Handsworth Songs: An Eerie Experiment in Subconscious Storytelling
‘Handsworth Songs’ is the title of a 1986 experimental film produced by east London’s Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC). The group consisted of seven Black-British and diaspora multimedia artists including John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul. Its members included Fine Art and Sociology students who were interested in contemporary debates surrounding postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory.
The BAFC sought to promote a black cultural presence in British media and arts in order to create political visibility, particularly in response to the civil disturbances in the 1980s against British institutional racism. For example, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself sought to attract votes from far-right groups (like the National Front) by reconciling with them on anti-immigration sentiments. The collective sought to garner an artistic awareness of these issues by producing experimental films which would emphasise the subjective experiences of people in black and brown communities.
The title refers to the district of Handsworth in Birmingham, which saw rioting in 1981 over racial tensions and inner-city deprivation, though there were equally serious riots over the same concerns in Brixton, London, and Moss Side, Manchester. The film itself avoids the traditional realism of the documentary form, as well as any fixed narrative, and offers a multi-layered, multi-stranded narrative made up of newsreels, still photographs, interviews, and poetic voice-overs.
The lack of any clear structure to these various materials encourages the viewer to put together their own narratives based on personal reaction to the evidence presented. Ultimately it avoids pushing any authorial, ‘true’ telling of events, its fragmented structure hinting at the possibility that there is no unitary or linear cause of the disturbances.
In the first few scenes, there is a clear attempt to disorient the viewer. First, we see a black museum attendant overseeing a piece of machinery, in black and white footage dated prior to the production of the film. This takes us back into the past, with the machinery as a symbol of economic preeminence bound with empire. Therefore, a clearly postcolonial image is created of a British diasporic subject exercising control over Britain’s past.
We then cut to footage of birds and trees - a typical presentation of peace and harmony that is disturbed quickly after by a sporadic syncopation of sound which makes the listener feel irritated on a subconscious level. All the while are interjections of clips of a mechanical clown which continues to intensify the sinister quality of the opening scenes.
The purposeful disorientation of the viewer from the very beginning signals the necessity to actively reflect on the process of film production being presented, as these images communicate how the everyday experiences of black people and the exceptional practices of state violence (footage of which ensues) are actually intimately bound.
The representation of ordinary voices from the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities of particularly London and Birmingham, especially the inclusion of interviews spoken in Patwah (Jamaican Creole), de-normalizes the expectation of received-pronunciation English and white-British faces in a British documentary.
There is a point at which we see footage of the funeral of Mrs. Cynthia Jarett, the riots in London being partly sparked by the event of her heart failure after an invasive police search of her house. The scene is surrounded by shots of cameramen, press, and crowds of other onlookers, suggesting the media’s responsibility in generating certain perceptions of the riots as well as their accountability in sensationalizing black death.
The abundance of anecdotal accounts detailing the roots of the riot and direct footage of police brutality are edited one after the other in a way that leaves space for the viewer to form new connections between what is being presented. This coincides with the technique of montage which is also used generously.
Now well-renowned, the montage came out of Soviet experimental cinema of the 1920s and made use of juxtaposing shots against each other, to produce meaning out of this collision. The film, therefore, collides accounts of visual material in a way that communicates the experiences of black and brown communities in cities without narrating it, the images themselves providing a vehicle for communicating many possible narratives. It avoids teaching white people about the violence of the period and instead offers a collection that represents the events with an emphasis on the subjectivity of those most affected by it.
One of the main themes of ‘Handsworth Songs’ is fear. Beyond the anxiety cultivated by the haunting sound design, detached poetic voice-overs, and dire clips of community struggle, it includes a clip of an interview with Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher addresses how those within the white-Britsh majority are frightened by the ‘threat’ of immigration, using the past-tense verb ‘swamped’ twice in an insidious reference to the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech by Enoch Powell, who was a hero to those opposed to immigration. The interview then jumps to footage of a black civilian man being chased by police. The collision produced by these scenes therefore highlights the irony of white fear at a time when such acts of brutality were a possibility to be constantly feared by black communities.
‘Handsworth Songs,’ the Black Audio Film Collective’s award-winning documentary that might be better described as an art-house film essay, is a remarkable experiment in political representation and promoting the visibility of marginal, particularly Black-British experiences in media and the arts.
Its complex and high-concept portrayals of the struggles of black communities have been criticized as being inaccessible, especially considering how Channel 4 commissioned the documentary to be featured as part of their series Britain: Lie of the Land - a rare opportunity at the time for such widespread exposure of black representation.
Nevertheless, the collective achieved what it set out to with the making of Handsworth Songs: to collapse the distinction between audience and production so that viewers could engage critically with how racist ideas and images of black people are presented in both arts and the media. Beyond this, it successfully made the point that art does not have to prioritize accessibility, especially when the existence of its makers are seen as inherently political in a society against which that very art seeks to encourage independent criticism.