Past Screenings: Page 23

Past Screenings

John Akomfrah

17 – 23 March 2014

Seven Songs for Malcolm X

“I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment” Malcolm X.

The African-American civil rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated on 21 February 1965.

“For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slave master name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed on my parental forebears.” Malcolm X.

Through archival footage, extracts from Malcolm’s writings and speeches, recollections from family, friends and fellow activists, and stylised tableaux vivants, Seven Songs For Malcolm X, Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film, weaves a compelling portrait of a committed revolutionary.

“When we look at other parts of this Earth upon which we live, we find that black, brown, red, and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their Independence. They are not getting it by singing “We shall over come”. No, they are getting it through Nationalism. It is Nationalism that brought about the independance of the people in Asia…. and it will take Black Nationalism to bring about the freedom of 22 million Afro-Americans here in this country where we have suffered colonialism for the past 400 years….” Malcolm X

The stylised tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life reference the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

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Transfigured Night (2013), John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation exploring the disappointments of post-Independence Africa, is currently on view at Carroll / Fletcher as part of a group exhibition featuring work by Phoebe Boswell and Rashaad Newsome. Click here for further information on the exhibition.

Click here to view John Akomfrah’s artist page at Carroll / Fletcher.

John Akomfrah

10 – 16 March

Testament (1988), 77 min

Two decades after been forced into exile by the coup d’état in 1966, which ended President Kwame Nkrumah’s experiment in African socialism, activist turned television reporter Abena returns to Ghana to confront her memories and the country she left behind. Adrift in a ‘war zone of memories’, Abena is caught in the tension between public history and private memory that characterises the emotional landscape of postcolonial trauma.

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Testament begins with the following text:

The Gold Coast became Ghana in 1957. Led by a charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah, the C.P.P. commenced the first experiment in ‘African Socialism’.

The C.P.P. (Conventional People’s Party) became the inspiration for other liberation movements in Africa.

The party was overthrown in 1966 by a military coup.

This scenario has haunted African politics since.

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Black, blue and red are Ghanaian colours of mourning.

Rivers are GA Gods/Goddesses of memory

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‘All we have left is the place the attachment to the place we still rule over the ruins of temples… if we lose the ruins nothing will be left.’

Zbegniew Herbert, Report from a Besieged City – and Other Poems

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Kwame Nkrumah’s presence haunts the film:

“Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand […] The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.”

“We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”

“We prefer self-government with danger to servitude and tranquility.”

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John Akomfrah:

“We went to Ghana to try to make a film about Kwame Nkrumah, but also about a movement and a body of ideas that simply don’t exist any more. They’d been swept away not just by the force of historical events but also by attempts on the part of successive governments after Nkrumah’s to basically bury the man and all that he stood for. There is something metaphorically significant in that act because so much of diasporic history rests precisely in that gap between history and myth.”

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Section VI from Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

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Click here to view John Akomfrah’s artist page at Carroll / Fletcher.

John Akomfrah

3- 9 March 2014

Stan Tracey: The Godfather of British Jazz (2003)

Stan Tracey: The Godfather of British Jazz is a portrait of one musician’s lifetime achievement. In a career spanning 60 years as pianist and composer, Tracey (1926 – 2013), recalls his life with unprecedented honesty. The film combines a mix of archive, landscape and interviews with musical giants such as saxophonist Courtney Pine, doyenne Cleo Laine and jazz eminence Humphrey Lyttleton.

Stan Tracey’s obituary, published in the Guardian, 6 December 2013 can be viewed here.

Born in 1957, John Akomfrah lives and works in London. An artist, lecturer, and writer, as well as a filmmaker, his work is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world. Akomfrah is well known for his work with the Black Audio Film Collective, which he co-founded in 1982, together with Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George. Since 1998, Akomfrah has work primarily within the independent film and television production companies, Smoking Dogs Films, (London) and Creation Rebel Films (Accra).

Alongside Akomfrah’s successful career in cinema and television, his work has been widely shown in museums and galleries including Documenta 11, Kassel; the De Balie, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A major retrospective of Akomfrah’s gallery-based work with the Black Audio Film Collective premiered at FACT, Liverpool and Arnolfini, Bristol in 2007. His films have been included in international film festivals such as Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, among others. In 2008, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In March 2012, he was awarded the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

www.smokingdogsfilms.com

Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2013) will be on view at Carroll / Fletcher from Friday 7 March. Click here for further information on the exhibition.

Visit John Akomfrah’s artist page at Carroll / Fletcher.