'Handsworth Songs' and the Archival Image

Seen from the perspective of 2006, Handsworth Songs remains a remarkable piece of filmmaking and an astonishingly important and relevant document of cinematography. London-based Black Audio Film Collective made the film in 1986. The group’s members (in the 1980s) were John Akomfrah (who directed Handsworth Songs), Reece Auguiste, Eddie George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Trevor Mathison and David Lawson. They were a group of individuals committed to fashioning new types of filmic dialogues, reflective of social, cultural and political developments in 1980s Britain, and equally as important, committed to vigorously critiquing a number of then-existing orthodoxies. Such orthodoxies taken to task by Black Audio Film Collective (particularly within Handsworth Songs) included the format and nature of the documentary film, and the privileging of certain accounts or perspectives arising out of the early to mid 1980s ‘riots’ in cities such as London and Birmingham.

 

…To this end, Handsworth Songs was created as, and indeed remains, a complex, multi-layered sequences of narratives that defy linear, chronological and conventional historical readings and perhaps, most importantly, eschew the notion of the singular authentic, homogenous Black voice, raised in protest against ongoing hardships and discrimination. The film, “a nonnarrative, impressionistic documentary” was shown in cinemas and film festivals in the UK and internationally, and has won a number of awards. Handsworth Songs was also shown on Channel 4 and such is the film’s enduring nature and reputation as a fresh and compelling example of film-making that it was included, some sixteen years after it was made, in Documenta XI, 2002, and more recently in Making History - Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now at Tate Liverpool in 2006…

 

…The film’s multiple strands, both aural and visual, combine to create a cinematic work of great depth and potency. Even setting aside, if we are able to, the images of great violence that sporadically dominate the film, Handsworth Songs is by no means an easy or a comfortable piece of film-making with which to engage. The film requires the viewer to undertake an almost bewildering, frame-by-frame process of absorbing its often bold and unflinching nuances, and to critique, deconstruct and reconstruct the film’s various cycles. No two viewings of the film can ever be the same, simply because of the marked and profound sense of fluidity that the filmmakers brought to every aspect of the project. Within the work the idea of meaning becomes fiendishly elusive; frame after frame throws up image, spectacle and language that sits uncomfortably with the viewer and refuses to indulge any fixed meanings…

 

…Together with Brixton, Handsworth had, during the course of the 1970s, come to symbolise territory that represented the unmistakable emergence and presence of Black Britain. To be sure, Handsworth was, as mentioned, home to many people from the Commonwealth countries, and to their British-born/raised children. Significantly the neighbourhood had gained a special and particular place in the affections and empathies of younger Black British people. Steel Pulse had the measure of it when they sang (on their seminal 1978 Handsworth Revolution record) that “Handsworth means us, to Black people, Handsworth means us, to Black people,” In the parlance of the time, along with areas such as Ladbroke Grove, St Paul’s, and Brixton, Handsworth had achieved privileged ‘frontline’ status…

 

The full versions of the above text appeared as “'Handsworth Songs' and the Archival Image", a chapter written by Eddie Chambers in Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists' Film and Video, edited by Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon, Picture This, Bristol, 2005: 24-33