Introduction: The Muses of the Black Audio Film Collective and Smoking Dogs Films

The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) was an artistic collective consisting of multimedia artists and filmmakers working within and between the fields of film, television, and visual art. The collective was inaugurated in 1982 and dissolved in 1998. Its members were John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Claire and Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson, and Edward George. Both by way of the work made under the name of BAFC and under the name of Smoking Dogs Films (Akomfrah, Gopaul, and Lawson’s current project), the members of the collective remain an important presence in the world’s most renowned film festivals¹ and exhibitions.² They have collaboratively produced award-winning films, photographs, video works, installations, posters, and performances. In an academic context as well,³ BAFC has become widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artistic groups to emerge from Britain in recent decades.

The themes addressed by BAFC and Smoking Dogs Films come with an acute relevance to our own times, but from the earliest stages onward their productions have staked a claim for a kind of moving image work that was resolutely innovative. By way of a rigorous experimentation with form and sound, the work of BAFC has overturned the ideals of traditional documentary making and has changed the aesthetics of the documentary form from within. For example, in an early work like Signs of Empire (1982–1984), the unusual medium of slide-tape was used to address the nature of ideology and the politics of exclusion that has marked a large part of recent history. The succession of still images, often shot from oblique angles, distorts the outlook of large-scale monuments and widespread symbols of the British Empire but not without thereby capturing the logic of domination that was underlying its project of colonization. Oftentimes appealing to an intense, visual beauty while making use of puzzling sound design, moreover, the work of BAFC and Smoking Dogs Films stands out in questioning the veracity of collective memory. It has widely used archival images to both criticize the power of narrative conventions and deconstruct the supposed certainty of the “factual.” As Gill Henderson puts it in his foreword to the important volume that was recently dedicated to the work of BAFC, their films “threw out the rule-book on the dominant polarities of incomprehensible semiotics and didactic propaganda. They were films that embraced both visual and audio pleasure and narrative displacement, and they were radically different from any of the other independent film and video of that period.”⁴ Indeed, the work of BAFC and Smoking Dogs Films references not just political and social events of the recent past but also artistic, literary, and philosophical tropes from both the Western canon and black culture. Tackling the complexities, subtleties and antagonisms that come together with the artistic choices and the political ideals that they have made into their own, the members of BAFC and Smoking Dogs Films make work that defies the language of “transparent” meanings. Their output is, in other words, multi-layered, inviting scholarly attention and demanding careful analysis.

Since Akomfrah, who was born in Accra, Ghana in 1957 and moved to Britain in the late 1960s, directed all of Smoking Dogs Films and most of BAFC’s films, including those discussed in this Close-Up, such as Handsworth Songs (1986), Testament (1988), 7 Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and The Last Angel of History (1995), his name will emerge throughout the contributions as the face of both the BAFC and Smoking Dogs Films. Still, all of the work discussed in this Close-Up has to be seen in the context of the collective’s collaborative work. These artists were first- and second-generation immigrants to the United Kingdom, coming primarily from the West Indies and Britain’s newly independent colonies. They were part of a generation whose adolescence was spent in an atmosphere of despair and foreboding in 1970s Britain. According to Coco Fusco in Young, British and Black—the first publication giving an overview of the work...