With his feature documentary The Stuart Hall Project, John Akomfrah presents the viewer with a precious gift: 103 minutes with Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born scholar and founding pillar of academic cultural studies in the United Kingdom, co-founder of the New Left Review, and one of the most brilliant contemporary thinkers and cultural studies theorists. In order to create this compelling and very moving portrait, Akomfrah combed through more than eight hundred hours of archival images, television news footage, home videos, family photos, and Open University lecture scenes of Hall, showing him as a teacher, thinker, husband, father, and activist grappling with issues of identity politics and the meaning of being black in Britain, the African diaspora, and indeed, the world.
Akomfrah is a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain whose award-winning debut documentary, Handsworth Songs, in 1986, positioned its members as innovators at the forefront of the black British arts scene from the mid-1980s onward. Following several other notable releases such as Testament (1988), Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), and The Last Angel of History (1995), the collective disbanded in 1998 with Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson going on to create Smoking Dogs Films and continuing to produce complex, deeply layered media texts that challenge spectator positioning and foreground issues of identity.
The Stuart Hall Project is part of Akomfrah’s expanded cinema project on Hall and had its genesis in a three-screen film installation, The Unfinished Conversation (2013), first presented at the Tate Britain in London. In an interview with Georgia Korossi (“The Stuart Hall Project: John Akomfrah Interview,” BFI News, Feb. 21, 2014; www.bfi.org.uk), Akomfrah stated that the art installation is concerned with Hall’s “legacy and implications,” whereas the film is meant to focus on Hall’s own observations of the outside world. For practical reasons (connected to Arts Council funding and scheduling requirements), Akomfrah made the film after the art installation; ordinarily one would expect the reverse, since artists working in digital media often reconfigure analog products such as film, television, and photography in pursuit of interactive experiences of immediacy and immersion. In The Unfinished Conversation visitors participate directly in the course of the narrative, suggesting that meaning can shift radically depending on context.
This labile quality underscores quite nicely Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding meaning. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, in their discussion of “hypermedia,” express a perfect “Hallism” when they state that “the subject is defined as a succession of relationships with various applications or media. She oscillates between media . . . and her subjectivity is determined by those oscillations. . . . Insofar as we are mediated, we are therefore remediated, because in each case we also understand the particular medium in relation to other past and present media” (“Remediation,” Configurations [4.3], 1996, 355). These ideas, though enacted directly in the installation, are expressed in the film as well. Near the beginning of The Stuart Hall Project Hall states that he has always been concerned with how to define origin and whether or not a return to origin is possible; later in the film he states that identity cannot be an essence “but [is] always constructed in a conversation between who we are and the political ideologies out there.” Identity, he says, is an “ever-unfinished conversation” and what is new always encompasses reconfigured elements of the past.
The opening shots of the film are highly reminiscent in tone, mood, and texture of the postcolonial melancholia of Akomfrah’s earlier short fiction film, Digitopia (2001), which explores alienated black subjectivity in a digital universe. Here, over a close-up shot of a young Stuart Hall, soft melancholic piano music mixes with jazz licks as Hall, in voiceover, states, “The various moods of Miles Davis matched the evolution of my own feelings. . . . The nostalgia of what cannot be is in the trumpet of Miles Davis.” Unlike the art installation, the film is designed for linear consumption, and thus Akomfrah must deal creatively with time. He achieves this by using the music of Davis over a progression of years and marking the passage of history with television news snippets of key political and cultural events from South Africa, Cuba, Vietnam, the U.S. (the Black Power movement), Chile, Iran, and Northern Ireland. This also situates the viewer within the development and maturation of Hall’s thinking. From there, Akomfrah organizes the film into twelve parts or chapters, each with its own title, such as “From Colony to Post-Colony,” “The Coming of the Hyphen,” and “The Neo-Liberal Problem Space.” Within this complex structure, Akomfrah sets up the ongoing conversation among Hall, Miles Davis, Akomfrah himself (as organizer of the material), and viewers, who are then meant to participate in the discussion. Akomfrah is quite playful and ironic at times. For example, in the section titled “A Public Intellectual,” Hall discusses social, economic, and political change in England. Over black-and-white long shots of depressed working-class industrial northern England, we hear Hall declaring that certain kinds of people today have “constructed for themselves images of their own power and influence and transformed the economic and political relationships around them”—a comment whose irony is underscored by the grim images of communities with no such agency. Miles Davis interrupts the conversation with a few loud licks from the “So What” track of his 1959 Kind of Blue album, in a sense participating in an unresolved debate among friends.
Several moments in the film are particularly emotional and poignant, particularly those showing Hall’s wife, Catherine, and their two children: photos of Catherine as a bride; a home video of the birth of their first child; photos of the couple with their children over the years; and images of Hall with his sister and their parents. In the section “The Winds of Feminism” Hall pays direct tribute to Catherine when he muses that Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson were important for his thinking and political engagement, but they could never be his role models. Feminism, he declares, “taught me the difference between a conviction in the head and a change in how you live. . . [,] both intellectually in the [film] center and domestically in the home.”
Who, ultimately, is Stuart Hall? What is this incredible legacy that he has created and bestowed on us? He seems himself to be musing on this question when he states, “Britain is my home, but I’m not English. . . and I don’t think any one thing any longer will tell us who we are. . . . Whatever is the actual color of my skin, socially, historically, culturally, politically, I made the identification with being black (during the movements of decolonization and civil rights in the US). . . . I have come via Oxford, via English literature, via Africa, via Kingston. . . . I’ve come by many places and who I am are that thing.” Akomfrah has successfully created a film textbook in which the viewer cannot but participate in the ongoing conversation about race, politics, culture, history, and identity construction. If nothing else, it makes the viewer want to reread Hall immediately!
