Handsworth Songs, reviewed in 1987

Variously described as a ‘documentary’ and a ‘film essay’ on race and civil disorder in Britain today, Handsworth Songs, as its title suggests, in fact owes more to poetic structures than to didactic exposition. Familiar TV and newspaper reportage is juxtaposed with opaque, elusive imagery, newsreel and archive material is reworked, and sound is pitted against image to release a multitude of unanswered questions about the underlying causes of ‘racial unrest’. The result is a powerful combination of anger and analysis, of lyricism and political strategy, elegy and excavation.

The conflagration scenario beloved of the media has been replayed so often that it has achieved almost iconic status. Shadowy figures against a fiery background, riot police and crowds in heated conflict, peaceful streets transformed into a violent battleground: after the 1985 upheavals, one newspaper described Handsworth as “The Bleeding Heart of England”. This widely accepted view of a green and pleasant land torn apart by unwelcome violence, innocent victim of conflicts internal to ethnic communities, conveniently locates the ‘problem’ elsewhere, enabling politicians like Douglas Hurd, seen on a walkabout in the aftermath of the Handsworth riots, to adopt a suitably bewildered stance: “These are senseless occasions”. Handsworth Songs sets out to unearth the sense, tracing links between recent history (the post-war West Indian immigration, the promise of a new Jerusalem which soon turned sour in the context of economic and industrial decline), the long-term disintegration of colonial power, and the widening social divisions in Thatcher’s Britain.

Against the stereotype of unemployed black and Asian youths as troublemakers and hard drug pushers, a group of young Asians point out that only wealthy Asian businessmen can afford large-scale drug dealing. Against the myth that the conflict is the result of inter-racial tension, men from the Handsworth and Aston Welfare Association offer the view that the battle is in fact between rich and poor. In vox-pop interviews, ordinary black people accuse the police of mishandling the situation, while others demand that the state agencies accept responsibility and recognise their rights. Together with the historical passages, accompanied by a lyrical, sometimes abrasive commentary, a counteranalysis is built up which brings the problem back where it belongs, with a government which draws on the language of popular racism (Thatcher’s ‘swamping’ speech) while remaining intent on containing the symptoms rather than dealing with their cause. Piece by piece, a complex picture of the British black experience – personal, political, cultural and economic – emerges which seriously challenges commonly held assumptions about English national identity.

The danger in setting the voices of ordinary people against media stereotypes in this way is that these voices will be seen as a transparent embodiment of the truth, as opposed to the ideology-laden language of the press and politicians. The montage structure of Handsworth Songs works against any simple oppositions; its clear intention is to identify language and ideology as primary areas of political struggle, and its journey into history is carefully constructed through different kinds of representation which work with and against one another – a public exhibition of photographs set against private snapshots of family life, for instance, or a Handsworth mural against newsreel footage of the post-war immigration boats. Film of a black youth set upon by riot police is replayed as part of a project to look again, more closely, at everyday images usually taken for granted. This formal strategy, the search for new means of expression, is intimately tied in with the film’s argument for a new formulation of Englishness which will include ethnic difference, a multiplicity of cultures and languages.

But in spite of the film’s deliberate attempt to avoid a homogeneous message or the predominance of a single voice, an overview does emerge from the conjunction of vox-pop, newsreel and elegiac commentary. This tends to present the communities as innocent victims of promises made but not kept, as dreamers betrayed, helpless to affect their own destinies. To a certain extent, this perspective is contradicted by images of organised political action, scenes of anger and resistance, and instances of individuals speaking and acting on their own behalf. Nevertheless, the commentary’s mourning of a lost innocence, spoken by a female voiceover and evoking images of suffering motherhood, betrayal and disappointment, remains a powerfully emotive thread knitting together disparate and conflicting discourses. In view of the fact that it is mostly men who are seen to be actively involved in political struggle, the effect is to make women’s role once more one of passive endurance. Handsworth Songs exhorts us to seek out the ghosts of other stories behind the stories of the riots. Perhaps this would be a good place to begin the exhumation.