Wishful filming, 30 years on

In ‘Wishful Filming’, Sir John Akomfrah points to how the radical tradition can create space for a healthy ecosystem for Black filmmaking. He invokes America as an example of an environment in which the diversities of perspectives and desires of filmmakers, from Spike Lee to Julie Dash, can co-exist.

Looking back, the ecosystem of British film has developed very little. The industry’s progression has predominantly left space for what Akomfrah referred to in ’93 as the “pornographic display of Black life”. The commercial success of films like Rapman’s Blue Story (2019) indicates that they are indeed “worth some money”. Though I consider that an ungenerous categorisation of commercially viable Black British films, their commercial dominance is indicated by the fact that of those films considered Black British, only so-called ‘urban cinema’ has been delineated as a subgenre. No other clear subgenres exist among mainstream Black British films, due to the paucity of different narratives.

Do today’s audiences have some heightened recognition of a distinctly Black British cinema? Still sparsely represented among new British releases, there is now at least a broader awareness of the presence of, and the paths trodden by, Black British talent – due in no small part to the post-90s transatlantic successes of an ‘expat generation’ of British actors, from Idris Elba to newer breakthroughs. Think Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton (Judas and the Black Messiah, 2021), Cynthia Erivo as Aretha Franklin (Genius, Season 3, 2021); David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King (Selma, 2014) or Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston (I Wanna Dance with Somebody, 2022). There seem to be very few African-American icons left who haven’t been played with a disconcertingly accurate accent, mannerisms and expressions by a Black British actor. The consistent refrain, “I didn’t know they were British!” has been whispered by live late-night television chatshow audiences in the US for years. For Black acting talent in the UK, making the journey to the US is now a well-worn road to mainstream acclaim and success.

But, in Britain, Black British actors have not found roles that reflect the lives of prominent Black British cultural figures. Outside of Steve McQueen’s 2020 Small Axe series, these portrayals do not exist. There is no Olive Morris film, no biopic of the life of Claudia Jones or Walter Tull. Contemporary storylines made by Black directors that engage with the ordinary, exceptional or changing lives of Black people in Britain remain scarce. This does not live up to the vision Akomfrah espoused in ‘Wishful Filming’: his hope for a future in which the British industry challenged the American system, either in confrontation with or in conversation with the more diverse narratives present in Black American filmmaking at the time. If anything, the lack of meaningful infrastructure development in cultivating Black British mainstream directing talent has intensified the potential for those people to be subsumed by the US machine.

Until now, little attention has been paid to the history of Black British filmmakers, particularly those who emerged from the ‘workshop’ movement in Britain – filmmaking collectives that sought to bring multicultural voices and experimental aesthetics into cinemas and on to British television. America has thus capitalised on the lack of our domestic engagement with a pivotal moment that occurred on our shores, with Black British talent instead cultivating commissions and relationships through various American institutions.

While I was curating and researching a project on the Black and South Asian workshops, the extent of this transatlantic engagement with the movement’s filmmakers has been an eye-opener. Significantly, a connection with the South Asian film collective Retake came via academics at Yale, who had organised a presentation on the collective’s history. In American galleries and museums, there has been an ongoing endorsement of the work of workshop filmmakers. Artists such as Sir Isaac Julien (co-founder of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective) have often had new work commissioned in the US, including the installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) and, most recently, Once Again… Statues Never Die (2022), through the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Still, there have only been a handful of solo shows of Julien’s work in the UK.

For Akomfrah, transnational support has been present over time, but has appeared to come with a clear caveat: a minimal domestic interest in the work of the Black Audio Film Collective in the 1990s. With his career progression since co-founding Smoking Dogs Films in 1998 (with Lina Gopaul and David Lawson), interest in Akomfrah has heightened. Notably, he will represent Britain at the 2024 Venice Biennale. And in some further hint at a sea change, this April sees the opening of the Tate’s first major exhibition of Julien’s work – his first solo show in Britain since 2019. Progress, yes. But it can hardly make up for the complete absence of a more comprehensive appreciation of filmmakers from the workshops within UK institutions until now.

So where is dedicated reflection on the lineage of the workshops occurring? In Britain, the experimental sector remains the space in which this history has been most closely examined and engaged with. In responses commissioned via the ICO and LUX Moving Image’s Second Sight programme partnership, filmmakers took on the experimental techniques, themes and narratives of specific workshop films, interpolating them with their work. From the reflective chronicling of the student’s relationship to artist Claudette Johnson in Ayo Akingbade’s Claudette’s Star (2019) to an exploration of the transnational solidarity of movements between London and Chicago in Morgan Quaintance’s South (2020), a different trend in conveying Black British cultural figures and movements has been occurring in the experimental film community.

Last year’s Jarman Award shortlist primarily comprised Black British artists, such as Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Onyeka Igwe and Alberta Whittle, featuring reflective and historical work looking at identity and politics in stories relating to Blackness and Britain. Uddoh’s work, Black Poirot 2019-2021, offers a precise seam of Black internationalism and Black diasporic culture that moves from the erasure of African-American jazz singer Abbey Lincoln to the incorporation of philosophies by Martiniquan intellectual Frantz Fanon. Igwe’s work, meanwhile, focuses on the contested site of colonial archives contrasting locations in Bristol and Lagos.

In a way, then, the Black internationalism and diasporic view of audiences that Akomfrah invokes in his essay has found new life in the experimental sector. The discourse in contemporary artists’ moving image invites a conception and exploration of diaspora, seeking transnationally forgotten linkages. As to whether there will be any continuity from a global Black perspective of the experimental sector in cultivating a mainstream Black British film culture that chimes with this perspective – it remains to be seen. We are still determining whether radical perspectives will help create an environment with more narrative diversity. However, we stay wishful.