In the early 1980s, the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah became a founder member of the innovative, seven-strong Black Audio Film Collective, who curated programs of avant-garde world cinema and made their own work using slide-tape texts, film, and video. Their serious-minded, multifaceted output, much of which was directed by Akomfrah, alighted on subjects from the causes of race-related inner-city U.K. unrest and its media representation (Handsworth Songs) to the origins of Afrofuturism (The Last Angel of History). The group disbanded in 1998, but Akomfrah has since operated extensively across film, television, and galleries, often in collaboration with former Bafc members. […]...
- 7/18/2016
- by Ashley Clark
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
March 8-10, Harvard Film Archive will present a series of films and conversation with British/Ghanaian experimental filmmaker John Akomfrah and and his partner and producer, Lina Gopaul. Hfa will screen five films over the three-day event, including The Last Angel of History, Memory 451, his 1986 debut film Handsworth Songs, Peripeteia, and his 2013 Sundance documentary on intellectual Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Project. Says Hfa, "Akomfrah has become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to mine the...
- 2/24/2014
- by Jai Tiggett
- ShadowAndAct
★★★★☆
Ghana-born director John Akomfrah - the creative mind behind 1987's Handsworth Songs and, more recently, The Nine Muses - made a triumphant return last year with The Stuart Hall Project (2013), a multi-layered video essay on the fluidity of identity in 20th century Britain which revolved around its titular cultural theorist. Hall, a working-class Jamaican with consequent links to all manner of countries and races, confesses an innate lack of national identity, and uses this as an entry point to unravel the many complexities of the defunct and shrinking British Empire, as well as those who left 'home' for a new life abroad.
Ghana-born director John Akomfrah - the creative mind behind 1987's Handsworth Songs and, more recently, The Nine Muses - made a triumphant return last year with The Stuart Hall Project (2013), a multi-layered video essay on the fluidity of identity in 20th century Britain which revolved around its titular cultural theorist. Hall, a working-class Jamaican with consequent links to all manner of countries and races, confesses an innate lack of national identity, and uses this as an entry point to unravel the many complexities of the defunct and shrinking British Empire, as well as those who left 'home' for a new life abroad.
- 1/22/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
From 50s migrant to 80s Thatcher critic, the cultural theorist has long led the debate on race and politics. A new film charts his life and his decades-long influence on the culture of modern Britain
As the Labour party prepares for another round of soul-searching next month about the left's place in modern Britain, it could do worse than organise a pre-conference screening of John Akomfrah's wonderful documentary The Stuart Hall Project.
It would be perverse to suggest that Professor Stuart Hall, 81, has been a neglected figure in British cultural life over the last six decades. He was a founding editor of the hugely influential New Left Review in 1958 and the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme (at Birmingham University in 1964). He has been the most prominent of black British intellectuals since the 1960s, a prominent figure of the Open University and among the most trenchant critics of Thatcherism.
As the Labour party prepares for another round of soul-searching next month about the left's place in modern Britain, it could do worse than organise a pre-conference screening of John Akomfrah's wonderful documentary The Stuart Hall Project.
It would be perverse to suggest that Professor Stuart Hall, 81, has been a neglected figure in British cultural life over the last six decades. He was a founding editor of the hugely influential New Left Review in 1958 and the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme (at Birmingham University in 1964). He has been the most prominent of black British intellectuals since the 1960s, a prominent figure of the Open University and among the most trenchant critics of Thatcherism.
- 8/17/2013
- by Tim Adams
- The Guardian - Film News
Chicago area filmgoers will have their chance to see John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses soon, when it will screens next week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, located in downtown Chicago, on Thursday Nov. 15, starting at 6Pm. Akomfrah is a filmmaker who should be very familar to regular S & A readers, since we have covered him and his film projects several times, including Nine Muses (Here) and his current project in production Peripeteia (Here). As we prevously stated about Akomfrah he is orginally from Accra, Ghana and moved to the UK as a child. He studied art and sociology in college. At 28, he made his seminal film, Handsworth Songs (1986), about racial and...
- 11/8/2012
- by Sergio
- ShadowAndAct
Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs attracted a huge audience when shown in the wake of last summer's riots. His new film, The Nine Muses, uses Homer to explore mass migration to Britain
John Akomfrah, widely recognised as one of Britain's most expansive and intellectually rewarding film-makers, has never been afraid of a battle. Back in the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens, he tried to screen Derek Jarman's homoerotic Sebastiane at the film club of the Southwark further education college, where he was studying. "There were rows. Black kids were throwing chairs everywhere. They were saying 'you can't show this'. So we stopped the film and had a discussion: what do you mean, 'We can't show this film'? It was clear there were forms of propriety for black spectatorship. Rather than run back into the field, I thought: let's just accelerate it. Let's push these boundaries a little bit more.
John Akomfrah, widely recognised as one of Britain's most expansive and intellectually rewarding film-makers, has never been afraid of a battle. Back in the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens, he tried to screen Derek Jarman's homoerotic Sebastiane at the film club of the Southwark further education college, where he was studying. "There were rows. Black kids were throwing chairs everywhere. They were saying 'you can't show this'. So we stopped the film and had a discussion: what do you mean, 'We can't show this film'? It was clear there were forms of propriety for black spectatorship. Rather than run back into the field, I thought: let's just accelerate it. Let's push these boundaries a little bit more.
- 1/21/2012
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
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