Stuart Hall: Mourning, migration and Miles Davis

Early in the summer of 2012, I spent an afternoon at the North London home of the cultural theorist and left-wing intellectual Stuart Hall. Our conversation ranged widely, from the birth of the New Left in Britain after Suez and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to the cultural politics of Thatcherism. Hall also spoke, with great feeling, about the “emotional damage” that his “cultural formation” in the Caribbean had done to him. (Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932 and came to Britain on a Rhodes scholarship in 1951.) “I went to one of the big Jamaican boys’ schools,” he told me. “It was a good academic education, but it was a deracination in terms of cultural connections. My family belonged to a very particular formation — middle-class and coloured, not black. So I didn’t feel like an ordinary black Jamaican boy.”

In John Akomfrah’s magnificent new documentary, The Stuart Hall Project which opens in London this week, we see footage of an adult Hall returning to the school that formed him in such complex ways.

This is just one episode in a remarkable haul of archive material that Akomfrah has assembled in order to tell the story of Hall’s life and career and with it the story of the post-war intellectual left in Britain. I spoke to Akomfrah last week about the film.

Jonathan Derbyshire: This is an extraordinarily moving film for several reasons. It’s an act of memory but it’s also an act of mourning isn’t it? Mourning for a certain idea of what it is to be a left intellectual and also to be, as Stuart Hall was, a black intellectual.

John Akomfrah: Very much so. Although I should say that that wasn’t the ambition when I started off. The idea initially was just to see what there was of Stuart Hall’s output that formed any kind of coherent line of ideas about being a public intellectual in this country. As it went on, I came to realise that, in a way, what we had, in microcosm, was the evolution, the maturity and, in some ways, the ageing of that entity, which made it a slightly more elegiac piece than I’d set out to make. So a roundup of a life has become a sort of epitaph.

JD: The end of the film is particularly moving — there’s a moment when Hall says, “The world is stranger to me than it has ever been before.”

JA: I’d done another project with him — a three-screen gallery piece that will open at the Tate in October — using pretty much the same material but concentrating on his early life. The aim was to try and see how much this idea of identity being an unfinished conversation applied to Hall’s own evolution. And it stopped at around 1968. So it was catching him in ascent, as it were. Whereas with this film, it struck me that what we were also talking about was the process of ageing — both of ideas and the physical self. So that meant that at some point you were going to see him slightly out of joint with the present. But none of this was planned. It’s a matter of seeing what happens when you trust to the process of montage.

JD: One of the most impressive things about the film is the way it handles the relationship between Hall’s personal itinerary and, not to be too grandiose about it, the history of postwar Britain. The film moves very subtly, throughout, between those two levels.

JA: The minute he started to open up to us a few years back, especially once he’d done Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, he began to talk about his formation as a kind of flight from the Caribbean.

JD: He does talk almost as if escape from the circumstances of his Jamaican upbringing was a condition of self-discovery, self-fashioning doesn’t he?

JA: Yes. The one recurring disagreement that we had concerned how committed he is to the notion of discontinuity. He just doesn’t trust continuities of any kind! You can see the extent to which that then forms this kind of ceaseless quest to make and re-make things — which he says is the basis of identity-formation in general. Yet there are also certain stable obsessions of his — political obsessions among other things.

JD: Were you surprised by the sheer amount of archive material you managed to turn up? I’d never seen, for example, the footage of Hall from the late 1950s, the era of the first New Left, when he was instrumental in setting up first Universities and Left Review and then New Left Review.

JA: I had no idea that that stuff existed. And certainly nothing in the conversations I had with him had led me to think that there’d be so much of it still around—from both radio and television. In the past, going to the BBC to try and get stuff you’d inevitably come across paperwork for stuff that had been produced but had since disappeared. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of his history, and by implication, of the left’s formation and evolution still remained.

JD: In the press materials for the film you refer to something you call the “recycled aesthetics of the past”. How does that express itself in the visual grammar of the film?

JA: The idea of literally recycling material from the past is both an ethical and aesthetic choice. Ethical in the sense that I genuinely believe that there are things of value to be found in these acts of rescue. Not all of the stuff that’s in the film plays to Hall’s own trajectory and biography. So part of the aesthetic ambition was to try and find things that would work as a counterpoint to the ideas — general stuff about what it is to live in England. That offered another vantage point from which one can look at the life. Others are things that one knew would have had an impact on his formation but weren’t necessarily things he has spoken directly about in the archive. For instance, I know Vietnam was a major moment for him, and of course for large sections of the left, though he doesn’t refer to Vietnam himself. It just felt necessary to have his voice sit next to some of that material.

JD: One formative influence, and he acknowledges this explicitly in the voiceover to the film, is the music of Miles Davis. There’s a moment when he’s talking about Miles and he says, “Nostalgia for what cannot be is in the sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet”. That’s connected with the theme of mourning and memory isn’t it? Because it’s also nostalgia for what can no longer be.

JA: There’s another thing that he says about Miles that I really like—that when he was young, “Miles Davis put his finger on my soul”. That’s a great phrase! What we’re trying to do in the film is ask about the things that put a finger on our souls—in this case the soul of a left intellectual. Clearly for Stuart that melancholic tone of Miles Davis speaks all sorts of other truths than merely musical ones. So it seemed to me worth exploring to what extent that music’s elegiac tone can be commandeered to speak about politics and culture.

JD: As the story moves into the Seventies, which Hall, in the voiceover, characterises as an era of crisis, Miles’s tone changes doesn’t it? It’s less elegiac and more violent.

JA: There was a moment when we realised that all the musical shifts in Miles fit certain epistemic changes in our world. That was uncanny.

JD: You mentioned Miles Davis putting his finger on Stuart Hall’s soul. There’s also a sense in which Hall himself put his finger on your soul as a young black man growing up in Britain in the 1970s isn’t there? What was your first encounter with him?

JA: I’d heard his name come up in a left study group. And I have to say that at that point I didn’t realise he was black. I remember seeing him in an Open Door programme made by the Campaign Against Racism in the Media and there he was. I think this was 1978. I thought, “Wow! He’s black!” Then there was the realisation that almost everybody I knew who was of colour and also reading radical material or into that world had seen that same programme and had been taken aback in the same way. I think from the late Seventies onwards, he became important for us. It was really, really critical that we found him as we struggled to make sense of being both inside and outside something, of becoming comfortable with the idea that you were always going to carry that stigmata of race but that it didn’t have to be a negative thing. I’m talking about those of us who were slightly nerdy and didn’t want to be dancers or football players but wanted to live the life of the mind. For us, he was absolutely critical.

JD: What impact has he and his thought had on your cinematic practice. I’m thinking of your first film Handsworth Songs for example. Did his book Policing the Crisis, about the racial politics of the mid-to late 1970s, influence you?

JA: That book was absolutely seminal. If anything, it was the charismatic example of that book rather than any direct quotation or line … The idea that there was a way of thinking about race that wasn’t just negative or positive. The sense that what shaped the discourse of race were larger blocs in society, that race wasn’t a self-contained fragment on the edge of things but could actually be at the centre of things — those were all ways of thinking about race that we took from him. There was a received wisdom about how to talk about what was then called “race relations”. Policing the Crisis was part of an attempt to think beyond that, but not necessarily in a triumphalist way. Policing the Crisis wasn’t saying there was something heroic about being black and being seen as a mugger. That was one of the things that we liked about it. It was saying that there were all sorts of things happening and that they intersected. So it wasn’t an apologia for bad behaviour. It was just a really intelligent, considered way of coming at the problem of black estrangement and state hostility.

"The Stuart Hall Project" opens at the ICA and Curzon Renoir in London on 6^th September, and is at BFI Southbank from 13^th September. 

Watch a trailer for the film here