Part 7 (1/2)

Watched and listened to now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless acts of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday. This is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have 'progressed' in any simple linear fas.h.i.+on since Handsworth Songs was made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of new riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Rob White pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now of Handsworth Songs or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less being commissioned. The a.s.sumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there was politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more...The lesson to be remembered especially now that we are being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again is that struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George s.h.i.+re pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost so much as diverted into what he called 'the privatisation of politics', as former activists become hired as 'consultants'. s.h.i.+re's remarks strikingly echoed recent comments made by Paul Gilroy. 'When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities,' Gilroy observed, 'the generation who came of age during that time 30 years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They've privatised that movement, and they've sold their services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers.' (See dreamof-safety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-2011.html) This points to one major discontinuity between now and 25 years ago. In 1985, political collectivities were in the process of being violently decomposed this was also the year in which the Miners' Strike ended in bitter defeat as the neoliberal political programme began to impose the 'privatisation of the mind' which is now everywhere taken for granted. Akomfrah's optimistic take on the current riots that those who rioted will come to const.i.tute themselves as a collective agent suggests that we might be seeing the reversal of this psychic privatisation.

One of many striking things about Handsworth Songs is the serene confidence of its experimental essayism. Instead of easy didacticism, the film offers a complex palimpsest comprising archive material, anempathic sound design and footage shot by the Collective during and after the riots. The Collective's practice coolly a.s.sumed, not only that 'black', 'avant garde' and 'politics' could co-exist, but that they must entail one another. Such a.s.sumptions, such confidence, were all the more remarkable for the fact that they were so hard won: the Collective's Lina Gopaul remembered that the idea of a black avant-garde was greeted with incomprehension when the BAFC began their work. Even the sight of young black people carrying cameras provoked bemus.e.m.e.nt: are they real? Gopaul recalled police officers asking as the Collective filmed events in Handsworth and Broadwater Farm 25 years ago.

At a time when reactionaries once again feel able to make racist generalisations about 'black culture' in mainstream media, the Collective's undoing of received ideas of what 'black' supposedly means remains an urgent project. In The Ghost of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, the outstanding survey of the BAFC's work that he co-edited with fellow Otolith Group member Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun argued that, for the Collective, 'black' 'might be profitably understood...as a dimension of potentiality.' At the Tate discussion, which he chaired, Eshun pointed to the use in Handsworth Songs of Mark Stewart and the Maffia's dub-refracted cut-up version of 'Jerusalem': the track makes a bid for an account of Englishness from which 'blackness', far from being something that can be excluded, becomes instead the only possible fulfilment of the millenarian promise of Blake's revolutionary poem. The use of Stewart's music also brings home the extent to which Handsworth Songs belonged to a postpunk moment which was defined by its unsettling of concepts of 'white' and 'black' culture. Trevor Mathison's astonis.h.i.+ng sound design certainly draws upon dub, but its voice loops and seething electronics are equally reminiscent of the work of Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire. So much film and television now deploys sound as a crude bludgeon which closes down the polyvalency of images. Whoos.h.i.+ng sound effects subordinate audiences to the audio equivalent of a spectacle, while the redundant use of pop music enforces a terroristic sentimentalism. By strong and refres.h.i.+ng contrast, Mathison's sound which is simultaneously seductive and estranging liberates lyricism from personalised emotion, and frees up the potentials of the audio from the strictures of 'music'. Subtract the images entirely, and Handsworth Songs can function as a gripping audio-essay.

Mathison's sound recording equipment captured one of the most extraordinary moments in the film, an exchange between the floor manager and the producer of the long-defunct doc.u.mentary series TV Eye in the run-up to a special edition of the programme which was about to be filmed in front of a Tottenham audience. The exchange reveals that it is not possible to securely delimit 'merely technical' issues from political questions. The producer's anxieties about lighting quickly shade into concerns about the proportion of non-whites in the audience. The matter-of-fact tone of the discussions make this sudden peek into the reality studio all the more disturbing and illuminating.

The screening and the discussion at the Tate were a reminder that 'mainstream media' is not a monolith but a terrain. It wasn't because of the largesse of broadcasters that the BBC and Channel 4 became host to popular experimentalism between the 60s and the 90s. No: this was only possible on the basis of a struggle by forces which were political at the same time as they were cultural that were content neither to remain in the margins nor to replicate the existing form of mainstream. Handsworth Songs is a glorious artefact of that struggle and a call for us to resume it.

'Tremors of an imperceptible future':.

Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins.

Sight & Sound, November 2010.

In Ellis Sharp's short story 'The Hay Wain', a Poll Tax rioter in 1990 takes refuge in the National Gallery and 'notices what he has never noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls of his aunt's flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field beyond.' Constable's supposedly timeless painting of English landscape ceases to be a kind of pastoral screensaver and becomes what it always really was: a snapshot of agricultural labour. Far from being some refuge from political strife, the English landscape is the site of numerous struggles between the forces of power and privilege and those who sought to resist them. Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of murdered working cla.s.s martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is 'timeless', but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice. When the Poll tax rioter is clubbed by police and his blood starts to stain Constable's emblem of English nationhood, we're uncomfortably reminded of more recent episodes. 'He was resisting arrest, right? Right mates? (Right, Sarge.)... We used minimal force, right? ... Don't p.i.s.s yourself and we'll see this thing through together, right mates?...Everyone'll be on our side, remember that. The commissioner. The Federation. The papers. And, if it comes to it, the Coroner. Now f.u.c.king go and call for an ambulance.'

Patrick Keiller's latest film, Robinson in Ruins, the long-awaited sequel to his two 1990s films, London (1994) and Robinson in s.p.a.ce (1997), performs a similar politicisation of landscape. Or rather, it exposes the way in which the rural landscape is always-already intensely politicised. 'I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality,' Keiller wrote in 2008, as he was preparing Robinson in Ruins. 'I had forgotten that landscape photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one.' London was a melancholy, quietly angry study of the city after 13 years of Tory rule. Its unnamed narrator, voiced by Paul Scofield, told of the obsessive researches undertaken by Robinson, a rogue and fictional theorist, into the 'problem of London'. London was the capital of the first capitalist country, but Keiller was interested in the way that the city was now at the heart of a new, 'post-Fordist' capitalism, in which manufacturing industry had been superseded by the spectral weightlessness of the so-called service economy. Robinson and his narrator friend bitterly surveyed this brave new world with the doleful eyes of men formed in a very different era: a world in which public service broadcasters could commission films of this nature.

London was as remarkable for the unique way that it combined fiction with the film-essay form. The film was composed of a series of striking images captured by Keiller's static camera, which unblinkingly caught the city in unguarded epiphanic moments. Robinson in s.p.a.ce retained the same methodology, but broadened the focus from London to the rest of England. Rural landscapes featured in Robinson in s.p.a.ce, but as something which Keiller's camera looked over rather than at. In the first two films, Robinson's interest was in the cities where capitalism was first built, and in the non-places where it now silently spreads: the distribution centres and container ports that are unvisited by practically anyone except Robinson and his narrator-companion, but which web Britain into the global market. Keiller saw that, contrary to certain dominant narratives, the British economy was not 'declining'. Rather, this post-industrial economy was thriving, and that was the basis of its oppressive and profoundly inegalitarian power.