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  • L’Homme de dos:The Politics of the Rear-view Figure in the Films of John Akomfrah
  • Jeroen Verbeeck (bio)

This Gallery section will explore a recurrent visual trope in John Akomfrah’s films that seems to refer to a painterly rather than a cinematic tradition. This is most notable in his depiction of the human figure filmed from behind. Theater scholar George Banu has conceptualized this motif as l’homme de dos (rear-view figure). In Banu’s analysis of the presence of such a figure throughout the history of Western painting and theater, he observed that l’homme de dos confronts the viewer with a “cyphered poem” as opposed to the explicitness of the gaze or the clarity of the face in portraiture. Banu describes this as a metaphor that, on the one hand, sets forth a coherence of posture and, on the other, entails uncertainty and openness in interpretation.1 In the following, the appearance of such rear-view figures and the variety of political meanings they entail will be explored in three recent films by Akomfrah.

The Nine Muses (2010)

The rear-view figure is incessantly present in The Nine Muses. In this seminal film, human figures dressed in brightly colored hooded jackets appear and reappear within the snow-covered Alaskan landscape. Akomfrah explains that these figures served as visual counterpoints, opposed to the different narratives and granular textures of the archival footage included in the film. It was also a means to do justice to the testimonies of the immigrants of the so-called Windrush generation and mirror their experiences upon arrival: the cold, the loneliness, and the feeling of standing out in the monochromatic British cityscapes of the 1950s and ’60s.2

In their article for this Close-Up, Stéphane Symons and Matthias De Groof interpret this hooded figure as a “hyphen” between present and past— [End Page 154] a wanderer that “embodies the capacity to revisit a history that is somehow still at work and has not yet exhausted its capacity to become-other” and thus “manages to save history from the-present-it-once-was.” Also in this volume, Kass Banning discusses the painterly tradition of the tableau in The Nine Muses and Akomfrah’s earlier films. She reflects upon the critical potential of the cinematic tableau in Akomfrah’s work as a form of “re-enactment’s emancipatory agency.”


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Figure 1.


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Figure 2.

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All three authors thus point at a political or even utopian opening that could be understood through Ariella Azoulay’s concept of potential history. Azoulay writes, “Potential should be understood in the dual sense—unrealized possibilities that still motivated and directed the actions of various actors in the past and possibilities that may become our own and be reactivated to guide our actions.”3 Interestingly, figures in the archival footage used in The Nine Muses sometimes mirror the posture of the hooded figures in the footage Akomfrah shot for the film. For example, a sharply dressed Caribbean man examines the display of job offers in front of the employment office (fig. 1). Other archival footage shows a woman staring out to the sea with her back to the camera, evoking a strong sentiment of homesickness (fig. 2). Elsewhere, activist Leirie Constantine and, editor of the journal Drum, Lewis Ngosi stand in a similar pose before a brick wall bearing graffiti that reads “Keep Britain White” (fig. 3).4

This footage addresses the social, economic, political, and existential aspects of the immigrant’s condition, which ethnographer Abdelmalek Sayad described as the “illusion of the provisory.” The immigrant exists in the first place exclusively through his labor. As this work is often of a precarious nature, the existential condition of the immigrant remains provisory and the idea of returning home is never really abandoned. The possibility or idea to return in itself often proves to be illusory because the immigrant is not only considered “other” in the country of arrival, but also because over time he/she starts to be considered “other” in his/her native country. Sayad designated this as a...

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