Futures and Fictions Read online

  The notion of an “elsewhere” that Akomfrah foregrounds in his talk does not merely mean off-screen, or hors champ, a cinematographic term which goes beyond the capacity and necessity of the lens to frame, never capturing the whole picture. Rather it connects to a reality of the picture, a resounding but invisible experience of a person appearing in the image. An elsewhere effected through sound. Or as Akomfrah puts it:

  A voice of a woman comes in with pure form, within this form it brings a mood — that speaks to us and says three things: I am one with the image. I speak to you from the same space, the space of cinema, and so I am here, says the voice, to add what the image wants to say to you. Yes, I am here, but my domain is elsewhere and the manner in which I will speak to you within this frame, the way I will move you, owes its meaning to that elsewhere.

  Bloch’s futurity begins with daydreams as distinguished from one’s dreams at night, which he leaves to the psychoanalysts. He is mainly interested not in the unconscious, but in the “not-yet-conscious”, the not-yet-settled, the potential and becoming, terminology which resonates with a Deleuzian understanding of a knowledge in the making. As such, Bloch does not question the origin of hope, but states its sheer existence and wonders where it may lead to. His concern is with the subject who is discontent with the present, open to revolt against his living conditions, who utters, imagines or desires a better future:

  Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right. [...] The desiderium, the only honest attribute of all men, is unexplored. The Not-Yet-Conscious, Not-Yet-Become, although it fulfils the meaning of all men and the horizon of all being, has not even broken through as a word, let alone as a concept. This blossoming field of questions lies almost speechless in previous philosophy. Forward dreaming, as Lenin says, was not reflected on, was only touched on sporadically, did not attain the concept appropriate to it (Bloch 1995: 3).

  This again connects to Akomfrah’s lecture where he emphasises the aspect of the looking forward:

  For Bloch, thinking means venturing beyond... [Everybody lives in the future, because they strive, past things only come later, and as yet genuine present is almost never there at all. The future dimension contains what is feared or what is hoped for; as regards human intention, that is, when it is not thwarted, it contains only what is hoped for.

  Translated to the practice of cinema, Akomfrah turns it into: “The future begins by making an image”. By the hope that leads to the agreement of being filmed, of becoming part of an image that matters and will be watched by an audience to come in the future.

  A Refusal to Produce Knowledge…

  Through a detour we come back to this promise of image-making, but this leads us first to another beginning, namely to Handsworth Songs (1985). This was the first film by the Black Audio Film Collective to receive widespread attention, winning several prizes and provoking a heated debate. Handsworth Songs is a dense reflection on a couple of days of riots taking place in September 1985 in a district in Birmingham, where mostly families from the Caribbean found their homes in the 1950s, struggling with youth unemployment, education, poverty and racism during the heyday of Thatcherism. The movie did face the challenge of deliberating form and politics of representation, image and image-making, story and storytelling. There is a refusal of representation in Handsworth Songs, and instead of narrating a kind of counter-story the film unfolds these elements as being in crisis — a new tactical approach to image-making which is not easy to read. Salman Rushdie famously criticised the film from the perspective of literature in The Guardian, arguing that it failed to “give a voice to the voiceless”:

  There’s a line that Handsworth Songs wants us to learn. ‘There are no stories in the riots.’ It repeats, ‘only the ghosts of other stories’. The trouble is, we aren’t told the other stories. What we get is what we know from TV.

  Salman Rushdie’s reproach still seems to hit a nerve, namely to satisfy a desire for the untold upsetting individualising story that allows us to feel good about our compassion, a feeling that helps for charity, but only tolerates a very thin line as to what can or should be politically possible. “Giving a voice to the voiceless” can be seen as a noble, well-meaning gesture, but it remains within a certain paternalistic logic of control — a voice given and not just taken. This can lead to the more difficult question of how we understand all these voices and how we deal with them. A long thread of responses by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Isaac Julien, Darcus Howe, Kobena Mercer and others provide an intriguing debate on the question of the politics of representation. Refusing the imperative to tell individual stories and thereby establishing a narrative evolving in and from the past, Handsworth Songs condenses the narrative within images that question time rather than index time. Time-layers start to blur between the footage from the 1960s and the 1980s. These images are not explained, they require their own translation, a reading that has to be invented and contains its own fiction. Archival images in black and white, glimpses of an everyday street life and work environments, all moments of encounters, and speaking also of a belief in the significance of making these images, for a time to come, in juxtaposition with then present scenes of street battles, of a youth that claim their future through their own struggle.

  The image, the voice, the sound and the song, each element resonates with its own divergent form of storytelling and affection and requires its own recognition and knowledge. It marks a substantial aesthetic and political shift: to cut out the motive, the why, the reason of movement and migration as a justification. Reasons for departure are not in question. Taking the arrival as a given, time and place where hope once led to, demand an understanding of the image that contains past, present and future at once. A storytelling immanent within the grammar of cinema that does not use image and sound as a tool, but as a form that tells its own story, that refuses to be defined by any identitarian parameter as it refuses to produce ethnographic or sociological knowledge. The knowledge generated instead can tell us more about the production of images than it gives us information to classify phenomena of difference. Akomfrah underlined this notion in a 1989 interview with Gilroy and Jim Pines:

  You can’t use the film to construct other knowledges about Handsworth, other than what you already know. Once you have done that, anything else that you get is purely a profilmic event. The film doesn’t make any pretensions to know where Rastas are at in Birmingham, or where the ‘unclubbables’ hang out à la the police report. It seems to me that the missionary zeal with which black life is chased in this anthropological way, is precisely what is missing from Handsworth Songs (1988: 14).

  … And How Image-Making Can Change the Notion of Knowledge

  The images of the riots in Handsworth, of uprising, police brutality and anger, do not accumulate as riotporn. They are constantly transitioning, stretching from significant symbolic images towards non-significant images of everyday life and detailed reflection, whether from the archives or as footage recorded in the then-present. The images bridge decades, in black-and-white and in colour only within a few frames. Like a panning shot through time around a few streets and a crossroad, while a female narrator whispers to us, talking with the images, not over them, adopting different voices:

  On the 10th of September 1985 a journalist is pestering a middle-aged black woman on the road, he wants her opinion on the disturbances: ‘Did you have a relative involved? Could we talk to one of them?’ He is writing a story. She says to him calmly: ‘There are no stories in the riots. Only the ghosts of other stories.’ If you look there you can see Enoch Powell telling us in 1969 that we don’t belong, you can see Malcolm X visiting us in 1965 and a Conservative said: ‘If you want a nigger for your neighbour, vote Labour.’ She remembered Malcolm strolling through Smethwick saying: ‘If this is the centre of imperialism then we have a common struggle.’ For a moment the voice of Malcolm swooned over the
ashes of decline.

  With these words the images arrive in 1965, after panning along unspectacular street sceneries, construction sites, people standing around watching policemen standing around on both sides of the barriers, most likely at the same corner we see now: Malcom X in front of Marshall Street, not talking, walking down the street, alone in the picture, even while surrounded by photographers, accompanied by an abstract sequence of tones — an echo — which summons up more black-and-white photographs, another protest. This sequence of non-melodic tones, sounds, echoes, compresses time and image and enters almost unnoticed into a new movement with an astonishing length. Leaving the photographs of young people reclaiming the streets, carrying slogans, the photographs arranged hanging in a dark room, the camera of this archival footage starts pursuing, pestering without any motivated reason two women carrying their small children, their thin wide trousers and false fur coats marking their difference from other passers-by wearing the tight British knee-length skirt. The two women, turning around visibly annoyed, start to almost run. The pursuit ends with a gesture, with one of the women attacking the camera with a handbag. Ghosts of another story we cannot grasp, but which arrives with quite an excess. “Something in the image always resists”, Stoffel Debuysere suggests in his contribution to a special issue of Black Camera on Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective. “Something that escapes the look of the beholder handling the camera and the powers guiding it, something that goes beyond the inherent inequality between those filming and those being filmed” (2015: 69).

  The Future Begins by Making an Image

  What remains important for a debate today? Why be so precise on a sequence of images and their background and not just summarise some key content? “To spell a suspicion of how images come into being, how they circulate and what sustains their circulation”, Akomfrah argues, understanding the precondition of image-making as Benjaminian, anticipatory — that to consent to be filmed implies an agreement to appear as an image in the future. In his lecture he offers a multi-layered reading of one particular scene that becomes crucial to lay out the dimensions happening during this specific moment while making an image, the implicit contract for a future and the encounter between the person filming and the person being filmed, but also connects Handsworth Songs to Nine Muses (2010). It is a scene from a 1964 BBC documentary, The Colony by Philip Donnellan, “a fantastic pioneer of essayfilm who worked principally in television”. And because Akomfrah’s reading is very detailed, I will quote this part of the lecture at length, as it also provides an insight into an ethics of the archive.

  Akomfrah describes a scene filmed one Sunday morning: people singing in a Baptist church in Birmingham, near where most of the footage of Handsworth Songs was shot. It now becomes the transcription of a viewing experiment. While reading this, one has to imagine what would have remained invisible while watching without knowing: the scene was shot during the first openly racist election campaign in Britain, which the female voice in the quote above of Handsworth Songs is referring to.

  So, you are watching people who know that they are the objects of racist division, it is not something you can miss if you are a minority and this is the only news about you around. […] Everybody you have seen in this scene has migrated from the Caribbean. They might have had a few days in London, but all headed straight to Birmingham, and to Handsworth. You are watching people who had all arrived at the promised land, where they wanted to be. But in 1964, the journey to the promised land will be caught and cut short by some very specific historical events. All the people you see in this film have become recently not British, for the first time in their lives. The majority are from Jamaica, some from Barbados, some from Grenada — and when you look at their faces, you can see they are all in their thirties upwards, so for thirty plus years most of them had been British subjects. But between 1962 and 1964 their identities would have changed, they became West Indians, very recently. Which also means that they became coloured, very recently. It’s a group of people in a major transition in their lives, singing in a hostile city, about to become a racist landmark. A place they had made their home, some of them for a decade or more. And you are also in a very profound sense watching the place where most will die. Most of the figures in that film never made their way anywhere else.

  This scene can also tell a story of how image and sound can come into sync, two distinct itineraries unfolding as fiction. “The scene which has been filmed on that Sunday 1st of March 1964 also made it into a film by Richard Marquand, Home for Heroes.” The Colony does not exist as “a film one could show with great sound”, and would have been lost, not interesting for puristic documentarians to restore. The sound, which has been synced by Akomfrah, comes from somewhere else, from an oral history recording made by Donnellan’s friend and collaborator Charles Parker.

  Charles Parker was a champion of oral history of ordinary working class folks narrating their own lives, he was a veteran BBC producer, radio producer who worked for the corporation between the early 1950s and 1970s. In 1958 Charles Parker along with the musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger came up with this remarkable form of radio documentary called The Radio Ballads. The Radio Ballads became for Parker the default radio documentary mode. So, why was he in that church on that Sunday? […] There was an existing set of radio recordings made on the 1st of March 1964, that day that maybe could help us to reconstruct The Colony, because until now The Colony doesn’t exist as a film that you could show with great sound. […] When you watch this now, you are not aware of that sophistry. You are not aware that a fiction is unfolding in front of you. […]

  Occasionally I come across an image or a sequence that reminds me of the key ethical claim behind what we do. And that is this injunction on us in a way we handle and relate to the image. As a double demand, a double burden, a double consciousness if you will, because first of all we are confronted with this implicit claim of mortality that such moments come with. We do what we do because we want partly moments like this, to live and not die, that is part of the utopian contract. But secondly, we do what we do because of something which is the opposite of mortality, the exact opposite, we do what we do because of the immortal yearnings of such moments. The ways in which they say to us: come to us, because with you and through you we will and want to be forever. Etched into every gesture of that performance. This is in fact the precondition of what we are watching. As you watch them you can almost feel them say to you: I can feel your look which is to come from somewhere not of this moment, from somewhere in the future. From a place which is not right here, right now, and I am consenting to this process in anticipation of that look. […] We are here, they say, for you and with you. But this is not a mere service, in being here for you in this moment, we know you will be there for us in your moment. This is the utopian contract I’m talking about.

  We have to imagine the editing room as social space, a space of collective decision-making and debate, and not of solitude. And that the process of choosing images is as complex as making them and finding them: “Through the absence of black lives documented, they come to us as pure utopic fragment that it both confirms and blurs”. The era in which the images of The Colony (1964) found their way into Handsworth Songs was in many respects quite different from that of The Nine Muses. A fragile male broken voice speaks, bridging excerpts from The Colony with new images. A boat is moving.

  Sometimes we think we should blame the people because it’s we who have come to your country. On the other hand, we think if they in the first place had not come to our country and spread the false propaganda, we would never have come to theirs. If we had not come they would none be the wiser and we would still have the good image of England, thinking that they are what they are not. And the English would be ignorant of us.

  Hangover: A Time for Recollection

  Within the montage of the abstract frozen images of northern landscapes in clean High Definition, the lively urban, grainy analogue film excerpts fr
om the 1960s interrupt with a different noise. They permeate and inform the abstract surface of the filmic landscape with traces of industrial labour, means of transport, kids playing and laughing, people descending from a boat, faces, heavy snow, pictures of an everyday life; and at the same time they go beyond, through another layer of imaginary abstraction, to a stream of European and Asian literature and poetry. Text samples of travel literature unfold into polyphonic narratives of drifting, travelling, working towards the inner states of consciousness: from Homer’s Odyssey to Emily Dickinson, to John Milton, Matsuo Bashô, Li Po, Kabir, Rabindranath Tagore, Shakespeare, Zelda Fitzgerald, E.E. Cummings and John Berger. The self-contained images of these snowy northern landscapes, in greyish clear and constant twilight, seem designed to affect us with their beauty, along with various voices reciting, yearning and singing, and bits and pieces of music, from Schubert to the Gundecha Brothers. Arranged as a multi-layered hybrid score by long-time collaborator Trevor Mathison, they put us in a trance, enable us to fall out of time. Every image and every sentence speaks from a precise point in time, but we don’t feel it, see it, decipher it at the moment of watching.

  And yet within this dense aesthetic space full of indications and moving reflections we mainly see stagnation. Despite gestures of discontent from the past, there is a total absence of revolt in The Nine Muses; even the possibility seems absent. Human beings packed in snowsuits stand around and move like sleepwalkers in this forbidding place, seemingly incapable of action, confronted by compromised nature — heavy weather conditions, a heavily destroyed ecosystem (not visible as such). The third layer of images, recorded in the present, shows a man in an unspecified post-industrial wasteland, a former port and place of work for many immigrants. We see him lying down, sitting, his face lost in introspection, somehow absent. We see similar postures in Akomfrah’s Transfigured Night (2013), an elderly man looking quiescently out of a vitreous skyscraper in Seattle, people walking in slow motion around state monuments. Fred Moten, in an introduction to The Nine Muses, called this downtime syndrome a hangover from the period of Black Power politics.1