Memory, race, identity, and audio-visual experimentation in the Black British Workshops Ceddo, Black Audio film Collective, and Sankofa

Resumo

During the eighties, several film collectives emerged in the United Kingdom and responded to the social unrest the country was facing. Among these collectives, Ceddo (1982-1994), Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1988) and Sankofa (1983-1988) stand out. These collectives, British filmmakers with an Afro-Caribbean heritage, are the subject of study of this thesis. Thanks to their original production, they were able to integrate different disciplines in their productions, which helped them to claim and articulate important reflections on postcolonial identities. Previously, Afro-British filmmakers were scarce and relied on institutions that allocated limited to Afro-British cinema (Hall 1988; Mercer 1994). It was not until the emergence of Ceddo, Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa that there was a proliferation of Afro-British representations. Critics, artists, and audiences of the time were confronted with a new paradigm where there was a reconfiguration of previous conceptions of what was expected of an Afro-British filmmaker as these collectives broke with the categories of the past (Williamson 1988). Ceddo, Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa underlined the significance of migrant communities’ culture, which was often overlooked and undervalued (Fusco 1998). Although these collectives developed their production separately, as this research demonstrates, they share numerous aesthetic and intellectual influences such as the works of Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Franz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, C. R. L. James and, almost contemporaneously, Stuart Hall, all concerned with hybrid identities and the role of race in social processes. Although there are some publications on these groups, they received little treatment (Fusco 1988; Eshun 2007). The contributions by Fusco and Eshun and Sagar, while fundamental, are somewhat preliminary and panoramic. In more popular publications, they do not appear extensively: either they are not mentioned or, when they do appear, they are not dealt with in depth (Dixon 1988). Ceddo, for example, is not directly covered by these publications because his less avant-garde aesthetic did not attract enough attention (Williamson 1988). The main aim of the research is precisely to produce a detailed study of the production of Ceddo, Black Audio and Sankofa while demonstrating how Ceddo should be included in the study of Afro-Caribbean film collectives emerging in the eighties. The methodology is characterised by its eclecticism, drawing on theories and lenses of analysis from the fields of cultural studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies and film studies. These areas of study include an exploration of identity and nationhood, the role of cultural studies in society and popular culture, the cluster of intellectual influences that came to be called ‘postcolonial’ theory, the insights of memory studies, and the representation and interaction of these areas with film, which gives physical form to the abstract concepts from these fields of study (Alter 2018). The results show how the collectives interacted with different film genres, especially the essay film, introducing discursive and formal strategies stemming from their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. They also managed to propose new notions of identity and collectivity thanks to the relevance of memory and the use of archives. These collectives produced an art that wanted to be popular and accessible as well as avant-garde and intellectual, linked to the history and specific concerns of ethnic minorities. They demonstrated what it meant to be British and black from the perspective of Afro-descendant communities as they were involved in an unprecedented exercise of self-definition.