A Call from Inside the House: Broadcasting the Black Audio Film Collective's Postcolonial Critiques on Channel 4

This article resituates four British films from the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) in the context of their televisual broadcast on Channel 4. First, the article traces the history of Channel 4's intersection with experimental film and its role in funding the BAFC's films. It then places John Akomfrah's Testament (1988) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Reece Auguiste's Twilight City (1989) and Mysteries of July (1991) in conversation with theories of televisual time. It deploys Homi Bhabha's concept of the postcolonial time-lag to explore how television theories of liveness and flow are reinterpreted by the BAFC to subvert the promise of televisual presence. In particular, it focuses on how the direct use of televisual archives and address of the television news in combination with poetic narration allow the BAFC to dwell in the personal stories of diasporic women and to mourn the deaths of black men, using the space and tools of television to show how trauma lingers long past its broadcast on the nightly news.