Research Catalog

The ghosts of songs : the film art of the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982-1998

Title

The ghosts of songs : the film art of the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982-1998 / edited by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group.

Publication

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press : Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 2007.
©2007

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	PN1995.9.N4 G52 2007q Oversize	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Description

239 pages, 1 unnumbered page : illustrations (some color), portraits; 22 x 30 cm

Summary

This eagerly awaited book is the first to assess the oeuvre of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), one of Britain's most influential artistic groups. It reconsiders the entire corpus of the seven-person London-based group from inception in 1982 to its disbandment in 1998.
"The Ghosts of Songs is the first book-length exploration of the work of the Black Audio Film Collective. The collective, founded in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, comprised John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Reece Auguiste, Avril Johnson, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and David Lawson, and for sixteen years their films addressed the social, political and racial crises of Thatcher's Britain and beyond. However, it would be limiting their achievement to see them either as merely challenging the hegemonic forms of mass media, or conversely as polemicist film activists. In films such as Expeditions, Handsworth Songs, Seven Songs for Malcolm X and Twilight City the collective explored and developed a black film aesthetic. The essays in this volume, contributed by Jean Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, argue that they inaugurated themselves as an artist-group, laying claim to the right to reconfigure the space of cinema around the Afrodiasporic subject, reconceptualizing lighting, film stock, developing and printing, and inventing the forms that black cinema might take"--Publisher's description.

Subject

Genre/Form

video art.
Essays
History
Installation works (Art)
Video art
Essays.
Video art.
Art vidéo.

Note

Published to accompany the exhibition 'The ghosts of songs: a retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective'.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Foreword / Gill Henderson -- Preface / Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar -- In living memory ... archive and testimony in the films of the Black Audio Film Collective / Jean Fisher -- Post-colonial Trauerspiel / Kobena Mercer -- Drawing the forms of things unknown / Kodwo Eshun -- Coalition building : Black Audio Film Collective and transnational post-colonialism / Okwui Enwezor -- Absence of ruins (in conversation with Kodwo Eshun) / John Akomfrah -- Introduction to artists' writings -- Black independent film-making : a statement by the Black Audio Film Collective / John Akomfrah -- Which way forward? / Lina Gopaul -- New directions in training / Edward George -- Introduction to "Reflections of the black experience" / Edward George -- Black cinema, poetics and new world aesthetics / Reece Auguiste -- "Handsworth songs" : some background notes / Reece Auguiste -- Twilight : Auker's world / Reece Auguiste -- Identity / Avril Johnson -- Black independents and third cinema : the British context / Reece Auguiste & Black Audio Film Collective -- Colour symbolism in Ghanaian society (John Akomfrah interviewed) / by Lina Gopaul -- Expeditions : on race and nation / Black Audio Film Collective -- On writing "Who needs a heart" / John Akomfrah -- Notations of collective inventions for "Who needs a heart" / John Akomfrah -- On the borderline / John Akomfrah -- (Ghost the signal) / Edward George.

ISBN

9781846310140
1846310148

LCCN

99817481739

OCLC

ocm76798881
76798881
SCSB-1428557

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library