Dave Barber Cinematheque
Main Floor - 100 Arthur Street
Winnipeg, MB, Canada, R3B 1H3
Inaugurated in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, the seven-person Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artist groups to emerge from Britain in recent years. John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George produced award winning film, photography, slide tape, video, installation, posters and interventions, much of which has never been exhibited in Britain.
Their first film Handsworth Songs won seven international awards in 1987; their second film Testament premiered at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes International Film Festival in 1988; these and subsequent works such as Twilight City (1989) and The Last Angel of History (1995) staked a claim for a new kind of moving image work that was resolutely experimental and confidently internationalist.
This February, the Dave Barber Cinematheque presents five essential and radical works by the Black Audio Film Collective that encapsulate community, politics and protest, including Handsworth Songs (1986), Twilight City (1989), Who Needs a Heart (1991), Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light (1995).
Black Audio Film Collective
1991, UK, 78 min
Who Needs A Heart is a parable of political becoming and subjective transformation and remains BAFC’s most controversial film. Akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975, the film explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure; the counter-cultural anti-hero, activist and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik . Formerly known as Michael X and christened Michael De Freitas , he left England in 1970 and was tried and executed for his role in an unsolved murder in Trinidad in 1975. The film nevertheless holds him at a distance, tracing his career through contemporary TV and radio bulletins which counterpoint and parallel the lives of the group.
Dialogue is strictly a subsidiary element in Trevor Mathisons allusive, inventive sound design; narrative emerges in snatches, as John Akomfrah flashes back from 1972 to the early 60s and then forwards, recalling the properties of the times in music, fashion and art. Who Needs a Heart is a largely silent film whose soundtrack of Eric Dolphy , Ornette Coleman, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler , Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane and the ritual music of the Llamas and Tibetan Monks of the Four Great Orders investigates the expressionist potential of music to create the conditions for the movement of images.
