Black Film British Cinema II by Clive Nwonka

Black Film British Cinema II by Clive Nwonka

Author:Clive Nwonka [Nwonka, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912685639
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


I’m British but …: Archiving Black Film In/And/As/Beyond British Cinema

In his 2007 book Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective, Verne Harris argues for a requisite postcolonial re-situation of Jacques Derrida’s ‘archive fever’, replacing a Eurocentric ‘hauntology’ with a recognition that, for decolonising communities, archives can be ‘an invitation to enchantment, to the play of ecstasy and pain, as we exercise that immemorial passion for the impossible’ (2007: 69). Certainly, Black British cinema itself appears to tends towards the impossible – if mainstream accounts are to be believed. It is only independent archives, formal and informal, that allow us to contest that erasure; we need to heed the invitation to be enchanted by the riches they contain that would allow for a fuller understanding of Black British cinema, one that contests erasures that insistently inscribe histories of ‘lost’-ness and ‘first’-ness within minoritarian cultural production. An archival history of Black British film curation would present the central enchantments of historical continuity and community of practice.

Givanni’s work, collected and made available in her Pan African Cinema Archive, is the keystone of this history, and is also of course key to continuing circulation. Collecting festival and season programmes, film and event posters, and event and interview recordings, the archive shows the sources of Givanni’s Black Film and Video Catalogue, and hints at the routes by which the films that she lists would travel. As its name suggests, the Pan African Cinema Archive is testimony to the imbrication, ab initio, of Black British, African, and African diasporic cinemas globally, for local British audiences; and to the transnational flows of influences stretching from early Third Cinema to current multinational productions. An understanding of the ways in which Pan African and Africanist political and cultural movements initially informed the development of filmmaking and video workshops, as well as the consciousness of viewers, is contained in the material ephemera of the archive, to be read, perhaps, alongside the three-volume history of FESPACO forthcoming from the US journal Black Camera in 2021 (2019).

The archive and its title attest simultaneously to the mobility of Black British films and filmmakers to local and global audiences. Mapping these complex interconnecting and intersecting routes and roots goes beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is what yokes Black Film and British Cinema in all their relations. As Givanni notes in her recent article on the films’ travels in the UK, ‘A Curator’s Conundrum: Programming “Black Film” in 1980s–1990s Britain’:

The vision was expansive … There was a vision that an alternative economy for independent film and video could be viable, free of the requirements of commercial mass consumption, and embrace art and innovation born of integrity, honest experiences, and untold stories. This, in short, was the agenda that was prevalent in the United Kingdom and the environment into which the black film workshops and the independent production companies sought to carve out their role and make their mark.

(2004: 61)



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