Handsworth Songs

Today at Document, I saw Handsworth Songs, a film made in 1985/6 by the Black Audio Film Collective about what have come to be known as "race riots" in Birmingham and London.

In introducing the film, director John Akomfrah talked of an idea he and fellow members of the Collective came into contact with during their time at art college, that of the cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, who talked of political crises as simultaneously crises of narrative, of a failure to tell a story (or the real story? this was unclear) of events that were taking place. As I took it, each failure informed the other to the extent that they were inseperable and led to further crises and unrest.

The film itself, whilst ostensibly focussing on the Handsworth riots deals with the entire legacy of migrant travel to Britain, and Windrush in particular. It tries to unpick the long and complicated story that led to the riots. Akomfrah talked in praise of the collage technique and the film uses collage (and I suppose by extension Eisenstein's practice of montage) to gather in all the threads of the Afro-Carribean experience in Britain up until that point.

In quickly scribbled notes during the Q&A afterwards I wrote down "attempt to intervene in status quo narrative", that being the generalised, establishment-accepted version of events which had to all intents and purposes been 'agreed' on in the time between the making and the screening of the film. In fact Akomfrah told of an article by Salman Rushdie attacking the film for restricting the voices of Handsworth's inhabitants. By attempting to tell their own story, to contrast the "official" line, the Collective had been equally as guilty of denying the voiceless a voice.

I'm not sure how much I agree with that. What Akomfrah talked about were the distinctions, similarities and interplay between history and memory. Whilst obviously contentious, the Collective's aim he said was to mingle the two in the tradition of the black poetry he was reading at the time. Not a faceoff but a friendly meeting between the public and the personal, perhaps an attempt to bridge a gap.

Up to a point it succeeds. It is a gathering in of footage from libraries, footage discarded by mainstream TV channels, the films of Phillip Donnellan and that from the public. This latter category includes some fantastic coverage of Malcolm X wandering around Smethwick.

I felt lucky to see this film in the prescence of its very articulate director. By rounding out and elaborating on a film full of allusions, songs and words that meant more than their immediate literal meaning I felt I grasped a huge part of what the Black Audio Film Collective were all about, what the riots were about and crucially what life in Britain was like during the 80s, not just for immigrants and their families but for all of us.