The Ghosts of Songs The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective

by Eshun, Kodwo; Sagar, Anjalika

• ISBN13: 9781846310140
• ISBN10: 1846310148
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-05
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

The Ghosts of Songs is the first book-length exploration of the work of the Black Audio Film Collective. The collective, founded in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, comprised John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Reece Auguiste, Avril Johnson, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and David Lawson, and for sixteen years their films addressed the social, political and racial crises of Thatcher's Britain and beyond. However, it would be limiting their achievement to see them either as merely challenging the hegemonic forms of mass media, or conversely as polemicist film activists. In films such as Expeditions, Handsworth Songs, Seven Songs for Malcolm X and Twilight City the collective explored and developed a black film aesthetic. The essays in this volume, contributed by Jean Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, argue that they inaugurated themselves as an artist-group, laying claim to the right to reconfigure the space of cinema around the Afrodiasporic subject, reconceptualizing lighting, film stock, developing and printing, and inventing the forms that black cinema might take.

Author Biography

Kodwo Eshun is a lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the author of More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction.

Anjalika Sagar is cofounder, with Eshun, of the artists' collective the Otolith Group.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

In Living Memory...Archive and Testimony in the Films of the Black Audio Film

Collective

Post-colonial Trauerspiel

Drawing the Forms of Things Unknown

Coalition Building: Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational Post colonialism

An Absence of Ruins John Akomfrah in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun

Introduction to Artists' Writings

Black Independent Film-making: A Statement by the Black Audio Film

Collective

Which Way Forward?

New Directions in Training

Introduction to Reflections of the Black Experience

Black Cinema, Poetics and New World Aesthetics

Handsworth Songs: Some Background Notes

Twilight: Auker's World

Identity

Black Independents and Third Cinema: The British Context

And Black Audio Film Collective

Colour Symbolism in Ghanaian Society

Expeditions: On Race and Nation Black Audio Film Collective

On Writing Who Needs A Heart

Notations of Collective Inventions for Who Needs A Heart

(ghost the signal)

Exhibition History

Selected Filmography

Selected Bibliography

Contributors' Biographies

List of Works

Credits

Index

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