Who better to make a film on the life and ideas of one of the founders of Cultural Studies than a fellow Black Briton who has been both a student of and an important contributor to that field of intellectual practice? Stuart Hall (b. 1932) is a foundational figure, a respected intellectual and, in Britain, a well-known public figure. Akomfrah’s ambitious documentary is at once a history of the beginnings of cultural studies and a biographical portrait, very much in the filmmaker’s patented vein of weaving together the personal and the sociopolitical. One of the goals of cultural studies is to trace the degree to which subjectivity is constructed out of the language and images of the mass media as well as those of various subcultures. And so Akomfrah has cleverly fashioned his portrait entirely from archival footage of Mr. Hall and his times, accompanied by the evocative use of the music of Miles Davis.