Black Audio Film Collective

As usual the Glasgow Film Festival has come and gone with me only making it to one of the many wonderful sounding films that I meant to go to. However the night I did go to, a screening of two films by the Black Audio Film Collective was well worth it and was something I hadn't heard of before (although now I read that Tate Britain has acquired some of their work). The first film to be shown was Handsworth Songs, examining the causes and reflecting on the aftermath of the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London. The film is often cited as the beginning of a turn towards the archival and I think this holds out with the mixture in the film of historical footage, contemporary interviews, old photographs, music, newspapers headlines and news footage. The fluidity of memory and the reality that people can have such different perceptions of the same event was a major theme running through the film. It also highlighted the marginalisation of black history and the way that was continuing to happen even in the contemporary news footage and the press conferences after the riots. I also noticed a link to Lindsay Anderson and his early Free Cinema documentaries, specifically O Dreamland, set in the Margate funfair 'Dreamland'. At the beginning of the Handsworth film the camera moves a number of times to a shot of a dummy in a shop window. The dummy is waving his hand and there is an eerie tune playing in the background, giving the impression of dangers to come, a sinister undercurrent to the seemingly everyday. To me this was very reminiscent of a number of shots in O Dreamland, Lindsay Anderson's short film from 1953 where the mechanical dummies in the funfair are moving to the sound of repetitive, sinister laughter.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) was also a blend of different formats, including real footage of Malcolm X, interviews with family and friends and theatrical interludes which dramatised events in his life. There was footage of the premier of Spike Lee's Malcolm X biopic and interview clips with Spike Lee, relating the real man and history to more recent representations of Malcolm X. Once again there was a sinister atmosphere to the film, an unease that brilliantly conveyed the threat and anxiety that were a part of Malcolm X's everyday life. There were a number of more mystical elements to the film such as the importance of the number seven. In an interview with Malcolm's mother Louise she describes seven as the number of vision. The film is divided into seven segments, and Malcolm, a seventh son, was assasinated by Gabriel Prosser, a seventh son. Then there is also the connotations of Gabriel with the angel or archangel Gabriel. Both these films were moving, insightful, educational and haunting and I know they'll stay with me a long time.