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. …
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Jun 9, 2022
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