Revisiting Claire Denis’s films at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s near-complete retrospective last month, I was impressed by how well the French director’s body of work coheres. Not only do certain themes and stylistic devices recur across her films, but these patterns demonstrate a unity between form and content. Denis often deals with the legacy of European colonialism in Africa and with the African diaspora in postcolonial Europe, privileging the fleeting impressions of multiple characters over narrative coherence. Taken as a whole, her films represent an ongoing project to create a postcolonial cinema, wherein plot structure (which Denis, through allusions to American novels and films, associates with the Western tradition) is constantly undermined and complicated by foreign points of view.
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The films of British artist and academic John Akomfrah advance a similar agenda. Active since the mid-1980s, Akomfrah is a collage artist whose essay films, with their dizzying combination of archival footage, re-creations, literary citations, and philosophical musings, bring together unrelated subjects and suggest a more holistic approach to world history. He’s more overtly political than Denis, yet he shares her obsession with using film structure to communicate marginalized points of view. That obsession is the guiding force of the two medium-length documentaries screening at Black Cinema House this Sunday; Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and The Last Angel of History (1996) are less interesting for their subjects than for the multifaceted perspective Akomfrah brings to bear upon them.
In 1982 this line of thought led Akomfrah to form Black Audio Film Collective, an arts group that made avant-garde works about the African diaspora for TV, cinema, and art galleries. The collective nature of the group, which Akomfrah was involved with until 1998, might explain why he isn’t more widely recognized as an auteur. (Tellingly, in both Seven Songs and Last Angel, the collective receives the “film by” credit.) The openly intellectual bent of Akomfrah’s films might also explain why they’re barely known in the U.S. Rather than advance hard-and-fast arguments, Akomfrah delights in cerebral activity for its own sake, encouraging spectators to draw their own conclusions from the juxtaposition of ideas.
The Last Angel of History ★★★ Directed by John Akomfrah Sun 12/15, 4 PM Black Cinema House 6901 S. Dorchester free reservations recommended at blackcinemahouse.org
