Arsenal on Location: Pioneers of Black British Cinema - John Akomfrah und das Black Audio Film Collective (HANDSWORTH SONGS & THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY)

The Ghanaian-born British video artist John Akomfrah (*1957) is co-founder of the influential film workshop Black Audio Film Collective. In 1986, the independent collective made the essay film HANDSWORTH SONGS for Channel 4. Akomfrah chose a narrative form that consciously distanced itself from established film conventions in order to question the practices and ideologies of mainstream media. In an audiovisual collage, television reports and newspaper clippings from the Handsworth Riots of 1985 are combined with interviews and archive material and accompanied by a catchy dub soundtrack and lyrical off-screen commentary. Instead of factual confrontations, the focus here is on meta-narratives, personal reflections and ghost stories. In the Afrofuturistic music documentary THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY, shot on video and produced by Channel 4 and ZDF, Akomfrah followed the fictional character of a time-traveling data thief in 1995. Using fragments from Sun Ra's jazz compositions, the techno narratives of the Detroit label Underground Resistance and interviews with the writer Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Sun), he is in search of a code with new perspectives for the future.

Films:
Handsworth Songs (UK 1986) by John Akomfrah 61 min.
The Last Angel of History (UK/D 1995) by John Akomfrah 45 min.