John Akomfrah, Stuart Hall and the Film Essay
Akomfrah’s films gives voice to the legacy of the African diaspora in Europe, and his experimental approach to narrative and structure helped pave the way for the re-emergence of the “essay film” today.
38 Articles by:
Basia Cummings
Basia Cummings is a writer and film critic based in London.
The Unruly Rush of the City
Julie Mehretu’s canvases depict a public zone dichotomous to that of their own surrounding, brimming with a sense of the life of a city which we can never really know or measure, whose politics is alive but oddly incubated.
Your truths are self-evident. Ours are a mystery
In her work, Ellen Gallagher defiantly challenges linear perspective to redress what fellow African-American artist Theaster Gates has called “the African non-archive.”
A fictional portrait of a national dream
Cristina De Middel self-published book “The Afronauts,” revisits the 1960s shortlived, abandoned project by Zambia’s government to send the first African astronauts to Mars
Styles and Genres
The best films of 2012 with African subjects as their focus: incredibly powerful and moving activist filmmaking that has documented the shifting politics of the continent.
The Trouble with Aid with “The Trouble with Aid”
How the humanitarian movement grew in close relation to the democratization of moving image technologies.
Bring the Beat Home
The documentary, “Soul Power,” captures a moment in African-American music during the 1970s: testing its boundaries in Kinshasa, Zaire.
Chop Cassava
Five filmmaking collectives from the African continent that are reinterpreting and reinvigorating notions of collaboration and distribution.
Africa is a Science Fiction Superpower
A film series in London explores what it would mean imbuing Africa with extra-terrestrial powers. We speak to the curators, Al Cameron and Nav Haq.
The rising bitterness of South Africa’s black majority
‘Dear Mandela’ questions whether the history of South Africa’s ruling party obscures its corruption and immoralities. And what kinds of movements it would take to challenge the ANC’s power head on.
We’ve always been migrating
A film about a Sudanese migrant to America explores a general fact of contemporary existence.
A French migration fairytale
A remarkable amount of new films in recent months have used migration, detention and illegal sea crossings as their subject matter.
The cinema of liberation
The film, “Come Back, Africa,” first released in 1959, challenged how white liberals imagined black people or tried to shape their struggles in South Africa.
The value of a people and their social structure
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s film “Touki Bouki” is an excellent example of how the contemporary can be read through the (re)construction of myths and narratives from a collective memory.
Shell brought me here
A BBC reporter visits the old fields of southeast Nigeria, the site of massive exploitation by Shell Oil–in a helicopter provided by Shell.
Soviet cinema and African filmmaking
Abderrahmane Sissako’s oblique suggestion of what a ‘socialist friendship’ might be in his first film, “October” (1993) set in a then-declining Soviet Union.