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Film and Video Series . From 2 to 16 July 2014, 7 p.m. Sabatini Building, Auditorium Sounds in Diaspora The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective

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

“Some time ago I found myself in London in revolutionary approaches of Third Cinema, search of the Black Audio Film Collective, which emerged in Latin America and Africa because I had to return two VHS tapes that during the decolonisation process in the they had lent me. But I could never find the 1960s and 70s, from metropolitan central place (…). These tapes remain among all my Europe, starting in the 1980s. Accepting its clutter, like some kind of remorse, together potency, but also its limits and shortcom - with the memory of that great work I would ings, this approach would be radically refor - like to pay homage to (…).” 1 These words by mulated into a new discursive space Chris Marker reflect the current situation of predominated by archive research and the the Black Audio Film Collective, consigned integration of aural culture in the moving to isolated appearances and commentaries image as it strove to question and allude to about a historic body of work lurking the the path of a decentralised subject with no mist of lost memory. Active between 1982 place; in short, a language of diaspora. and 1997 in the UK, there are countless rea - sons to dedicate a film series to the collec - “For us, Third Cinema is something that tive, founded by John Akomfrah, Reese sees the most gargantuan cultural, scientific Auguiste, Lina Gopaul, Trevor Mathison, and artistic manifestation of our time in this David Lawson, Edward George and Clare (anti-imperialist) struggle, the great possi - Joseph, a multidisciplinary team made up of bility of constructing a liberated personality film-makers, sound artists, activists, sociol - from all peoples: the decolonisation of cul - ogists and producers, all Britons from ture,” 2 this was how Fernando Solanas and Dominica, Jamaica, Ghana, Trinidad and Octavio Getino described a movement that, Tobago. Such reasons could include the adopting the manifestos The Aesthetics of mention of the horizontal work it distrib - Hunger by Glauber Rocha and For an Imper - uted, among both its members and its audi - fect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa, would ence, or the overhaul of realist documentary spread throughout the whole of Latin Amer - making through the display of colonial ica, Africa and Asia, and would persevere in imagery and representations originating a healthy collective network until well into from archive, and, most importantly, the the 1980s. Third Cinema articulated global capacity to articulate a common front, imagery of resistance based on the dialectic encompassing a large part of the New Left tension between the coloniser/colonised, approaches that not only questioned iden - empire/nation and capitalism/socialism, tity hegemony during the years of Thatch - after which it revealed the search for an erism, but also examined culture, and innocent, not contaminated, origin, an particularly cinema, as the key element of ostensible zero degree in the construction of resistance. decolonised national identity. The Black Audio Film Collective may receive claims of Nonetheless, beyond these reasons there is being Third Cinema, but question how to an accentuated cause that grants the Black incorporate it into a much more complex Audio Film Collective a foundational place mixed identity related to a new place of in the audiovisual history of recent decades; enunciation, yet also with the assumption more than just a film project, the Black that – adhering to Paul Gilroy in The Black Audio Film Collective put together an aes - Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Conscious - thetic programme focused on updating the ness 3 – emancipation and exploitation are Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 3

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

two inseparable effects of the modern expe - collaboration that enabled a consideration of rience. The tactics of confrontation and occupation and the debate around the institu - opposition in film-makers such as Med tion as a priority. The idiosyncrasy lies in how Hondo, Santiago Álvarez and Masao Adachi, this critical discourse would nurture two to name three examples of such disparate highly sophisticated movements; one, the geographical areas as Senegal, Cuba and nascent film theory in British academia, led Japan, would become a broader project with by the periodical Screen , which featured arti - two main goals. The first, the use of film as a cles by Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis and key element to articulate another public Christian Metz and represented the starting sphere geared towards changing cultural point of Lacan, Foucault and Althusser in the and educational institutions through the analysis of the image and its apparatus. notion of difference and representation; the This academic circle, related to the momen - second, the thought of a nomadic and cos - tum of New Art History, looked to acknowl - mopolitan post-colonial identity, as edge and empower a new spectator, capable opposed to the global and nationalist one in of recognising themselves in critical analysis Third Cinema, where the moving image when faced with the saturation and determin - must adapt a visual form that encompasses ism in mass media, aspects that Black Audio – modernity and its reverse from the we are reminded of the name of their work - palimpsest of multiple stories and narrative shops, Visions and Revisions – would grant time periods that approach the present. Or, privilege to. The other movement, stretching according to the poetry of Derek Walcott, over the entire filmography of the collective how to think about the present moment and even continuing through the current from “the absence of ruins”. work of many of its members, forms the debates of the New Left, with a strong empha - Therefore, in 1984, the year their first film sis placed on the voice of Stuart Hall, the production Expeditions was released, the col - founder of visual culture studies and the jour - lective founded the Association of Black nal New Left Review. Workshops, eight permanent workshops that, under the name Visions and Revisions , In 1972 the Irish labourer Robert Keenan was endeavoured to “produce new skills in both mugged by two teenagers of African descent practice and theory”, in the words of Edward on his way home from the pub in the George 4, in order to be contextualised in Handsworth area of Birmingham, an inner internal network and structure systems that city Afro-Caribbean district. This event upheld independent black culture . It cannot be marked the beginning of a whole campaign of forgotten that this mobilization occurred at a alarm at the growing number of robberies on time when any and every public service of the the working class in the UK. The situation State – particularly cultural – was being with - would give rise to Policing the Crisis , a study drawn and privatised, thus giving rise to insti - in which Hall condemned the emergence of tutional reinvention and creation from the this panic from a fantasy of evil that strove to bottom. Lina Gopaul, another of the collec - replace the old culture of post-war consensus tive’s members, wrote how this “new sector of with coercion and repression during the cri - black cinema is the culmination of different sis. Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film desires, strategies and modes of intervention Collective’s first feature length film, depicts in film production”5, appealing to a time of the outburst of labour protests and race riots Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 4

Sounds in Diaspora. The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective 4

at the beginning of the 1980s in the same pean, without the missed connections in neighbourhood of England, and is con - transatlantic migrations, would be a core structed with news footage and images of rep - part in the development of a filmography resentations of slavery, with the narrator articulated in the discordant and anachro - repeating the phrase, “There are no stories in nistic stories of diaspora. the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”, an inescapable resonance of the conclusions How is this spatial and temporary transit from Policing the Crisis. equipped with self-expression? “Handsworth Songs was John Grierson Hall worked from the CCCS department at speaking about the language of diaspora,” the University of Birmingham, the birth - according to Reece Auguiste, a member of place of cultural studies. To a certain extent, the collective; in other words, the documen - the cinema of the Black Audio Film Collec - tary movement in Britain and the visual tive can be understood as the search for a form of an interrupted, collective and language of diaspora, born in the crossroads yearning memory, linked not only to the between the genealogy of Third Cinema and past but also to the state of emergency in a the perspective of cultural studies. When present determined by the persistent mech - faced with the obsolete concept of class anisms of exclusion. The manifestation of struggles, Hall put forward the idea of hege - memory, in its absence and presence, inter - mony, the progressive conquest of pre-emi - ruption and continuity, is the element that nence through a false consensus; the role of allows the documentary mechanism to be culture was to show discordance and mate - reinvented. rialise as a space for permanent negotiation, and, from that point, interest in the popular Expeditions , their first project, with two culture theory of power relations. The syn - screenings of slide tapes with a voice-over, is thesis between fragments of sound and positioned in a space found halfway black music alongside documentary images between museum and cinema. Both series, and archives can be seen in every film by Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality , Black Audio, who also attempted to incor - set in motion the collapse of two time peri - porate the popular within a film narration ods through intertextuality: the certainty of rationale – not dependent on it, but used as the British nationalist myth evoked in 19 th an oral conversation and permanent dissen - century colonial photography is broken up sion. So much so that The Last Angel of His - as it is mixed with a mesh of texts and audio tory , one of their last productions, is based that exhibit the ideology of supremacy and on the presence of the alien and outer space conquest. In Handsworth Songs , this inter - in the free jazz of Sun Ra ( Space is the Place , textuality, in such close proximity to post- 1972) and the funk of George Clinton ( The modern allegory, becomes a palimpsest Mothership Connection, 197 5), Afro-futurist halfway between documentary records and allusions to black otherness in white soci - historical archive, between the appropria - eties. “The journey ends,” wrote Stuart Hall, tion of official news images and the traces of “not in Ethiopia but with the music of Burn - a past of denial that, dialectically speaking, ing Spear and Bob Marley’s Redemption presents violence in the present as an irre - Song ”. 6 The idea that a black culture does mediable conclusion. As with the paths of not exist, and much less English or Euro - diaspora, that endless relationship Édouard Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 5

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

Glissant 7 spoke of, the palimpsest is a lan - Program guage devoid of significance, with its mean - ing emerging from the fissures and cracks that 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, registers and textures that clash with the image. With a narration verging on fable, the voice-over in Twilight City spans the geographical area of London in its gradual conversion to a capital of financial gain; the city is represented from a fictitious character in exile, syncopated with interviews with post-colonial theorists and critics such as Homi Bhabha, Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy. Fable mixed with chronicle is the way they depict the activist Michael Images of Nationality, 1982-84. Abdul Malik, whose biography is staged in a Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London. series of tableau vivants , an element of scenography used in Black Audio’s films in Session 1. 2 July, 7 p.m. the 1990s. The Last Angel of History , together Sabatini Building, Auditorium with The Mothership Connection and Gangsta Gangsta: The Tragedy of Tupac Shakur , con - Signs of Empire clude the series, which, like their filmography Colour, sound, 20’50’’, 1982-84. Original format: as a whole, is dedicated to the popular as a 35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. culture of resistance. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films

Images of Nationality 1 ESHUM, K. and SAGAR, A. (eds.). The Ghosts of Songs. Colour, sound, 22’44’’, 1982-84. Original format: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective . FACT and 35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. University of Liverpool Press, 2007, p. 12. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films. 2 GETTINO, Octavio and SOLANAS, Fernado. “Hacia un tercer cine”, en AAVV. A diez años de “Hacia un Tercer Both film projects form Expeditions , Black Audio Film Cine ”. México: Filmoteca, UNAM, 1982, pp. 38 and 39. Collective’s inaugural work approached in two parts. 3 GILROY, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Expeditions shares deliberated hermeticism and the 4 GEORGE, Edward. “New Directions in Training”, in use of allegory in art practices from the beginning of ESHUN, K. and SAGAR, A. Op. cit., pp. 148-150. the 1980s. Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality 5 GOPAUL, Lina. “Which Way Forward?”, in ESHUN, K. both include familiar aspects in the collective’s work: and SAGAR, A. Op. cit., p. 146. the dimension of sound in the image, the audiovisual 6 BLACKBURN, Robin. “Remembering Stuart Hall”, an remix of archive and the use of text as collective writ - article published in New Left Review , March/April 2014, ing. Signs of Empire draws from Roland Barthes and available at http://newleftreview.org/II/86/robin-black - burn-stuart-hall-1932-2014 [last accessed10 June 2014]. his Empire of Signs , resolving to show historical signs 7 GLISSANT, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du from colonialism, while Images of Nationality divers . Paris: Gallimard, 1996. addresses the continuity of the myth of the nation. Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 6

Sounds in Diaspora. The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective 6

Program

Handsworth Songs, 1986. Twilight City, 1989. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and LUX, London. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London.

Session 2. 3 July, 7 p.m. Session 3. 9 July, 7 p.m. Sabatini Building, Auditorium Sabatini Building, Auditorium

Handsworth Songs Twilight City Colour, sound, 60’, 1986. Original format: 16mm film, Colour, sound, 52’, 1989. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.

At the beginning of 1985 a series of race riots and An epistolary documentary essay that narrates the labour protests took place in Handsworth (Birmingham) story of a young girl in London who writes to her and Brixton (London), culminating in the death of an mother on the island of Dominica. Her letters recount elderly black woman and a white policeman. The film the changes occurring in the city while the Docklands joins the civil unrest and a multiple story of disposses - are being rebuilt as the film intersperses this social sion, delving deeper into the roots of contradictions and psychological landscape of the city as a symbolic from the colonial past and connecting the economic space in which the transformation of the urban and industrial crisis at the time. By using the traditions panorama into financial affluence converges with the of reformist documentaries in Britain (John Grierson, hopes and disappointments of African diaspora. This Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright), together with intimate space, with echoes of Chantal Akerman’s archives of black presence (and absence) in the UK, News from Home , is imbued with debates on the pub - Handsworth Songs concludes that any meaning has to lic sphere, where sociologists, activists and historians be sought outside of news reporting. draw up a new urban territory, mapped out by racial The Songs from the title does not refer to musicality in and cultural limits. “A place with people existing in the film, but instead invokes an updated idea of docu - close proximity but living in different worlds,” as Paul mentary, devised as a poetic montage of associations. Gilroy remarks. Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 7

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

Who Needs a Heart, 1991. The Last Angel of History, 1995. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and LUX, London. Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs, London.

Session 4. 10 July, 7 p.m. Session 5. 16 July, 7 p.m. Sabatini Building, Auditorium Sabatini Building, Auditorium

Who Needs a Heart The Last Angel of History Colour, sound, 78’, 1991. Original format: 16mm film, Colour, sound, 52’, 1995. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.

This film, produced by Channel Four, explores the his - One of the collective’s last and most influential film tory of British Black Power by means of the blurred essays, The Last Angel of History concentrates its figure of Michael Abdul Malik, the predominant combination of interests in a highly complex and dis - counter-culture anti-hero and activist in the move - parate manner. Located between critical theory and ment. Nevertheless, the narration keeps its distance science fiction, the Data Thief , a version from Walter from this historical figure and traces his biography Benjamin’s story, played by Edward George (a mem - from radio and television documents, complemented ber of the collective), travels into the past to assemble with the lives of other participants in the movement. fragments of information that will enable him to deci - Trevor Mathison’s soundtrack is arranged to produce a pher the future. The cosmic journey and alien iconog - deliberate estrangement with the images, and Who raphy prevalent in the music of Sun Ra, Lee Perry and Needs a Heart sets out a fragmented narration that George Clinton is interpreted as a metaphor of dias - flashes back and jumps forward, bringing in fiction as pora and the otherness of the black subject in white a “postcolonial chamber theatre ”, in the words of society. Thus, free jazz and black electronic music Kobena Mercer, supporting itself with music, the imagine a future that is inevitably condemned to the street and art to reclaim the genealogy of blackness. past. Collective en inglés_Maquetación 1 31/07/14 11:02 Página 8

Museo Nacional Centro Entry to the film and video program: de Arte Reina Sofía Free until full capacity is reached Curatorship and texts Sabatini Building Chema González Santa Isabel, 52 Front cover photo Nouvel Building Handsworth Songs , 1986. Ronda de Atocha Image courtesy of Black Audio (on the corner with plaza Film Collective and LUX, London del Emperador Carlos V) 28012 Madrid Tel: (34) 91 774 10 00 www.museoreinasofia.es

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