adequate.

History, landscape, nation: British independent film and video in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract This article examines uses of history in British independent film and video in the 1970s and 1980s, looking at ways in which radical pasts were called on to foster struggle in the present. In tracing the influence of New Left cultural historians on independent film and video, and television, during these two decades, this article also suggests ways in which the nation is figured, contested and re-drawn in specific works by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, Phil Mulloy and Black Audio Film Collective. A rich and diverse framework of leftist historical discourse is outlined, suggesting that the exploration of a socialized landscape (the city as well as the country) played on and renegotiated existing myths and tropes of Britishness, identity and belonging. This article also fills a gap in existing accounts of radical film’s uses of history, going beyond valedictory accounts of modernist historiography to assert the vitality of a complex counterpublic discourse. It concludes with a reflection on problems in the depiction and imagination of the past today.

Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah

The films of John Akomfrah have begun, with their recent increase in both budgets and ambitions, to seem less like artworks than research projects. The Nine Muses (2012) worked through a specific body of testimony and archive footage related to the first post-war wave of Caribbean migrants to arrive in Britain. The Stuart Hall Project and The Unfinished Conversation(2013) sorted through the facts and documents of the life and ideas of a figure important to Akomfrah's project –Hall had acted in an advisory role early on in the work of the Black Audio Film Collective, of which Akomfrah was a founding member. Peripeteia, first shown in Akomfrah's 2012 show at Carroll/Fletcher, extrapolated from two drawings by Albrecht Durer depicting black Africans a bleak, well-composed drama of dislocation.

Contributors

Contributors

Celluloid Documents: migrant women in Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs and Twilight City, and Sankofa Film and Video Collective’s Dreaming Rivers

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses representations of immigrant West Indian women in the films Handsworth Songs, Twilight City, and Dreaming Rivers by the black British film collectives Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, respectively. Black Audio and Sankofa emerged in the mid-1980s as activists and innovators in the fields of video and film arts. Formed by male and female filmmakers of African, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian descent, they were born out of the struggles waged by black Britons in the 1980s to shape a new cultural politics and a new politics of representation. An important stage in the ongoing struggle to gain acknowledgement of diversity within “the black British experience,” and to gain control over representations of that diversity, was that of breaking the historic silence of black British women of Caribbean origins. As a result of the new cultural politics, and for the first time, black women artists gained the means to give voice to their experience and their concerns through the medium of film. At a moment when debates on representation necessarily provoked questions of racial, national, ethnic, and individual identity, the impact of migration on black women’s identity formation became a pressing concern, if not to the community as a whole, then certainly to the women. The paper evaluates the two films as responses to these debates by filmmakers committed to giving voice to black women.

The Utopian Promise: John Akomfrah’s Poetics of the Archive

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.

‘Ghosts of Songs’: The Haunting Soundtracks of the Black Audio Film Collective

Throughout its existence as an innovative and influential collective of artists, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) produced a number of films that are consistently concerned with archival images and sounds. Seen (and heard) from the perspective of this black British collective, the archive is understood not only to reveal an official memory of the past but also to signal the absence of certain narratives. BAFC's works interrogate these gaps in the archives, finding within them narratives and moments that speak of the black British experience. Reworking the archive in particular through their thoughtful and provocative soundtracks, BAFC present new ways of seeing and hearing the past, and new ways of conceiving of the present. Focusing on their most famous work Handsworth Songs (1986), this paper examines how the soundtracks resound with and against the archival images seen on screen. BAFC sample and distort voices and songs from the past, dubbing, versioning, and remixing them with discordant, unexpected sounds such as industrial noise and whale song. These splintered and haunting soundtracks open up the images to reinterpretation. Ultimately, this paper suggests that in a diasporic life characterised, as Derek Walcott describes it, by an ‘absence of ruins’, music and the collective memories heard within it can be considered as alternative archives: the intangibles of sounds and words acting in part as monuments to a history that is not registered in official books or buildings.

Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective

Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective

Signs of Struggle, Songs of Sorrow: Notes on the Politics of Uncertainty in the Films of John Akomfrah

It is said that the end of the 1970s marked the beginning of a time of disorientation and disappointment. The dreams of emancipation and liberation that once were longed for gave way to an overwhelming sense of mourning: mourning for crumbled hopes and broken promises, mourning for possibilities that turned in on themselves, a mourning seemingly without end. Deprived of the certainties that supported revolutionary dreams, politically engaged cinema was bound to explore other forms of sensibility that had to come to terms with their own uncertainty. The work of the Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah responded to this challenge by reawakening the phantoms of history and infusing the act of mourning with the possibility of collective agency. Between documentary and allegory, between letting go and moving on, Akomfrah’s films weave a sensible tissue from histories of fractured horizons and absent ruins that refuses to act as an urgent response to the “state of emergency.” Instead, what is explored is a politics of uncertainty that takes grief by the hand and generates sites of memory that leave room for a reimagination of the future.

Introduction: The Muses of the Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs Films

Introduction: The Muses of the Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs Films

Giving a Damn

The Stuart Hall Project, directed by John Akomfrah, Smoking Dog Films/ BFI, 2013 At the end of an essay from 1981 Stuart Hall claimed that is 'one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why popular culture matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it'. (1) I was reminded of Hall's words last week while listening to a radio programme marking fifty years of Cultural Studies (Bingo, Barbie and Barthes: 50 Years of Cultural Studies BBC, Radio 4, 2013). Along with various accounts of Cultural Studies' emergence and consolidation there was a sound bite from an interview with Hall; he was complaining that he couldn't bear to read yet another Cultural Studies interpretation of the US TV show The Sopranos--frankly, my dear, he just didn't give a damn. The radio programme had a strange atmosphere about it; it seemed to suggest--contra Hall--that the spirit of Cultural Studies had migrated into all sorts of places and that its mission was now complete. The logic seemed to suggest that now, when newspapers would dedicate many more column inches to a new Dizee Rascal CD than to any classical offering, a need for Cultural Studies had passed. Not so much a celebration of Cultural Studies, then, as a valediction, sending it off to the great paper shredder of history. A different feeling of Cultural Studies is offered in John Akomfrah's latest film The Stuart Hall Project. The title mimes a category used by Hall and others to insist that Cultural Studies wasn't going to be just another discipline, rather it would be a 'project'. We should take Akomfrah's use of the term 'project' in the title of his film as similarly embracing the unfinished, on-going, contingent and necessarily inadequate state of any 'study'; while also recognising a striving towards something unknown and, perhaps, as also actively encouraging contradiction and inconsistency. As if to make this condition clearer still Akomfrah titled the three-screen video installation portrait of Hall that preceded the film The Unfinished Conversation, which is both Hall's description of identity-work, while also being the condition of the artwork. So anyone looking to The Stuart Hall Project for a bio-pic or for a fully adequate representation of the intellectual odyssey of Hall will be disappointed. The film stays for the most part in the 1950s and '60s: so for those desiring the Stuart Hall who has done so much in recent years to establish a platform for multicultural visual arts in the shape of inIVA (the institute of International Visual Arts) will find little sign of him; if you are looking for the Hall who grappled with feminism and non-heterosexual identities in the 1980s and '90s there's a tiny bit more to go on but not much; even if you desire 'the architect of Cultural Studies' from the 1960s onwards there is really very little to indicate what Cultural Studies was and is for Hall. It will, I think, be hard for many not to measure the film in relation to their own desire for Stuart Hall, and of course this is a totally understandable way of greeting a film with such a title. Yet to apprehend this film in relation to its adequacy as a representation of Hall's life would be to fundamentally misrecognise the film and mistake its primary mood. To my mind the first thing that needs to be established in attempting to grasp what The Stuart. Hall Project achieves is to attend to it as a John Akomfrah's film--as part of a practice, as part of an aesthetic engagement with the world--an engagement that has been fundamentally shaped as a response to the work of Stuart Hall and to aspects of Cultural Studies. Akomfrah's default aesthetic is elegiac: previous films have evidenced a mournful, haunted quality, often produced by the use of electronic soundscapes and slowed-down images, rendering the recent past as distant and almost ethereal (no wonder that the late Chris Marker was a fan). One consistent aspect of Akomfrah's practice (and the practice of the Black Audio Film Collective, of which he was a founding member) has been to take a public archive and alter it, unmoor it, interfere with it in some fundamental way. …

Digitopia and the spectres of diaspora

ABSTRACTThe article (an edited transcript of the keynote address given by John Akomfrah at the ‘Re-presenting Diasporas’ conference in Exeter, July 2007) explores a series of debates, practices and challenges that have taken place in the last twenty years or so within an area of study that could be loosely defined as a cinema of the black diasporas. It begins with the premise that questions of diasporic identities and diasporic or postcolonial cinema are, in fact, already implicit in debates around the emergence and development of digital cinema. It considers the possibilities and implications of this overlap between the diasporic and the digital by analysing three ‘conceptual tyrannies’: ‘the tyranny of propriety’, ‘the tyranny of time’ (or how to render looking at the ontology digital-diaspora more forceful) and ‘the tyranny of history’ — viewing them in relation to Akomfrah's own work since the 1980s with the Black Audio Film Collective and, more recently, Smoking Dogs Films. It finishes by imagining the possibilities for cinema's digital futures through ‘new’ (black) diasporic histories of cinema.

The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum

Taking as its subject Jenin refugee camp in Palestinian Occupied Territories, Nervus Rerum (2008) is a thirty-two-minute by London-based Otolith Group, commissioned by Homeworks IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which met in Beirut in 2007, and recently screened at Tate Britain in February, 2009. juxtaposing excerpts from writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet with mystifying imagery of West Bank camp, builds on artists' remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003-2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, exploited critical potential of essay film a distinctive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in tradition of such diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, real and imaginary. In process, Otolith Group has invented inspiring new political and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art. Most significantly, Nervus Rerum its title borrowed from Cicero's Latin, meaning the nerve of things confronts problem of representability of a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupation. Established in 1953, Jenin refugee camp was built to shelter Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their native towns and villages in areas that became Israel following nation's founding during 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Under Jordanian control for nearly twenty years, Jenin camp fell to Israeli occupation during Six-Day War of 1967, and was later handed over to Palestinian National Authority in 1996. With a population of some 13,000

Expedition

Expedition Get access The Black Audio Film Collective The Black Audio Film Collective Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 26, Issue 3-4, May-August 1985, Pages 157–165, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/26.3-4.157 Published: 01 May 1985