on the experience of migration, of never really arriving, even when one is “there.”

a more classical figure of the epic hero whose very mode of being is the journey.

central to Akomfrah’s work: how it is possible to “open up” an image, to detach an image from the narrative and the chronology of which it used to be a part. 

On Handsworth Songs – JA – There was a matrix of representation and we were reporting it, we were producing it, we were going to be responsible for it. As a result all sorts of political, ethical, and cultural assumptions that we’d made before that moment started to be dissolved.

… actually what happens in one afternoon has decades in it.

…We didn’t claim to be political theo-rists with all the answers. Because in some ways it was the very idea that there was an answer that the film was trying to problematize. Because all the “answers” seemed to suggest that someone was at fault. And invariably the category that was as fault was the “rioters.” So it was a more complicated attempt to look at why people do what they do—why does anybody do what they do?

…It’s not entirely coincidental that the year government says to its citizens “the party’s over, go home and suffer” that, for the first time in twenty-five years, a group of people takes to the street to perform an unlawful protest. It’s not a coincidence, and anyone who thinks it is misjudges the intelligence of the populace.

…the archive survives in a very complicated way for diasporic subjectivities. Someone made the point that disaporic lives are characterized by the absence of monuments that attest to your existence, so in a way the archival inventory is that monument. But it’s contradictory because the archive is also the space of a certain fabulations and fictions. So there needs to be critical interrogation of the archive. One of the important ways of doing this is to remove the narrative voice. Once you remove the voice, nine times out of ten the images start to say something else.

…. You need to extract the images and the narratives and the stories out of a certain preformed chain.

…We have to always see the things around that are useful: what Milton and others say about the numinous or the liminal is just incredible, and I wanted to use that.

Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry: Interview with John Akomfrah
Author(s): Nina Power
Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 59-63
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2011.65.2.59
Accessed: 29-04-2018 15:58 UTC