film and video series sabatini building, auditorium sounds in diaspora … · 2014. 8. 4. · film...

Film and Video Series. From 2 to 16 July 2014, 7 p.m.Sabatini Building, Auditorium

Sounds in DiasporaThe Cinema of the BlackAudio Film Collective

Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 1

Sounds in Diaspora. The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective 2

“Some time ago I found myself in London insearch of the Black Audio Film Collective,because I had to return two VHS tapes thatthey had lent me. But I could never find theplace (…). These tapes remain among all myclutter, like some kind of remorse, togetherwith the memory of that great work I wouldlike to pay homage to (…).” 1 These words byChris Marker reflect the current situation ofthe Black Audio Film Collective, consignedto isolated appearances and commentariesabout a historic body of work lurking themist of lost memory. Active between 1982and 1997 in the UK, there are countless rea-sons to dedicate a film series to the collec-tive, founded by John Akomfrah, ReeseAuguiste, Lina Gopaul, Trevor Mathison,David Lawson, Edward George and ClareJoseph, a multidisciplinary team made up offilm-makers, sound artists, activists, sociol-ogists and producers, all Britons fromDominica, Jamaica, Ghana, Trinidad andTobago. Such reasons could include themention of the horizontal work it distrib-uted, among both its members and its audi-ence, or the overhaul of realist documentarymaking through the display of colonialimagery and representations originatingfrom archive, and, most importantly, thecapacity to articulate a common front,encompassing a large part of the New Leftapproaches that not only questioned iden-tity hegemony during the years of Thatch-erism, but also examined culture, andparticularly cinema, as the key element ofresistance.

Nonetheless, beyond these reasons there isan accentuated cause that grants the BlackAudio Film Collective a foundational placein the audiovisual history of recent decades;more than just a film project, the BlackAudio Film Collective put together an aes-thetic programme focused on updating the

revolutionary approaches of Third Cinema,which emerged in Latin America and Africaduring the decolonisation process in the1960s and 70s, from metropolitan centralEurope, starting in the 1980s. Accepting itspotency, but also its limits and shortcom-ings, this approach would be radically refor-mulated into a new discursive spacepredominated by archive research and theintegration of aural culture in the movingimage as it strove to question and allude tothe path of a decentralised subject with noplace; in short, a language of diaspora.

“For us, Third Cinema is something thatsees the most gargantuan cultural, scientificand artistic manifestation of our time in this(anti-imperialist) struggle, the great possi-bility of constructing a liberated personalityfrom all peoples: the decolonisation of cul-ture,”2 this was how Fernando Solanas andOctavio Getino described a movement that,adopting the manifestos The Aesthetics ofHunger by Glauber Rocha and For an Imper-fect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa, wouldspread throughout the whole of Latin Amer-ica, Africa and Asia, and would persevere ina healthy collective network until well intothe 1980s. Third Cinema articulated globalimagery of resistance based on the dialectictension between the coloniser/colonised,empire/nation and capitalism/socialism,after which it revealed the search for aninnocent, not contaminated, origin, anostensible zero degree in the construction ofdecolonised national identity. The BlackAudio Film Collective may receive claims ofbeing Third Cinema, but question how toincorporate it into a much more complexmixed identity related to a new place ofenunciation, yet also with the assumptionthat – adhering to Paul Gilroy in The BlackAtlantic: Modernity and Double-Conscious-ness3 – emancipation and exploitation are


From 2 to 16 July 2014, 7 p.m. 3

two inseparable effects of the modern expe-rience. The tactics of confrontation andopposition in film-makers such as MedHondo, Santiago Álvarez and Masao Adachi,to name three examples of such disparategeographical areas as Senegal, Cuba andJapan, would become a broader project withtwo main goals. The first, the use of film as akey element to articulate another publicsphere geared towards changing culturaland educational institutions through thenotion of difference and representation; thesecond, the thought of a nomadic and cos-mopolitan post-colonial identity, asopposed to the global and nationalist one inThird Cinema, where the moving imagemust adapt a visual form that encompassesmodernity and its reverse from thepalimpsest of multiple stories and narrativetime periods that approach the present. Or,according to the poetry of Derek Walcott,how to think about the present momentfrom “the absence of ruins”.

Therefore, in 1984, the year their first filmproduction Expeditionswas released, the col-lective founded the Association of BlackWorkshops, eight permanent workshops that,under the name Visions and Revisions,endeavoured to “produce new skills in bothpractice and theory”, in the words of EdwardGeorge4, in order to be contextualised ininternal network and structure systems thatupheld independent black culture. It cannot beforgotten that this mobilization occurred at atime when any and every public service of theState – particularly cultural – was being with-drawn and privatised, thus giving rise to insti-tutional reinvention and creation from thebottom. Lina Gopaul, another of the collec-tive’s members, wrote how this “new sector ofblack cinema is the culmination of differentdesires, strategies and modes of interventionin film production”5, appealing to a time of

collaboration that enabled a consideration ofoccupation and the debate around the institu-tion as a priority. The idiosyncrasy lies in howthis critical discourse would nurture twohighly sophisticated movements; one, thenascent film theory in British academia, ledby the periodical Screen, which featured arti-cles by Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis andChristian Metz and represented the startingpoint of Lacan, Foucault and Althusser in theanalysis of the image and its apparatus.This academic circle, related to the momen-tum of New Art History, looked to acknowl-edge and empower a new spectator, capableof recognising themselves in critical analysiswhen faced with the saturation and determin-ism in mass media, aspects that Black Audio –we are reminded of the name of their work-shops, Visions and Revisions– would grantprivilege to. The other movement, stretchingover the entire filmography of the collectiveand even continuing through the currentwork of many of its members, forms thedebates of the New Left, with a strong empha-sis placed on the voice of Stuart Hall, thefounder of visual culture studies and the jour-nalNew Left Review.

In 1972 the Irish labourer Robert Keenan wasmugged by two teenagers of African descenton his way home from the pub in theHandsworth area of Birmingham, an innercity Afro-Caribbean district. This eventmarked the beginning of a whole campaign ofalarm at the growing number of robberies onthe working class in the UK. The situationwould give rise to Policing the Crisis, a studyin which Hall condemned the emergence ofthis panic from a fantasy of evil that strove toreplace the old culture of post-war consensuswith coercion and repression during the cri-sis. Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio FilmCollective’s first feature length film, depictsthe outburst of labour protests and race riots


at the beginning of the 1980s in the sameneighbourhood of England, and is con-structed with news footage and images of rep-resentations of slavery, with the narratorrepeating the phrase, “There are no stories inthe riots, only the ghosts of other stories”, aninescapable resonance of the conclusionsfrom Policing the Crisis.

Hall worked from the CCCS department atthe University of Birmingham, the birth-place of cultural studies. To a certain extent,the cinema of the Black Audio Film Collec-tive can be understood as the search for alanguage of diaspora, born in the crossroadsbetween the genealogy of Third Cinema andthe perspective of cultural studies. Whenfaced with the obsolete concept of classstruggles, Hall put forward the idea of hege-mony, the progressive conquest of pre-emi-nence through a false consensus; the role ofculture was to show discordance and mate-rialise as a space for permanent negotiation,and, from that point, interest in the popularculture theory of power relations. The syn-thesis between fragments of sound andblack music alongside documentary imagesand archives can be seen in every film byBlack Audio, who also attempted to incor-porate the popular within a film narrationrationale – not dependent on it, but used asan oral conversation and permanent dissen-sion. So much so that The Last Angel of His-tory, one of their last productions, is basedon the presence of the alien and outer spacein the free jazz of Sun Ra (Space is the Place,1972) and the funk of George Clinton (TheMothership Connection, 1975), Afro-futuristallusions to black otherness in white soci-eties. “The journey ends,” wrote Stuart Hall,“not in Ethiopia but with the music of Burn-ing Spear and Bob Marley’sRedemptionSong”.6 The idea that a black culture doesnot exist, and much less English or Euro-

pean, without the missed connections intransatlantic migrations, would be a corepart in the development of a filmographyarticulated in the discordant and anachro-nistic stories of diaspora.

How is this spatial and temporary transitequipped with self-expression?“Handsworth Songs was John Griersonspeaking about the language of diaspora,”according to Reece Auguiste, a member ofthe collective; in other words, the documen-tary movement in Britain and the visualform of an interrupted, collective andyearning memory, linked not only to thepast but also to the state of emergency in apresent determined by the persistent mech-anisms of exclusion. The manifestation ofmemory, in its absence and presence, inter-ruption and continuity, is the element thatallows the documentary mechanism to bereinvented.

Expeditions, their first project, with twoscreenings of slide tapes with a voice-over, ispositioned in a space found halfwaybetween museum and cinema. Both series,Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality,set in motion the collapse of two time peri-ods through intertextuality: the certainty ofthe British nationalist myth evoked in 19thcentury colonial photography is broken upas it is mixed with a mesh of texts and audiothat exhibit the ideology of supremacy andconquest. In Handsworth Songs, this inter-textuality, in such close proximity to post-modern allegory, becomes a palimpsesthalfway between documentary records andhistorical archive, between the appropria-tion of official news images and the traces ofa past of denial that, dialectically speaking,presents violence in the present as an irre-mediable conclusion. As with the paths ofdiaspora, that endless relationship Édouard



Glissant7 spoke of, the palimpsest is a lan-guage devoid of significance, with its mean-ing emerging from the fissures and cracksthat form its composition, the idea of archi-pelago and continent, to go back to Glissant once more. In Handsworth Songs,the sampling in the film adds voices, registersand textures that clash with the image. With anarration verging on fable, the voice-over inTwilight City spans the geographical area ofLondon in its gradual conversion to a capitalof financial gain; the city is represented froma fictitious character in exile, syncopated withinterviews with post-colonial theorists andcritics such as Homi Bhabha, Kobena Mercerand Paul Gilroy. Fable mixed with chronicle isthe way they depict the activist MichaelAbdul Malik, whose biography is staged in aseries of tableau vivants, an element ofscenography used in Black Audio’s films inthe 1990s. The Last Angel of History, togetherwith The Mothership Connection and GangstaGangsta: The Tragedy of Tupac Shakur, con-clude the series, which, like their filmographyas a whole, is dedicated to the popular as aculture of resistance.

1 ESHUM, K. and SAGAR, A. (eds.). The Ghosts of Songs.The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective. FACT andUniversity of Liverpool Press, 2007, p. 12.

2 GETTINO, Octavio and SOLANAS, Fernado. “Hacia untercer cine”, en AAVV. A diez años de “Hacia un TercerCine”. México: Filmoteca, UNAM, 1982, pp. 38 and 39.

3 GILROY, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

4 GEORGE, Edward. “New Directions in Training”, inESHUN, K. and SAGAR, A. Op. cit., pp. 148-150.

5 GOPAUL, Lina. “Which Way Forward?”, in ESHUN, K.and SAGAR, A. Op. cit., p. 146.

6 BLACKBURN, Robin. “Remembering Stuart Hall”, anarticle published in New Left Review, March/April 2014,available at http://newleftreview.org/II/86/robin-black-burn-stuart-hall-1932-2014 [last accessed10 June 2014].

7 GLISSANT, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique dudivers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

From 2 to 16 July 2014, 7 p.m. 5

Program

Session 1. 2 July, 7 p.m.Sabatini Building, Auditorium

Signs of Empire Colour, sound, 20’50’’, 1982-84. Original format:35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films

Images of NationalityColour, sound, 22’44’’, 1982-84. Original format:35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.

Both film projects form Expeditions, Black Audio FilmCollective’s inaugural work approached in two parts.Expeditions shares deliberated hermeticism and theuse of allegory in art practices from the beginning ofthe 1980s. Signs of Empire and Images of Nationalityboth include familiar aspects in the collective’s work:the dimension of sound in the image, the audiovisualremix of archive and the use of text as collective writ-ing. Signs of Empire draws from Roland Barthes andhis Empire of Signs, resolving to show historical signsfrom colonialism, while Images of Nationalityaddresses the continuity of the myth of the nation.

Images of Nationality, 1982-84. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London.




Handsworth Songs Colour, sound, 60’, 1986. Original format: 16mm film,screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX.

At the beginning of 1985 a series of race riots andlabour protests took place in Handsworth (Birmingham)and Brixton (London), culminating in the death of anelderly black woman and a white policeman. The filmjoins the civil unrest and a multiple story of disposses-sion, delving deeper into the roots of contradictionsfrom the colonial past and connecting the economicand industrial crisis at the time. By using the traditionsof reformist documentaries in Britain (John Grierson,Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright), together witharchives of black presence (and absence) in the UK,Handsworth Songs concludes that any meaning has tobe sought outside of news reporting. The Songs from the title does not refer to musicality inthe film, but instead invokes an updated idea of docu-mentary, devised as a poetic montage of associations.


Twilight CityColour, sound, 52’, 1989. Original format: 16mm film,screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.

An epistolary documentary essay that narrates thestory of a young girl in London who writes to hermother on the island of Dominica. Her letters recountthe changes occurring in the city while the Docklandsare being rebuilt as the film intersperses this socialand psychological landscape of the city as a symbolicspace in which the transformation of the urbanpanorama into financial affluence converges with thehopes and disappointments of African diaspora. Thisintimate space, with echoes of Chantal Akerman’sNews from Home, is imbued with debates on the pub-lic sphere, where sociologists, activists and historiansdraw up a new urban territory, mapped out by racialand cultural limits. “A place with people existing inclose proximity but living in different worlds,” as PaulGilroy remarks.

Program

Twilight City, 1989. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London.

Handsworth Songs, 1986. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and LUX, London.


From 2 to 16 July 2014, 7 p.m. 7


Who Needs a HeartColour, sound, 78’, 1991. Original format: 16mm film,screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX.

This film, produced by Channel Four, explores the his-tory of British Black Power by means of the blurredfigure of Michael Abdul Malik, the predominantcounter-culture anti-hero and activist in the move-ment. Nevertheless, the narration keeps its distancefrom this historical figure and traces his biographyfrom radio and television documents, complementedwith the lives of other participants in the movement.Trevor Mathison’s soundtrack is arranged to produce adeliberate estrangement with the images, and WhoNeeds a Heart sets out a fragmented narration thatflashes back and jumps forward, bringing in fiction asa “postcolonial chamber theatre”, in the words ofKobena Mercer, supporting itself with music, thestreet and art to reclaim the genealogy of blackness.


The Last Angel of HistoryColour, sound, 52’, 1995. Original format: 16mm film,screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.

One of the collective’s last and most influential filmessays, The Last Angel of History concentrates itscombination of interests in a highly complex and dis-parate manner. Located between critical theory andscience fiction, the Data Thief, a version from WalterBenjamin’s story, played by Edward George (a mem-ber of the collective), travels into the past to assemblefragments of information that will enable him to deci-pher the future. The cosmic journey and alien iconog-raphy prevalent in the music of Sun Ra, Lee Perry andGeorge Clinton is interpreted as a metaphor of dias-pora and the otherness of the black subject in whitesociety. Thus, free jazz and black electronic musicimagine a future that is inevitably condemned to thepast.

The Last Angel of History, 1995. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London.

Who Needs a Heart, 1991. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and LUX, London.


Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Sabatini BuildingSanta Isabel, 52

Nouvel BuildingRonda de Atocha (on the corner with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)28012 MadridTel: (34) 91 774 10 00www.museoreinasofia.es

Opening hoursMonday to Saturdayand public holidays from 10:00 a.m. to 09:00 p.m. Sundaysfrom 10:00 a.m. to 02:15 p.m. opens the whole Museum,from 2:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.visit to Collection 1and one temporary exhibition (check Website)Closed on Tuesdays

Exhibition rooms in all venues will be cleared 15 minutes before closing time

Entry to the film and video program:Free until full capacity is reached

Curatorship and textsChema González

Front cover photoHandsworth Songs, 1986. Image courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and LUX, London

NIPO

: 036-14-010-6


film and video series sabatini building, auditorium sounds in diaspora … · 2014. 8. 4. · film...

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