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The Last Angel of History

Directed by John Akomfrah

Memory Room 451

Directed by John Akomfrah
Screening on Film

00:00 / 00:00
      The Last Angel of History and Memory 451 introduction by David Pendleton. ©Harvard Film Archive

      PROGRAM

      • The Last Angel of History

        Directed by John Akomfrah.
        UK, 1995, digital video, color, 45 min.

      A truly masterful film essay about Black aesthetics that traces the deployments of science fiction within pan-African culture. Akomfrah begins by comparing and contrasting three musicians of eccentric genius – Sun Ra, George Clinton and Lee Scratch Perry – and their use of the images of the spaceship and the alien, and then moves on to Black science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. Suggesting that the spaceship and the alien have obvious resonances with the diasporic condition of exile and displacement, Akomfrah ultimately widens his net to include everything from Walter Benjamin to DJ Spooky while tracing an itinerary through Black music and science fiction on the way to a revealing look at modernity as it enters the digital age.

      • Memory Room 451

        Directed by John Akomfrah.
        UK, 1996, digital video, color and b&w, 25 min.

      The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.

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