There's a Riot Goin' On: A Short History of the Black British Cinema
The Last Angel of History (1996). The last major work of the Black Audio Film Collective.
Coming of age during the economic decline of the 1970’s — the decade when England was dreaming — and watching the rhetoric of hate groups like the National Front gain momentum as their very existence was being threatened, two groups challenged the Eurocentric construction of black images in popular culture through film. They were part of a broader movement, emerging from various art schools around London and enlivened by cultural studies and experimental film in equal measure. Sankofa (Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Robert Crusz) and the Black Audio Film Collective (John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison) are the two most well known and prolific of these groups, whose collective film practice came to define what is known as Black British Cinema.
That term, like any categorization, is both restricting and defining. While sharing similar interests, especially early in their careers, both groups had their own singular concerns, in form and content. By the late 1990’s both collectives had dissolved, and members have since moved their practice toward an art world that is more receptive to their blending of forms than a traditional cinema audience. Today, their early achievements are unrecognized and underappreciated, but the amnesia, as the critic Kodwo Eshun calls it, has been changing. Isaac Julien’s films were just recently given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and John Akomfrah’s recent documentary on Stuart Hall, a public intellectual and bright star whose writings on cultural identity and the diasporic arts influenced the fractured narratives in the work of much of the Black British Cinema and provided their guiding light, has shed light on Akomfrah’s career with and without the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), especially in the wake of Hall’s recent death. But there is still scant critical and historical evaluation of the groups, from where they emerged, and how their work shifted the discourse of non-fiction and experimental film.
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It started with a riot.
On April 6, 1981, plainclothes members of the Metropolitan Police swarmed the center of Brixton, a small district in South London with a large African and Caribbean population. Operation Swamp, as the siege was called, was an attempt to quell street crime using stop and frisk practices, or what in England is called the ‘sus’ law. The Metropolitan Police, due to a provision in the Vagrancy Act of 1824, were allowed to enter a neighborhood and round up people who were suspected of committing a crime.
And round up they did. According to reports, 943 were stopped in five days and the police became a notable and frightening presence in the neighborhood, positioning themselves on every street corner. As the author Paul Gilroy has noted, tensions had been simmering since the mysterious and possibly racially motivated fire in Deptford, South East London, in January 1981, where thirteen young black people were killed and the tragedy was met with horrifying insouciance. [1]
On Friday, April 10, 1981, the spark is lit. With the daylight hours dimming, crowds gather. A young black man with a stab wound in his back comes running down the street and instead of being helped by police is questioned. The crowds get restless, rumors begin to swell — the police are just standing there, watching him die, setting off a showdown between residents and authorities. As tensions escalate overnight, the Metropolitan Police make the rash decision to call in more officers in a misguided attempt at crowd control.
What happened next is what Time Magazine, in a vapid article published a week later, called “Bloody Saturday,” an “orgy of burning and looting.” According to a report in The Guardian, by early morning the police had already lined up in rows of two down the main streets of Brixton. After a scuffle with a plain-clothes officer, a young man was arrested, setting off another chain reaction. More officers were called in, flooding the streets. Molotov cocktails began to be thrown, abandoned police cars went up in smoke, and as the flames lit up the night sky it appeared that the entire neighborhood was burning to the ground.
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The BAFC and Sankofa emerged in the shadow of these flames. Both groups formed in 1982, the same year that saw the creation in England of Channel Four and the ACCT Workshop Declaration, which gave the groups a foundation and platform for their art (and were themselves answers to the riots, what cultural critic Kobena Mercer called the reaction to “encoded militant demands for black representation within public institutions as a basic right.”). Some of their first major works — Sankofa’s Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), Territories (1984), and the various “tape-slide” experiments/performances of the BAFC — dealt explicitly with the riots and its aftermath using early video technology that filtered the digressive and multi-layered essay-film vision of Chris Marker, whose shadow hangs over both groups. “Marker developed a formal vocabulary of his own, one that facilitates an extraordinary musicality,” Isaac Julien writes in Riot, his 2013 autobiography published in conjunction with his latest exhibition at MoMA. “That’s exactly what I was also searching for.” The notoriously reclusive Marker was also reportedly a fan of the BAFC, and once tried to track the group at their offices in London, only to get lost on the way. He never made it.
While Marker remains the foremost aesthetic influence on both groups, it was the work of the late sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall that most penetrated the ideas of Sankofa and BAFC. There were others, of course — Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy, to name two of the most obvious — but Hall’s writings on the intersection of race and popular culture, and his role as public intellectual, with regular appearances on television, provided a model for both groups. Their word would not be confined to the black or white box, at least not initially. It was made to engage with an audience, to spark a conversation among people outside the traditional realms of discourse. Hall’s words and voice would literally become some of the raw materials of their work, and he would act as a vocal supporter of their films in the press, including a famous back-and-forth exchange of letters in The Guardian with author Salman Rushdie over the latter’s critique of the BAFC’s Handsworth Songs (1986), who felt the collective were more concerned with, as one writer recently said, “theories of representation than with representing the second-generation migrants whose rioting had occasioned the film.”
For the BAFC, theories of representation were crucial to understanding why representation was uniformly negative or didn’t exist at all. Handsworth Songs emerged at the center of debates about black cultural production — today generally referred to as post-colonialism, multiculturalism, identity politics, take your pick — and remains one of the defining films of the period. It’s also the most cited work of the BAFC, and there’s a sense, unfairly, that everything that came after, including a staggering number of films, many of them better than Handsworth Songs, only exist for many people in the former’s shadow.
With it’s fragmented lack of narrative, Handsworth Songs formally mirrors the riots it documents, which New Yorker reporter Jane Kramer called “disorganized and confusing events, lacking clear definition and structure.” Through a variety of different visual means — archival photographs, newsreel clips, interviews — the film attempts to find a new language, to speak not just from the voice of the people of the riots, but through a collective voice of the ‘other,’ or through what the writer Okwui Enwezor, in an essay about the film, called “an archeology of the visual archive of minoritarian dwelling in Britain.” Trevor Mathison’s layers of sound, which add another voice, or set of voices, to the conversation happening within the frame — with ethnographic recordings, bits of synthesized noises, snippets of readings, and calypso and reggae music filtered in and out of the cut-and-paste soundtrack as if mixed by a deejay — add to the overall density of the project, and the feeling that the film is not just speaking about the present but, to cop an analogy the BAFC used often, with the ghosts of the past.
Sankofa’s first major statement was Passion of Remembrance (1986), which used similar formal strategies as Handsworth Songs with an added focus: black male sexuality. The group’s ideas and unique aesthetic would be cemented three years later with Looking For Langston (1989), a “meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance,” as the title card states, and which remains the collective’s most famous film. The film’s title positions the famous poet at the center of a hidden history of African American culture, where his often ignored sexual identity is explored in relation to the hatred aimed at members of the gay black community during the then-present culture wars of the late 1980’s. Julien, who directed the project, combines archival with original footage (something BAFC would incorporate as well in their Handsworth Songs follow-up, Who Needs a Heart (1991)), with many of the staged scenes resembling the photographic work of Robert Mapplethorpe, with it’s distinctive heavy shadows and attention paid to the components of male nudity. All of this is connected through a deeply layered idea of looking. The film opens with a train moving across the Manhattan bridge, signaling the search or journey of the film, and a later sequence playfully highlights a performative kind of looking through still images, frames within frames, and a melodramatic theatricality.
Running parallel to the images is a remarkable soundtrack featuring the poetry of Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent, along with the voices of Stuart Hall, Toni Morrison reading at the funeral of James Baldwin, and many others (the soundtrack was built by Trevor Mathison, it’s worth noting). The film’s importance as a crucial document of the period and reexamination of African American history is clear, and marks a certain epoch of the Black British Cinema and the conversations that swirled around it. The discourse wouldn’t stop, but it would simmer and eventually drift in many different directions.
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Looking For Langston would prove to be as far as Sankofa was able to push the boundaries before their disintegration. Young Soul Rebels (1991), a fiction film they made, would prove to be the final collaboration with Julien as a member. And, looking back on it today, is a dilution of their previous work, made to appease a wider audience. They continued to work through the 1990’s, broadening their scope to include other diasporic visions.
The BAFC arguably made their best work during their later period. The Last Angel of History (1996), a hybrid essay/documentary, has become one of their most famous works and a prime source in the study of afro-futurism. Using the connections between two distinct figures — the musicians Sun Ra and George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic fame —the film maps a hidden history of the black experience through its use of space and alien imagery, pulling in all types of figures including Octavia E. Butler, Samuel Delany, and Detroit techno pioneer Derek May. The film also features writers Kodwo Eshun and Greg Tate, who act as a Greek chorus in the film and have illuminated these ideas brilliantly in their books More Brilliant Than the Sun and Flyboy in the Buttermilk, respectively. Weaved in and out of the interviews is an oblique narrative featuring a character named Data Thief, who time travels through archives in an attempt to reassemble the past and predict the future, and the assemblage of talking heads seems to come out of his work.
The Last Angel of History would mark the last major work of the BAFC. The collective would only make four more films before dissolving in 1998, partly due to decreased funding (they have continued to work, often together, on various projects). By the end of the decade, much of what had originally constituted the collectively produced Black British Cinema has disappeared.
The dissolution of the groups also marked a changing role of viewership in relation to their work. The two most prominent members to emerge from the collectives — Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah — have moved to the art world, where their work is more accepted (and financed). Both, along with films, produce large-scale installations, and have expanded their interests to include different cultures and modes of representation.
Part of why their shift into the art world was so easy is that their work has been hugely influential on a growing number of video artists and filmmakers working with nontraditional forms and narratives. Kodwo Eshun, who appeared in The Last Angel of History , created the The Otolith Group [2] in 2002, a collective clearly modeled after the BAFC who works to, in their own words, “rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of accelerated, unstable and precarious global conditions.” Sankofa and the BAFC’s work with archival footage can be expressly linked to the films such as Black Power Mixtape (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), both from filmmaker Göran Olsson, and images reminiscent of the work of Sankofa and BAFC have begun cropping up on television as well, through the essay films of Adam Curtis, whose image/text disfigurations are oddly similar to the early “tape/slide” work of the BAFC. Through a shared interest in the archive and the formal properties of the essay film, these disparate works are linked in their utopian vision — through the uncovering of hidden histories, painful as they may be, we may move toward a better world.
The shift has not constituted a rupture, and there is a sense that the artists associated with the collectives are looking back on their work with renewed interest. Much of this is formulated though Stuart Hall. Before his death in February, Akomfrah completed a documentary charting his life and work, and Hall recently appeared in Julien’s KAPITAL, a two-screen video work also featuring the writer David Harvey. In a small obituary Julien wrote for the British Film Institute, he mentioned Hall’s insistence that his influence on the filmmaker’s work was merely a “small walk on role.” A modest understatement, indeed. In the same vein, the work of the Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa have regulated to supporting, even background roles in the narrative of film history. It’s time for their close-up.
Notes
[1] Gilroy, Paul: There Ain't No Black In the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Hutchinson, 1987.
[2] The first Nordic solo exhibition of The Otolith Group — In the Year of the Quiet Sun — opened at Bergen Kunsthall in January, 2014.
On print in Wuxia 1-2, 2014