In the early 1980s, the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah became a founder member of the innovative, seven-strong Black Audio Film Collective, who curated programs of avant-garde world cinema and made their own work using slide-tape texts, film, and video. Their serious-minded, multifaceted output, much of which was directed by Akomfrah, alighted on subjects from the causes of race-related inner-city U.K. unrest and its media representation (Handsworth Songs) to the origins of Afrofuturism (The Last Angel of History). The group disbanded in 1998, but Akomfrah has since operated extensively across film, television, and galleries, often in collaboration with former Bafc members. […]...
- 7/18/2016
- by Ashley Clark
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Ashley Clark, who's curated Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, the series that opened at New York's BAMcinématek yesterday and runs through April 15, picks out a few highlights for the Guardian, including John Coney's Space Is the Place with Sun Ra, Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History and Terence Nance's An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Also, more on Walerian Borowczyk, an overview of the career of producer and director James B. Harris, a major Frederick Wiseman retrospective in Chicago, noir westerns such as Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon and Budd Boetticher's The Tall T in San Francisco and films by Gregory J. Markopoulos in Los Angeles. » - David Hudson...
- 4/4/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Ashley Clark, who's curated Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, the series that opened at New York's BAMcinématek yesterday and runs through April 15, picks out a few highlights for the Guardian, including John Coney's Space Is the Place with Sun Ra, Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History and Terence Nance's An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Also, more on Walerian Borowczyk, an overview of the career of producer and director James B. Harris, a major Frederick Wiseman retrospective in Chicago, noir westerns such as Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon and Budd Boetticher's The Tall T in San Francisco and films by Gregory J. Markopoulos in Los Angeles. » - David Hudson...
- 4/4/2015
- Keyframe
March 8-10, Harvard Film Archive will present a series of films and conversation with British/Ghanaian experimental filmmaker John Akomfrah and and his partner and producer, Lina Gopaul. Hfa will screen five films over the three-day event, including The Last Angel of History, Memory 451, his 1986 debut film Handsworth Songs, Peripeteia, and his 2013 Sundance documentary on intellectual Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Project. Says Hfa, "Akomfrah has become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to mine the...
- 2/24/2014
- by Jai Tiggett
- ShadowAndAct
Per the press release from Icarus Films, the same distribution that acquired and will release The Great Flood, from director Bill Morrison, as well as 6 Jean Rouch classics for North American distribution, including his landmark 1957 work Moi, Un Noir (Me, A Black), and also The Last Angel of History as well as Seven Songs for Malcolm X both by John Akomfrah - all releases we've covered on S&A. The company announced today its acquisition of all North American distribution rights to 11 films from the Cuba Media Project of the Americas Media Initiative. The films are all independent productions, and, with the...
- 8/5/2013
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
After nearly a decade of focusing his energy on music history television docs, director John Akomfrah has returned to one of his favorite topics, the struggles of minorities, and more specifically here, the wave of immigrants that arrived in the wake of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which was meant to supplement the need for workers post-World War II. Though the subject sounds straightforward, The Nine Muses buries its primary ideas in an avant-garde kaleidoscope of high brow canonical literature, found archival footage, and gorgeously composed, yet strangely haunting images of faceless travelers among the frozen landscape of modern day Alaska. There is something akin to brilliance within, but this repetitive medley of literary legend and immigrant alienation is too dense for its own good.
The film is structured around Homer’s epic tale and the assemblage of inspirational goddesses, the Nine Muses, each taking a chapter within the film.
The film is structured around Homer’s epic tale and the assemblage of inspirational goddesses, the Nine Muses, each taking a chapter within the film.
- 6/26/2012
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
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