Mass unemployment, IRA hunger strikes, race riots: the early 1980s was a turbulent period. In response, seven young black Britons at Portsmouth Polytechnic banded together as the Black Audio Film Collective. The filmmaker John Akomfrah, son of exiled Ghanaian radicals, was their charismatic spokesman, but each had their own interests—anti-colonial politics, sociology, psychoanalysis, post-punk music. What united them was a desire to make work rooted in British, rather than black American, aesthetics. Until they disbanded in 1998, their experimental films were closer in spirit to seminar rooms than soapboxes. They preferred elliptical questions to militant slogans and were as likely to be screened in art galleries as in high-street cinemas. These days you can find them on Amazon Prime or YouTube.
Black Audio began work on their remarkable first film Signs of Empire in 1982. Originally exhibited as a tape-slide production, it’s an eerie and unsettling exploration of the iconography of British imperialism. There are lingering images of statues and monuments commemorating Victorian heroes, close-ups of the soldiers who propped up British dominion, hundreds of sepia photographs of proud Englishmen standing beside flayed colonial subjects or tiger-hunt spoils. Trevor Mathison’s sound design is a ghostly mix of loops, musique concrète and distorted samples, including Tory MP Ronald Bell asserting that one need only look at the faces of immigrant children to see that “they don’t know who they are, or what they are.”
Signs of Empire suggests connections between a colonial past and a postcolonial present, but what these might be remain deliberately opaque. Many images are overlaid with elegant calligraphy and phrases made using Letraset that wouldn’t look out of place on the sleeves of arty record labels. The film delves into the nation’s dark past but, perhaps confoundingly, looks beautiful. It’s more moodscape than agit prop, less interested in fist-waving anger than melancholic ambiguity.
These days it’s hard to move for polemical histories auditing British imperialism. Signs of Empire, though, preceded the rise of postcolonial studies and critical race theory. When I talk to Akomfrah, now a celebrated filmmaker, he recalls: “Black Audio were very conscious of the fact that many of the categories and the concepts we were throwing up—‘palimpsests,’ ‘the hinterlands of narrative,’ ‘the rhetoric of race’—were speaking to a theory-to-come that hadn’t been born. Even though we were very young, we just knew it was a matter of time before people would start to question restricted ideas about national identity and whiteness. We knew the long postcolonial fire would reach our shores, would burn. But we needed to push for it, to push for that complexity.”
Signs of Empire feels resonant because of its attention to statues. Black Audio zoomed in on details that made them look fragmented and ruined. They tilted them, made them look rusted, dented their grandeur. Akomfrah has fond memories of filming at the Mall and the Albert Memorial: “as filmmakers you have to get pretty close to them. Sometimes sit on them. The fact that we were a ragamuffin, motley crew of young black kids meant that everyone who saw us assumed we were up to no good. We were supposed to be busying ourselves with chasing old ladies and taking their money!” This proximity was crucial, though. “I love the Albert Memorial. It’s a profound work. But it’s when you’re in the statues’ presence that you have to have the argument with the fiction they propose—the argument about the brilliance and excellence of empire.”
What went through his mind when he saw slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol being torn down? “I saw the triumph of ethics. The so-called defenders of tradition inaugurate this enormous thing called ‘the law.’ They forget that before the law there’s the ethical. You know, having slaves was law; it doesn’t make it right! Many of those young activists understood this. They understood that Colston’s statue was something monstrous. Toppling the statue freed us. It freed the nation from this slavish adherence to the immoral in the name of justice.”
The Colston controversy made Akomfrah reflect on the changes in British society over the last 40 years. “You can take a camera and deconstruct statues and pull them down that way. But if, back in 1982, we had done what those protesters in Bristol did, we would have served life prison sentences. Literally. So that’s how much things have changed. These changes are both absolutely necessary and completely heartening. It is possible now to challenge some of these monstrous legacies in the language of the ethical and—possibly—win in a court case. It certainly wasn’t possible in 1982.”
