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The Black Audio Film Collective’s acclaimed essay film, ‘Handsworth Songs’, examines the 1985 race riots in Handsworth and London. Interweaving archival photographs, newsreel clips, and home movie footage, the film is both an exploration of documentary aesthetics and a broad meditation social and cultural oppression through Britain’s intertwined narratives of racism and economic decline.

Quote:
“[Handsworth Songs is] The Black Audio Film Collective’s documentary-essay on the civil disobedience that erupted in reaction to the repressive policing of black communities in London and Birmingham in 1985. On the one hand, the film received critical acclaim and won many prizes, including the prestigious Grierson Award from the British Film Institute. On the other, one review in a black community newspaper—The Voice—received the film with the dismissive remarks, “Oh no, not another riot documentary,” and in the national daily The Guardian the film was subject to a fierce intellectual polemic from novelist Salman Rushdie. Whereas the filmmakers conceived their experimental approach to the documentary genre as a strategy ‘to find a structure and a form which would allow us the space to deconstruct the hegemonic voices of British television newsreels,’ (Reece Auguiste, 1988:6) Rushdie argued that, on the contrary, ‘the trouble is, we aren’t told the other stories. What we get is what we know from TV. Blacks as trouble; blacks as victims’ (ICA, 1988:16)” (Kobena Mercer Welcome to the Jungle 70).

Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah 1986) 576p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 0 min
Size: 	964 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 950 kb/s
BPP: 	0.176
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/46EA5DC9C3C39F0/Handsworth_Songs_(John_Akomfrah_1986)_576p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Akomfrah – Handsworth Songs (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.

Included are interviews with black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. Astronaut Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr. describes his experiences as one of the first African-Americans in space, while Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols tells of her campaign for a greater role for African-Americans in NASA. Novelist Ismael Reed and cultural critics Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun tease out the parallels between black life and science fiction, while Delaney and Butler discuss the motivations behind their choice of the genre to express ideas about the black experience.

718MB | 45m 07s | 720×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9C482879BF4B24E/The.Last.Angel.of.History.1996.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post John Akomfrah – The Last Angel of History (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer’s revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for THE NINE MUSES, John Akomfrah’s remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption.

Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, THE NINE MUSES is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic.

In addition to its resonance with Homer’s epic, THE NINE MUSES was devised and scripted from the writings of a wide range of authors including Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, TS Eliot, Li Po, and Rabindranath Tagore.

THE NINE MUSES is an journey through myth, folklore, history, and a museum of intangible things. It is a ‘sorrow song’ or ‘song cycle’ on journeys and migration, memory and elegy, knowledge and identity.

“Striking… Extends, complicates, and enriches the definition of documentary.” —Melissa Anderson, Artforum

“What makes the documentary a success is that the African immigrants are at once detached from standard cultural plugs (rhythmic music, soulful dancing, hand-clapping church services, confrontations with racists) and yet are not universalized. …Instead, the radical detachment, the unconscious stream of European poetry and philosophy, and those frozen Alaskan landscapes make the ghosts even more haunting, more unfamiliar, more distant. They might exist in a place and a time that is inaccessible.” —Charles Mudede, The Stranger

“Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses wraps the viewer in literature, music and archive footage, summoning up a mood rather than a story that reflects on the immigrant experience and the violence of displacement with a majestic grace.” —Jason Solomons, The Observer

“Cerebral and sensual, British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses considers the history of the African diaspora to postwar Europe through a highly unusual prism of structuralist cinema, archival footage, spoken-word recordings and the nine muses birthed by the union of Zeus and Mnemone, the Greek goddess of memory. Akomfrah’s steady, patient pace [makes it] fascinating to absorb his many heady references.” —Robert Koehler, Variety

“It’s been a long time since a film has moved me in quite the way that John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses did.” —Wendy Okoi-Obuli, Shadow and Act

2012 Images Festival
2011 Sundance Film Festival
2011 Jerusalem Film Festival
2010 London Film Festival
2011 Sheffield International Film Festival

1.44GB | 1h 36m | 865×468 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/AC8A31254FECDC8/The_Nine_Muses__John_Akomfrah_2010_.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Akomfrah – The Nine Muses (2010) first appeared on Cinema of the World.