Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Handsworth Songs and Peripeteia introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton, John Akomfrah, and Lina Gopaul. 

John Quackenbush  0:00 

March 9, 2014. The Harvard Film Archive screened two films, Peripeteia and Handsworth Songs. This is the recording of the introduction and discussion that followed. Participating are filmmakers John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and HFA senior programmer, David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  0:20 

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this evening’s screening of two works by John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul. This is the middle evening of our three-evening tribute to their work. And I'm here to introduce the filmmakers but also say just a few words before that. First of all, on a very practical note, if you have anything on your person, as always, that makes noise or sheds light, any sort of electronic communication device, please make sure that it's muted and shuttered, darkened. Please refrain from illuminating it while the house lights are down for the enjoyment and concentration of your neighbors.

This program has been made possible thanks to our friends at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Lina Gopaul and John Akomfrah are sort of wrapping up a two-year residency there. And there have been a number of screenings of their work and talks about their work, falling under the rubric of “cinematic migrations,” including a two-day symposium that just wrapped up on Friday. And I want to thank Renée Green, who's the director of the Arts, Culture and Technology program, and also an artist, writer, and teacher, as well as Javier Anguera, for all their work in making possible this program, and in helping us bring John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul to the Harvard Film Archive. They're here somewhere. I just want to give them a round of applause. Oh, there they are!

[APPLAUSE]

I want to give them,

[APPLAUSE]

‘cause we're very grateful. We're very grateful.

For over 30 years now, John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul have amassed a large body of work that crosses any number of genres, as I mentioned yesterday: documentary, fiction, the film essay, poetic text, experimental cinema, and gallery and museum installation. All of this work rotates around, I think, explicating the links between the history of the African diaspora and the histories of modernity and modern culture on both sides of the Atlantic. The work of these two, I think, also has been fundamental in really helping us to rethink the possibilities, the formal possibilities, of not just the film essay, but of political cinema. And really helping us, also, think of the relationship between experimental film and non-fiction film. They were among the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, which formed at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1982 and relocated shortly thereafter to London. The BAFC, as it was known, existed until 1998, when the two formed their own company, Smoking Dogs along with David Lawson, who was also a member of the BAFC. Last night, we showed a couple of video pieces from the mid-1990s. Tomorrow night, we'll be showing a major and very recent work, The Stuart Hall Project, from 2013.

Tonight, we'll see two works, sort of alpha and omega, in some ways, chronologically speaking. We'll open with the short film Peripeteia, from 2012, which imagines the lives of two Africans who served as the models for Dürer drawings in early 16th-century Europe. The title, interestingly, Peripeteia, comes from Aristotle's Poetics, where it's meant to mean a “reversal of fortune.” But it also has etymological links to the word “peripatetic,” to wandering. And in that sense, harkens back to the idea of diaspora, of exile, of rootlessness, that runs throughout the work of Akomfrah and Gopaul, including Handsworth Songs, which we'll be seeing second, from 1986. This is the hour-long film essay that grew out of the riots in the Handsworth neighborhood of Birmingham in 1981 and 1985. And it was really the film that brought the world's attention to the Black Audio Film Collective. As a film essay, it's a very ambitious and very accomplished work, I have to say. It weaves together reportage, archival footage, interviews and a very eloquent text, to bring together a number of concerns, not just a portrait of the community of Handsworth, but also its history. And then zooming out to the history of immigration in 20th-century England, the shift from the Old Left to the New Left and the benefits and difficulties of that shift. And it's because of the ambition in this film and the thrilling elegance with which it pulls it off, that the film has become a kind of modern classic, and we're happy to share it with you this evening. So we'll watch Peripeteia, go straight into Handsworth Songs. And then I will have a conversation with producer Lina Gopaul and director John Akomfrah. But now here to say a few words of introduction, please welcome to the podium Lina Gopaul and John Akomfrah!

[APPLAUSE]

Lina Gopaul  5:59 

Sorry, not sure if this is going to work properly. But hello and welcome. Thank you very much for coming to this screening this evening. I think we just wanted to say a huge thank you to MIT, Renée Green, Javier Anguera, and the whole MIT team that brought us here for the last two years, ending in the symposium and in the screenings that you, you are here to, this evening. But just a huge thank you. We're going to be here afterwards. But I just want to see if John wants to say, just before, maybe, say a few words, we will be here after the screenings.

John Akomfrah  6:34 

Nothing else to add to that eloquent and thoroughly undeserved introduction, [LAUGHS] except to say thank you to David Pendleton for making these screenings possible. So, yeah, we'll come back and make time.

John Quackenbush  6:57 

And now the discussion and Q&A with John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and HFA senior programmer David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  7:06 

So we've just watched Peripeteia, from 2012, Handsworth Songs, from 1986, films from two different ends of your collaboration. And I thought that we might begin by talking a little bit about some context that might be useful for us, in terms of talking about the films, particularly about the Black Audio Film Collective and also the ways in which the two of you collaborate, or collaborated within BAFC, the ways you collaborate now, at Smoking Dogs, in terms of who does what kind of work? Typically, you’re credited as director, and you’re credited as producer. But part of my question has to do with the writing, who does the writing, and all kinds of other things.

John Akomfrah  8:05 

[LAUGHS] I mean, we were initially part of a larger group in Black Audio, in which we encouraged each other to pair up. Just so that each project, whether it's a screening program, or the education program, where we're taking films to prisons, schools, etc., the visual research, whatever it is, somebody would argue and stand for it. And it was our misfortune that we were paired with the production [LAUGHS]. So from the beginning, there was always, certainly in our minds, the idea that ideas would come from the broader group of eight, to us. And we will assess it, either for its financial viability, or the narrative possibilities, or whatever, you know. It just so happens, I think, that in Handsworth, we didn't really have a choice. I mean, I think, you know, there are two kinds of films, really, that we've made. Ones which are products of imperatives, and ones which are kind of compulsions, really, internally generated compulsions. Handsworth was an imperative act, because things were happening, and it felt a necessity to intervene. So there, we didn't really have a choice, we just got lumbered with it [LAUGHS].

Lina Gopaul  9:47 

And we started by, as John was saying, that we were a collective that were also engaged in various other practices at the time the disturbances, or riots, started. We also just started to try and just document this, you know, enormous, fast-moving events that were happening simultaneously, from Birmingham, then on to London, in the two different areas in London, in Tottenham and in Brixton. And there were lots and lots of events. The riots that happened in Birmingham, happened for about three or four weeks. So we went up, initially, to document, we felt compelled to document, whatever was happening there, with a view for coming back later on and then trying to assess the situation. We were never going to be a news gathering team, and to put something out straight away. But so we knew we needed to just collect things. You know, we were also documenting a number of events, too, at the time. Various other demonstrations, activities, around the Black experience, protests, and so forth. So that's where we were at, at the time. And as John was saying, we were also running filming programs, we were running training programs, and we had a whole educational side to us, which we forget to talk about now, don’t we, really? So when we came back, the group formed, having seen a lot of the material that we had gathered. We then started to talk about how we could make something that talked about more than just those disturbances. And then set about gathering up all the other information and material that we’d assembled in the last, in the three years prior to that, in our experimentation in form. Especially the pieces that we did, the pieces that you see in there, which are the tableau pieces, the colonial, sort of imaginary pieces. And we wanted to try and find a way of using the material to talk about a story that we felt started way beyond the, you know, 1985 September riots in Birmingham.

David Pendleton  12:09 

Right. Well, I think one of the things that's so striking about Handsworth Songs is precisely this sense of both being there, as it happens, or that the filmmakers were there, sort of, as it happened, but what we see is one step removed. That there is a certain reflection, that's been brought to bear on the material before it gets to us in the audience. For one thing, we don't see the footage that one typically expects to see of this kind of, urban unrest—of, you know, burnings, looting, and that kind of thing. But also, so much of the footage that we see often focuses on cameras filming activities in the streets, as well as all this stuff that’s not about the riots, that's actually is about the community, and about the broader... these layers that go back and forth.

John Akomfrah  12:55 

I mean, I always made a point, because it was the point that the events threw up. Which was the idea that the political crises, that the disturbance were, if you like, a kind of summation of, was both a political, economic, as well as a narrative one. You know, there was a certain way of documenting, offering narratives, either of Black and working class life, or of migrants and outsiders, strangers, in general. And they're a series of, for want of a better word, “progressive” film practice, socialist left filmmaking practices, that it felt as if we'd got to the end of. You know? Because the traditional way in which, you know, independent film would have dealt with something like this is to film the event, find a group of people who would say, “Actually, the problem is that the socioeconomic circumstances are such that young black people are forced to riot, or young people are forced to riot.” Now, Thatcherism and in a way, the beginning of the New Right, was to delegitimize that argument, was to decouple unrests from their causes. By saying, for instance, right at the beginning, you know, you’d see a TV program and there would be a left-wing politician, or journalist, or activist, who would say, “Ah, but these people, you see, the thing you got to understand, these people are rioting because they’re poor, and they’re Black,” etc. etc. And the Thatcherite would say, “Ah hah! But you see, there's lots of other places where people are poor, and they’re not rioting.” You know? And of course, the unspoken, the very large pink elephant in the room was the question of race. But no one was pointing to that, you know? And so it seemed to us then, that we’d reached an end of that style, that approach to narrating a political event, and something else needed to be called upon, other strategies needed to be called upon, without necessarily rejecting those earlier ones.

David Pendleton  15:30

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  15:32

So Handsworth became this compendium encyclopedia of different kinds of approaches. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  15:36

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  15:36

To making films about the migrant subject, in particular.

David Pendleton 15:44 

I mean, there's a dimension of the film that Kodwo Eshun, actually, from the Otolith Group, points out, that he really called my attention to, that may be lost on people who haven't seen as much of the sort of, the Great British 30s and wartime documentary tradition that involves Flaherty, but also Grierson, and Humphrey Jennings. And the relationship between that style of making documentaries and a class-based leftist politics. And it seems like that tradition is adduced here, is mentioned very, very affectionately.

John Akomfrah  16:24

Absolutely. Absolutely.

David Pendleton  16:25

And yet, at the same way that film is looking at the ways in which race then becomes this way to drive a wedge into class solidarity.

John Akomfrah  16:32 

Well, I mean, the thing was, observational documentary had had a radical impact on the ways in which subjects, in particular working class, and subaltern, or Black, migrant subjects were framed, to that point. To the point where it had almost pushed aside these slightly older traditions of constructed cinema.

David Pendleton  16:58

Right.

John Akomfrah  16:59

You know, to the point where I think, by the time we started Handsworth, it was a pejorative, an insult, to say that you make constructive films, or constructed films. And we definitely wanted to return to that tradition. I mean, so this is very much an anti-ethnographic project.

David Pendleton  17:18

Right.

John Akomfrah  17:19

You know, it was about trying to return to some of the other rules by which the question of narrative was foregrounded. Your attention is drawn, as it is in Humphrey Jennings, to the question of construction.

David Pendleton  17:33

Right.

John Akomfrah  17:34

Because there was something else to say, other than what was happening in front of the camera.

David Pendleton  17:37

Right.

John Akomfrah  17:38

And sometimes there's nothing happening in front of the camera. [LAUGHS] You know, the most incredible thing that I learned, over the years, going into so-called conflict zones, is that actually, most of the things that are structuring those events are absent. You don't see them. You don’t see class. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  17:59

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  18:00

Do you know what I mean? You don't see the New Right. You don't see... Most things that over-determine events are unseen. And so, how does one draw it out? Other than talking to people? How do you draw out the unseen?

David Pendleton  18:17 

And still, at the same time, acknowledge that there is an unseen.

John Akomfrah  18:20

Yes.

David Pendleton  18:21

Because that's also the danger. I think, of a lot of witnessing documentary, observational documentary, is the idea that what you're seeing is what happened, it's everything that happened, or it’s the important that happened. When in fact, as you say, a lot of times these things are just the surface effects of things that go very deep, that can't really be represented or witnessed.

Lina Gopaul  18:41 

I mean, we said to ourselves, at that point, when we made Handsworth Songs, we weren't financed by anybody. This would be one of our few times, that we would be able to, in effect, economics aside, say what we wanted to say, without any kind of worry, or anxiety about what we could not say, and I mean, we just decided that we would put all our concerns... mix as many formats as we wanted. You know, we'd seen Flaherty, we'd seen Grierson films. And we really wanted to do our own experimentations, really, for ourselves. And we wanted to evoke some of those cinematic practices. And as we used to say, you know, dare to fail, too. You know, we used to talk about creating those spaces, those moments, where we could develop, develop storytelling in a sense. So, not having those financial constraints, i.e., broadcast, or a commissioning editor around you, or somebody telling you what you could or could not say, and what the format and style and structure should be, was really quite liberating, even though we hadn't realized it completely at the time. You know, because we were trying desperately hard to raise finances for this film. And the more we went round trying to do that, and to talk about the mixed formats, the mixed elements we wanted to bring into the film, I'm almost convinced people thought we were absolutely crazy, barking mad, probably, to.

John Akomfrah  20:25 

Well, they did. I mean they continue to think [LAUGHS]. In fact, you know, the shocking thing for us, is that Handsworth Songs became, quote, unquote, a classic. Because for the first decade, we were convinced it was an unremitting failure, for a whole number of people. And it took a while to understand why that might be the case. And one of the sort of flashpoints was an argument between us and Salman Rushdie about the value of the film. He just said, “Look, this doesn't work.” And, the claims he was making for a cinema that would work took you into the very fields that we were trying to get out of. He was saying, “Look, why don’t you just tell stories about these lives, you keep saying they’re these ghosts. You know, why don’t you just unearth the ghosts and just tell us the stories.” And it seemed almost impossible to get him to understand that in a way, by the time something like this gets done, you've sort of almost lost the battle, the political battle of ideas. Most people in England, I think, by the time the film came out, a year after the disturbances, were convinced that young urban kids were on the streets because they were criminals. I mean, they were that too! We weren’t saying they weren’t. They were that too, but it seemed to us that present in these flashpoints were all sorts of other stories, you know? Like, I would say to people, "Listen, you just got to understand this very simple fact. Nobody saves up for five years, whether they're in India, or Cairo, or Accra, gets the money together, moves to England, and when they get there, say to themselves, 'One day I'm gonna have kids, and they're going to be criminals, and they're going to cause trouble.'" You know?

David Pendleton  22:29

Sure.

John Akomfrah  22:29

I mean, the impulse for migration is an utopian one. So, when you find yourself in these dystopian scenarios, something's gone wrong. And the problem is between the passage, in the passage from the utopian premise to the dystopian present. And so the question of memory was an imperative to return to.

David Pendleton  22:54

Right.

John Akomfrah  22:54

Because it's the only way by which you can access exactly what the breakdown between that contract had been, the contract between citizen and state. And there clearly was a breakdown, because people don't take to the streets to riot unless there'd been that breakdown.

David Pendleton  23:09 

Right, right. Well, that's the whole racist rhetoric around riot, actually, is that these people need only the slight, the flimsiest of excuses. That the excuse is really, not the reason why the...

John Akomfrah  23:21 

And, but it was also, you know, there was a kind of standard and understandable left rhetoric, which said, “Let's not talk about it as race riots”, i.e., let's not talk about it as events which were principally led, orchestrated, choreographed by young kids of African, Caribbean, Asian and African descent. Because if you did that, you were playing into the hands of the enemy. But there was no way around that.

David Pendleton  23:53

Right.

John Akomfrah  23:53

Because by the time the essay was ready, it was clear to us—just thinking ahead in Benjaminian style that—so okay, by the time this thing comes out, everybody's gonna think it's about young Black kids. [LAUGHS] So, anything else would be an evasion. You know? It was worth just confronting that question. You know, just to say to yourself, okay, what if we just said, 'yeah, okay. It is about race.' You know, let's unpack this raciological scene and see what else is inside it. Other than crime, which is present. There's no question about that, people died, you know. So, the ethical drama and dilemma is not to be an apologist for events which are in themselves appalling. But to see whether a narrative might be provided, or set of narratives could be provided, in which they make sense! So that you're not left with this slightly pathological picture of a bunch of crazy young kids running around, with no rhyme or reason for doing what they were doing. That seemed to me to be the categorical imperative that weighed heavily. I don't know why I said that but [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  25:18

No, no, no! That's, no, that's all really interesting! And you said at least two things that I want to come back to. And then we will open it up shortly, ’cause I'm sure that people have a lot of questions. But let me just follow up with what you both said. Well, first of all, you referred to the film itself as an essay, I think, just now. Which made me want to ask if you can say a little bit about the chicken and egg, like, which comes first, the soundtrack, the text, the image track? Or is it a matter of sort of going back and forth? You know, is there a script that then you sort of figure out how do we lay images on top of this? Or do you start with the images and say, this is where this little bit of writing should go?

John Akomfrah  26:02 

Well, all at the same time. I mean, clearly, quite a lot of the images, the impulse to gather and collect came first. Clearly. And during the course of gathering, an interview suggests something, and so you think, we'll follow that up. But I mean, I think what's also important is that, we don't speak enough about this, is that Black Audio was a research unit. And so a lot of stuff in Handsworth Songs had been shot for different kinds of projects. Because we were preoccupied with this question of the surplus underclass. It seemed to us that something would, I mean, we didn't see this whole neo-liberal, quote, unquote, thing coming. All we saw was something very clear, which was, between ’49 and ’69, a buoyant imperial power, which needed labor, had got all these people from different parts of the world to come to help rebuild its base. But by ’69, it was clear that these people weren't needed anymore. This place is shutting down. It's very rapidly heading to third world power status. And so it was clear that there would be generations of post-migrant kids, who would clearly not have a role in that society. So there was a political crisis, not simply of their identity, but of their use value. Like, I mean, what was going to happen to all these kids? So this was one of the questions we were preoccupied with. And it just so happens that we start this research between the two convulsions, you know.

David Pendleton  28:06 

Between the ’81 riots and the ’85 riots?

John Akomfrah  28:10 

’Cause we start as a collective, as an outfit, in ’82.

David Pendleton  28:14

Right.

John Akomfrah  28:14

So by ’85, we had a number of ideas about where this was going. And one of the places you felt this was going was to, you know, do the standard thing, which is, you know, in the absence of any political vision about what to do with your [UNKNOWN] subjects, you blame them. You say they're lazy, or they're too prone to criminality, or they wouldn't accept lower wages, or whatever. You know, anything that sort of says, well, actually, the political responsibility does not lie with us, it lies with them. And it was clear, reading the writings of the Stuart Halls, and a number of the people on the New Old Left, the Old New Left, rather, that something was coming and that race would be very important in the inaugurating of this, from the ’70s onwards. So Handsworth Songs was informed by some of these ideas, as well, coming out of Thatcherism, if you like.

David Pendleton  29:30

Sure.

John Akomfrah  29:31

And what Thatcherism would narratively mean, which was to deny a past, to say that there isn't a past. There's just a kind of a grim present, and the grim present is the result of laziness, criminality, you know, of the unclubbables.

David Pendleton  29:47

Right.

John Akomfrah  29:47

You had to then politically, ethically, return to the question of memory, because it's the only way in which you can couple the past with the present.

David Pendleton  29:55

Right.

John Akomfrah  29:56

You know, in order for people to understand just how we got to where we are. And that's why it was almost impossible to make it as a straightforward documentary or current affairs documentary, ‘cause people would say to you, “Oh, yeah, we'll give you money. What are you going to say? You know, do you have any great stuff of Black kids, sort of throwing stones at the police, or?” And we said, “No, we don't. We didn't shoot those things!” [LAUGHS] You know, it's not about that for us. And the absence of that drama immediately put them off. "Sorry!" [LAUGHS] Anyway, that’s...

Lina Gopaul  30:30 

Deliberate part on our part, really. We didn't actually do that kind of film. So, we were looking at the media, looking at the people, looking at the, you know, we deliberately said we weren’t going to do this.

John Akomfrah  30:41 

Because if you film someone, I mean, our material was requested by the police because they wanted to know whether we had people throwing stones, so they can go and arrest them. I mean, where you pointed a camera was not just in a Godardian way, but in a very real sense, a political act.

David Pendleton  31:02

Sure.

John Akomfrah  31:03

Because it had consequences. And we knew that.

David Pendleton  31:05

Right, right.

Lina Gopaul  31:06 

So we hid our material. We actually had to, because we were raided by the police. I mean, it’s incredible stories, that were... I mean, they were very, very serious times.

David Pendleton  31:15

Yeah.

Lina Gopaul  31:16

[LAUGHING] Very, very serious times. And we were followed by them, our workshop was raided, they didn't believe that we didn't have that kind of material. I mean, we actually hid our film stock and shot material. They were quite heavy times, when you look back through that. But we did it as a matter of course, we knew they were coming for us, so...

David Pendleton  31:37

Right.

Lina Gopaul  31:38 

It was interesting times.

David Pendleton  31:40

No doubt. That comes through in the film.

Lina Gopaul  31:42

[INAUDIBLE] that again.

David Pendleton  31:43 

Is there anybody in the audience who is eager to ask a question? I have tons more questions but I want to make this a more open process. There's a woman, if you'll just wait while we bring a mic down to you, it's coming to your right.

Audience  32:02 

That was really great. My name is Julia and I just graduated from Tufts University. And so I've been learned on different theorists. Like specifically, I'm thinking about Natasha Tinsley, who wrote an essay, “Queer Atlantic, Black Atlantic,” in which she talks about all different ideas about history being unwritten, and different narratives being left out and how the past lives that have been lost can’t necessarily be reclaimed. But in thinking about, especially, I don't remember exactly how you say the name of the first movie that we watched. But in thinking about that, and looking at how the history of these specific people that were painted, has been lost to the winds of history. How do we understand, this new kind of– I mean, creating this new document that is that film, and kind of reclaiming their lives at that point? And I guess I also want, maybe, to think about the archive there, and what it means to– Maybe is it like a new idea, or a new form of archive, perhaps?

John Akomfrah  33:24 

Thank you. That's all really interesting. I mean, and the recurring obsessions in everything that we do. I think the point of diaspora, especially in its European variant, is that it's a narrative of disappearance. We tried for 25 years to make something on the history of Africans in Europe. And again, and again, and again, you come to the same impasse. Find a young boy, baptized in a church. He—or she, sometimes—might even have a life for about 10 years. You could find them, you know, given to this person or... And then it's almost like they live in a pre-Copernican universe. They'll go to the edge of the earth and then they’ll just fall off. So in fact, the question of diaspora for us, and interestingly this is something we were discussing this week, is not about bodies, but about narratives. Yeah? It's not bodies that embody a past, they sometimes literally don't exist. And so there's that ethical conundrum. How does one invoke that past, or at least alert people to the presence of that past, via an invocation? What form should that invocation take, etc. etc.? I don't have an answer. And we don't have an answer to this. It differs project by project. You know what I mean? So with Peripeteia, the point wasn't really to reclaim, but to alert us, and you, by implication, to the possibility that these figures exist–ted. They came up for air once and then they literally and metaphorically died. These are the possible spaces they could have lived, this is the possible relationship between the known archive, photographic, paintings, and the unknown. And that these three, or four, circulate and converge, collide, to create this narrative. It's one possible scenario. And so I don't want to deify it with the, with the gravitas of a reclaiming. That's far too big for what we're trying to do. Ours is really quite simple and much more, not simple, but modest. It's, it's about saying, how about this as a possibility, just to see whether it interests you, you know? Reclaiming is something slightly more educated folk do. [LAUGHS] Historians! [LAUGHS]

Lina Gopaul  36:42 

I mean, just to get back to that reclaiming. In some stories, it's almost an impossibility to do as you're suggesting. As John was saying, that those histories are marked with the appearance and disappearance. And they really are, sometimes, absolute disappearances. So what we're trying to do, in the face of that, having faced that for 25 years, and thinking about this with this question for 25 years, was, well, how about if we give you one fictional possibility? What about that? And there's a whole series of them for us, really, that we're going to keep working on. Because I think this is an obsession of ours that we've had for more than 25 years from probably earlier on when Black Audio first formed, and our first ideas about that appearance and disappearance. And this is how, to a certain extent, we started with that research process, and that, you know, initially gathering material, and gathering material, and always coming up with these complete and absolute disappearances and we'll stop. We’ll think, well, okay, now what do we do? You know? So it really is just us trying to imagine one fictional possibility.

John Akomfrah  38:05 

It's to do with something that a figure I made a film with, who became a friend, the historian Carlo Ginzburg, once said to me, he said, “Historical memory and the obligations that we have in pursuing historical research, is part of our ethical obligation to the dead.” You know. We are obliged to speak of the dead because in wrestling with the dead, we understand something. So we're not sufficiently removed from it to suggest a reclaiming, which would imply that we’re slightly more whole and fixed than Ginzburg's dictum.

David Pendleton  39:02 

Are there other questions in the audience, that people are ready to ask right now? Because otherwise... Yes, there's a woman here, and then a person in the back.

Audience  39:13 

Thank you. Just a short observation. Thank you so much for your work. When you talk about the erasure of the past, and Thatcherism, what we heard from her in the film so powerfully is that she is trying, that she's invested in narrating, a kind of pure, you know, “And did those feet in ancient,” whatever that thing is. A pure past that pretends that Black people weren't a part of it. And what's so kind of powerful is the way in which Black people are also invested in that kind of English past before they get to England, if they never get to England, and so it’s just an observation.

Lina Gopaul  40:02 

I mean, we all, we sort of forget, especially in England, somehow. We say it in, Stuart Hall says this, that you’ll probably see tomorrow. That there's this incredible forgetfulness that the colonies had existed. The Caribbean or the West Indies, as it was known then, India, Africa, in terms of Britain, for two, three-hundred, four-hundred years. This is a history, that has been a very, very long history in the making.

David Pendleton  40:30

Right.

Lina Gopaul  40:31

You know? And a lot of people who came over in the 50s and early 60s were British, you know? Were still British, then, you know. It's kind of post-, what, ’62, that when Jamaica, in terms of the West Indies, has her independence. Ghana in ’57. We're talking about people who were of British descent, and, well, British passports, you know, and British subjects…

David Pendelton  40:57

Right.

Lina Gopaul  40:57

...coming over to England. Not foreigners.

John Akomfrah  41:00 

So she's basically... You’re right.

Lina Gopaul  41:03

Yeah.

John Akomfrah  41:03

Part of the New Right project was to sever...

Lina Gopaul  41:07

Erase that, yeah.

John Akomfrah  41:08

..those links. And I think part of it was necessary. Part of it was just what Gilroy calls the “post-colonial melancholia,” of just coming to terms with a shrink. [LAUGHS] You were once a huge industrial maritime power and now you're not. And so, you know, that history weighs heavily on the brain of the living and part of the way in which you release that weight is to imagine that your role is slightly less global than it was. Because you can't quite put together this global preeminence with your new status. And so you then say, “Well, actually, that's because that didn't exist.” [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  41:59 

Yeah, but the other aspect of erasing Blackness, or people of color, from that narrative, is what you said before. Which is to say, well, this is a new problem, and that's because, and they brought it with them. As opposed to it being a structural problem that actually is what, because of what we were doing.

John Akomrah  42:14 

Absolutely.

Lina Gopaul  42:15

It’s a pathology. Yes.

David Pendleton  42:19 

Yes, yes. There's somebody in the... a hand up in the back row.

Audience  42:24 

Thank you very much. I've really admired Handsworth Songs for several years. And it's really lovely to see it again. And to hear you talk about it. In 2011, following the riots in London and elsewhere in the UK, I revisited the film because it seemed to be so unbelievably pertinent still. So I was wondering, and then this week, you have a trial opening about the Broadwater Farm riot. And you think, well, so much of this stuff is really still with us. So I was just wondering whether you might talk about what you feel has changed. I’m thinking about media coverage, I’m thinking about the kind of discourses that go on. We've touched on the narrative that suggests that somehow there are no larger causes, no structural causes, which was exactly again, the same rhetoric in 2011. This phrase, “criminality, pure and simple,” that we heard repeated by many, many politicians. So, so much seems to be the same, but there are big differences. So I'm just curious about that perspective.

John Akomfrah   43:44 

No, I mean, thank you. I’d agree pretty much with everything you said there. A lot’s changed. My son, and my nieces and nephews who I speak to all the time, I can just sense that the question of race hasn't been as over-determinant in their lives as it was in ours. You know? And those are qualitative shifts. That improves the quality of their life. The fact that they're not so obsessed as we were with our place in the culture. It’s the kind of thing my lad takes for granted. I’m British and that’s it. You know, we had to struggle for that, we had to fight for the hyphen, Black-British, the hyphen in those two words, to become legitimate, you know.

So in effect, what I'm saying is that there are some discontinuities. But there are also some continuities of narratives in particular. And so it's not entirely surprising to me, for instance, that Cameron and his ilk would say, oh, I mean, really stupid things like, “Multiculturalism has not worked.” Dude, did you or your party ever put anything in place called multiculturalism? What the hell are you talking about? [LAUGHS] You know. And that seems to hark back to that old Thatcherite, New Right ideal, which is to sever, and make people responsible for their plight. See, I don't see any problem at all between multiculturalism and something called “integration.” Seems to me that that's the conditions of existence of multiculturalism, is that people are saying, “We want to be here.” And by saying you want to be here, you're saying you want to be part of the society. If you’re saying you want to be part of the society, then you want to be integrated into that society. Nobody wants to sit on the edge of any society. But people want to do it on a basis that has some value for what they’ve brought with them. They don’t want to let go of everything that they’ve brought with them. And what you see more and more, is a kind of confidence in asserting the right, the multicultural right, to have elements of, quote, unquote, “their culture,” part of the arrangement. And that's different. Now that's partly what's creating quite a lot of problems at the moment in our society. But I think it's right, that it takes place, that the discussion takes place on that basis. You know? I think it’s right, that we discuss whether or not a young Muslim girl can wear hijab to school. If she demands it. I think it's right that we discuss it, and not just rule it out as somehow a not British thing to do because what we're discussing is what will be Britain in the present. So things have changed, some things are pretty much the same. [LAUGHS] And there are new questions being raised all the time.

David Pendleton  47:41 

Well, this brings me back to something I wanted to ask about Peripeteia, in terms of having the right, or feeling confident to assert a certain ownership of a certain canon, let's say, of Western culture. I'm thinking about you bringing in things like the song in Peripeteia, for instance.

John Akomfrah  48:04

Yes.

David Pendleton  48:05

Or even, in a way, The Nine Muses, the feature-length film that you were doing around the same time, which brings in the structure of the Odyssey. In other words, that sort of claiming these figures from the Western canon, whether it's the German art song, or whether it's Homer, as saying, you know, I'm not just using this as examples of some sort of alien culture, but rather, this is a culture that is now mine.

John Akomfrah  48:29 

No, I mean, people ask me all the time, and I'm always sort of mystified when it comes up, you know? They say, “Oh, why are you using that John McCormack?”, for instance, in Peripeteia. And the assumption is that I'm part of something called a “Black figure,” who was formed almost pristine and pure, without any connection with anything. [LAUGHS] You know. Whereas actually, the Blackness in question “germinates,” quote, unquote, in dialogue with everything around me. Like, you know, what do you mean, "Don't use Homer"? I fucking read it at school, just like everybody else. [LAUGHING] You know what I mean? You know, why can’t I use John McCormack? So part of the battle is to just widen, especially in Europe, the borders of Blackness. You know, so that it's not seen as…

Lina Gopaul  49:33

The perceived borders, isn't it?

John Akomfrah  49:35

Yes.

Lina Gopaul  49:36

It’s the perceived, all the time, that we're struggling against, you know.

John Akomfrah  49:39 

So it doesn't come across as something self-contained, and holy, and exclusive unto itself. It’s like, no! I mean, we grew up in the same culture, right?

David Pendleton  49:51

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  49:52

Why would we be these alien forms that seem to have been beamed in from planet Black? Where’s that? [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  50:00 

Right. Or that there might be a relationship that you might have with certain parts, or certain figures within Western cultural history...

John Akomfrah  50:07

Yes.

David Pendleton  50:07

...that are not always contestatory ones, or….

John Akomfrah  50:10 

Yeah. Well, you know, it just seemed to me that if you were, you know, for instance, with the Homeric epic. To suggest that the Homeric epic might have resonance for discussing diaspora or migration isn't to then completely give up on the idea that migration happens—for instance—to England from the global south. No one's saying that! All you're saying is that there's some elective affinity between those epics and the political epic of migration. And the same with John McCormack singing, “Come, My Beloved.” I mean, it's not that there isn't a Black voice [LAUGHS] that could sing something else. I mean, we could have found something. I happen to like the McCormack recording from 1920, which we used in the film, very much. But it just suggests some affinity with that condition that I just think is worth pointing out, you know. I’m not trying to, and certainly we never talk in those terms, you know, let's go and recolonize some dead, European, white figure. Or, that's not the aim! The aim is not to, any more than it is to pull them down.

David Pendleton  51:42

Right.

John Akomfrah  51:42

It’s to find things of value, and things of overlap, and to follow the elective affinities, really, that are potential in that dialogue, you know?

David Pendleton  51:56 

Well, it's interesting, then, to think about the figure of Watt in Handsworth Songs who is on the one hand, seen as the father of the sweatshop, if you will. But at the same time, as a sort of technological innovator, who also created jobs. I mean, maybe I'm misreading, but it’s seems like there's this real ambivalence towards the figure of Watt.

John Akomfrah  52:20 

Indeed, but the guy in– Sorry, Lina! [LAUGHS] There's a guy in Handsworth Songs who I've followed. When we found him again, I said to Lina, “Look, he's back!” You know. He's the guy in the train, in the museum. From the Caribbean. I think he's from Saint Vincent or Antiga, I can never quite work out. And he says something in Handsworth Songs that's kind of been really important to us. He says, “England is so rich with the culture, that there's nothing the living can do. We can elevate ourselves learning from the dead.” This is a bus conductor. Yeah? He's a working class sage, who's already arrived at a certain understanding of the relationship between Black identity and the European canon. Because he's saying there is something elevating about stressing your connection with things. You know, there is a richness. And that richness is one that you feel will benefit you, so you're going to take from it. It's not about losing yourself, because you take from it. It's suggesting that that dialogue between you and that past can be an enriching one. And I've always learned from that, you know. He comes up again in The Nine Muses and he's one of the figures who pointed us to the Homeric epic, where he says, you know, “I have now arrived.” He's the figure, you know, you probably wouldn’t recognize him. But if you've seen The Nine Muses, there's a woman with a baby and you hear a kind of non-diegetic voice. And the camera pans, and it finds this man speaking about being an immigrant and what he has to do. And he says, “Now that I'm in this strange place, I've decided that what I need to do is to survive. And to survive, I need to have this, and I need to have that. And one of the ways in which we're going to survive is to just put our head down and do what we need to do.” You know? I thought, wow! Actually, this is Homeric. [LAUGHS] I mean, he's almost an archetype. You know?

David Pendleton  54:43 

Did you record him saying that when you were working on Nine Muses, or is this going back to your own archive?

John Akomfrah  54:48

No, no, there was a filmmaker.

Lina Gopaul  54:57

[INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHS]

John Akomfrah  54:59 

There was a filmmaker called Philip Donnellan, one of the most brilliant figures who worked in British television in the 50s and 60s. Made a series of films in Birmingham that we draw on a lot in Handsworth Songs and in Nine Muses, because they're both based around Birmingham. And Philip Donnellan returned to this guy several times. So you'd see him in one film, in The Colony. Most of the stuff from Handsworth are from his film, The Colony, from ’64. But he also comes up in another film that Philip Donnellan produced, called Home for Heroes, from ’65. And in a way, the two films provided us with this figure. They delivered this man who was alongside another figure in Nine Muses. They’re the two who have been kind of guiding angels really, for us. The guy in Nine Muses, again, about two-thirds of the film, there’s a man, he's Jamaican, and he's obviously a bad boy. You know? He's got a kind of gash on his face. Some sort of cut, as a result of a fight. He's tried to grow a beard to cover it, but it's too, even in black and white, Panchromatic stock, you can see it. And he says– He'd clearly been asked, but you don't hear the question. So I think he's been asked something like, “Why have you come here? And what, what did you come with?” He says, you know, “I love you. Love. I love you. But the majority of you don't love we.” And the bit that always kills me is when he says, you know, “We came here with pure heart...[LAUGHS]...with the love that you couldn't understand if you tried to.” And between these two positions—between the sage from the museum, who says “We can elevate ourselves, learning from the dead.”—and this man, who says, “We came with love.” Literally, we tried to fashion a practiceinformed by these two figures. So all the raidings of Homer are always with these two sitting, certainly on my shoulder saying, “Don't go that far! [LAUGHS] You're letting us down if you go that,” you know what I mean?

David Pendleton  57:51

Yes.

John Akomfrah  57:51

They've been absolutely instrumental in the choices that we make. ’Cause I want to validate the profoundity of what they were trying to get across, you know. Which is a certain kind of colonial humanity, which gets lost. I mean, we stopped speaking like that. You know what I mean? Like my generation never talk about loving England.

David Pendleton  58:14

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  58:15

England, are you kidding! [LAUGHS] Most the time, we were contesting it. So I've tried to remember that, as I said, that utopian premise that informs the making of Black Birmingham. People wanted to be somewhere because they thought it would be better! That's why they came.

David Pendleton  58:33

Right, right, right.

John Akomfrah  58:35

You know? And they wanted to be there because they wanted to be with white people. Because they thought it would be good! I mean, you know, they’re not...

Lina Gopaul  58:43 

The mother country. I mean, this is a generational thing. And sort of grew up with all our parents coming from that, those ideas, and it was a real divide for us, wasn't it? This sort of overbearing sort of embrace that they had. Coming to the mother country. Coming to do something, to help, to be of service, with completely, as he says, open hearts.

David Pendleton  59:13

Right.

Lina Gopaul  59:14

You know, with love, thinking that they would be embraced in this, in this way, too. And the realization that that didn't quite happen, is something that's been with us all the time, really, ’cause we were living this. On the one side, their hopes and aspirations, and their hopes and aspirations for themselves, their families and ourselves. And that second generation that Handsworth Songs is-

John Akomfrah  59:40

[LAUGHS] Didn’t believe. Didn’t love quite so much.

Lina Gopaul  59:43

Yes.

David Pendleton  59:44 

You can see that, I think, even in Peripeteia, also. Because on the one hand, we have the photographic archive, that reminds us that the people that we see on screen, Katharina and the man, come from a different place. And the whole Peripeteia, there was presumably some moment of violence that brought them to this other place. But at the same time, there's the John McCormack song, or there's the Dürer drawing, which is, in a way, you’re saying, but well this is tradition that they came into. And for better or for worse, they're here now, and at least they can claim some of the...

John Akomfrah  1:00:17

Yes. Yes.

David Pendleton  1:00:18

We won't forget what happened. But at the same time, we will claim some of the high points of...

John Akomfrah  1:00:24

It's about also trying to make what would traditionally be discounted, be of value in a new setting. I mean, trying to get those photographs was a nightmare. The Royal African Museum in Belgium invited me and Lina and David to come and have a look at their stuff. And they kept looking for some anti-position. And like, no, no, no! Take ‘em. [LAUGHS] Give ’em to us. Take ’em. They couldn't believe it. So when we asked for it, it took forever, ’cause no one there could believe that there's anything to say with those images, that they could circulate in any other way, except either with us damning them.

David Pendleton  1:01:17

I see.

John Akomfrah  1:01:17

Yeah? Or calling into question their origin. And the fact of the matter is, how they came into being is now, yes, important for some, but not for the project that we're involved with.

David Pendleton  1:01:32

Right. Right.

John Akomfrah  1:01:32

You know, really, I’m not that interested...

David Pendleton  1:01:36

Right.

John Akomfrah  1:01:36

...in the fact that they're colonial images. Because the assumption behind the term “colonial images” is that there is a position from which to read them. And I think we just need to step back a bit and see whether these things can circulate slightly more.

David Pendleton  1:01:54 

Well, I guess there's an irony, which is that these images are the product of a colonial gaze, but at the same time, to us now, they still provide a window into a past that we otherwise don't have.

John Akomfrah  1:02:06 

I mean, look at those guys! Those four standing, that look! Incredible. It's an amazing look. But it's a look that now, for a modern, post-colonial audience, suggests something else. A kind of revenge of history. Because their look is now an inquiring one to us. Like, what are you looking at? [LAUGHS] What do you want? You know? And to get images from our past to circulate that, seems to me to be another way of coming at this language of restitution. Everybody wants an Elgin Marble to be returned, but nobody wants this stuff. These are pariah images. [LAUGHS] They’re stuck in some museum who don't want to show them because they're ashamed of them.

David Pendleton  1:03:12

Right.

John Akomfrah  1:03:13

And they can't stay there forever. They can't stay in that outlaw space forever. So we need to know what to do with them. Other than condemn them. [LAUGHS] They exist.

David Pendleton  1:03:26

Right.

John Akomfrah  1:03:27 

The question is, what could be the new ontology? If we stop accusing them of shaming us, and humbling us, you know. What else could they do? Other than shame or humble us, you know? And that was one of the important motivations behind Peripeteia, to just get things to talk again to each other. Get them to converse and see whether you could get anything more out of them.

Lina Gopaul  1:04:00 

No, they’re to be our characters. They’re coming into our film, they're gonna play a role. They're gonna have a say. That's effectively, I suppose, also, where we started about taking slides too. But we both know that none of this is going..

John Akomfrah  1:04:15 

[LAUGHING] That’s opening a whole new [INAUDIBLE]

Lina Gopaul  1:04:21 

It’s just, you know, we’re giving them a voice, and it's also up to you as to what they're saying to you. They’re making comments. We want to give them a form. And a voice [INAUDIBLE]. But anyway, I think [INAUDIBLE]

David Pendleton  1:04:35 

Are there other questions in the audience? One or two final questions, perhaps? If not, I'm gonna, I have one more question.

John Akomfrah  1:04:44

David! [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  1:44:45

Oh, I’m sorry [INAUDIBLE]

John Akomfrah  1:04:47 

[LAUGHING] No, no, no. Go ahead, go ahead.

David Pendleton  1:04:48 

I was just curious, because you said that Handsworth Songs was not a success when it was brand-new, but I remember seeing it in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. So there must have at least maybe a kind of an academic, or a film festival circuit that it was successful on. And maybe later it was successful with other people. But that leaves me with the question: who were you thinking of as the audience for the film, initially? And did it take a while for those people to see it? Or how did the film travel?

John Akomfrah  1:05:14 

For a certain kind of Black activist, writer, it wasn't a success. And I mean, everywhere else it was. But for that figure, because partly what was being negotiated was the space of autonomy for film practice. People just assumed that our rollout to that point was to service what they had to say, you know? We want to say the Black community is this, you film it and put it on the screen. You know.

David Pendleton  1:05:46

Right. Right.

John Akomfrah  1:05:49

A lot of those figures simply couldn't accept that there was an autonomy to that practice, which didn’t involve them. I think, to be honest, there was also a sort of powerful “realist,” quote, unquote, lobby, inside our world, inside the left, that we operated in, the independent film scene, which was disturbed by this overt manipulating [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  1:06:21

Right, right.

John Akomfrah  1:06:22 

...of genres and voices.

David Pendleton  1:06:24

There's a constructivist aspect, back to the film. And that just–

John Akomfah  1:06:27

Yes. It just disturbed.

David Pendleton  1:06:28

And that's one of the things that Rushdie seems to have been–

John Akomfrah  1:06:32

Yes, exactly. That constructivist intent seemed, to quite a lot of those people to be, willful at best.

David Pendleton  1:06:43

Right.

John Akomfrah  1:06:43

And almost certainly scandalous. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  1:06:45 

Right. And I think some people on the left sort of, there's almost a sort of Stalinist view, that this is elitists going over the heads of the masses. And therefore it's of no use.

John Akomfrah  1:06:58 

Yeah. But that accusation, I mean, the way in which cultural voices were policed, and the way in which we allowed ourselves to be policed, in the very early 80s, suggested that, to people outside of the group, that either Handsworth Songs was going to confirm the success of that policing, or break it. And we decided we were not going to go along with it any longer. You know, it's like, you’d be part of a Black left group, and they would say, “Okay, who can film?” You know. “Alright, well, you know, come on Thursday, just stand in a corner. And when we make the speeches, you just record it, and then we'll...,” you know, and the Black miner’s support, period. This is at the time of the miner’s strike. That’s all you kind of did, just find the camera, shoot, get the veracity of the voice right, the volume, the tone, and quite a lot of people on the left, were very happy for that to be the role [LAUGHS] of filmmakers and artists. You know, just “documenting,” quote, unquote, the real struggle. The idea that you might want to do something else other than that seemed heretical, and we knew we had to confront it at that point. So Handsworth was the occasion to effect this epistemic rupture. You know. I'm glad we did it, because everything came out in the open. [ LAUGHS] And for a decade we dealt with it.

David Pendleton  1:08:26 

Right. Well, that also might be the perfect point to stop, in preparation for The Stuart Hall Project tomorrow, because there's a way in which the Stuart Hall's work, in a way, provided an important context, an ally, a precursor, for making this argument about what images could do, other than just document.

John Akomfrah  1:08:47 

A lot of the confidence for, for what we were about to do came from our engagement with him. As you can see, he was at the end of Handsworth because he was there. He came to see it, we invited him, he didn’t know us from Adam. But I'll tell you all this tomorrow. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  1:09:02

Yes, that’s for tomorrow. My thanks to all of you for staying so patiently and for your questions. Please come back tomorrow. And my thanks to Lina and to John!

[APPLAUSE]

©Harvard Film Archive

The Handsworth area of Birmingham has historically been a gritty working-class neighborhood, housing workers for nearby factories and foundries. By the 1980s, it was home to large populations of Caribbean and Sikh immigrants, and was the site of rioting in 1981 and 1985. In Akomfrah’s achingly poetic first film, he both documents the riots and their immediate aftermath but also recalls the everyday lives of longtime residents. How did the bright hopes of those who arrived in the 1950s give way to the feelings of rage or hopelessness expressed in the rioting? In the years since the film was made, Handsworth has been the site of further rioting.

Akomfrah imagines the lives of the African models for two Albrecht Dürer drawings by presenting a man and a woman wandering in desolate landscapes marked by a foreboding, chilly beauty.