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Akomfrah John , director. The Stuart Hall Project . 2013. 103 minutes. English. U.K. Smoking Dogs Films. $350.00/£19.99.
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With his feature documentary The Stuart Hall Project, John Akomfrah presents the viewer with a precious gift: 103 minutes with Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born scholar and founding pillar of academic cultural studies in the United Kingdom, co-founder of the New Left Review, and one of the most brilliant contemporary thinkers and cultural studies theorists. In order to create this compelling and very moving portrait, Akomfrah combed through more than eight hundred hours of archival images, television news footage, home videos, family photos, and Open University lecture scenes of Hall, showing him as a teacher, thinker, husband, father, and activist grappling with issues of identity politics and the meaning of being black in Britain, the African diaspora, and indeed, the world.
Akomfrah is a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain whose award-winning debut documentary, Handsworth Songs, in 1986, positioned its members as innovators at the forefront of the black British arts scene from the mid-1980s onward. Following several other notable releases such as Testament (1988), Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), and The Last Angel of History (1995), the collective disbanded in 1998 with Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson going on to create Smoking Dogs Films and continuing to produce complex, deeply layered media texts that challenge spectator positioning and foreground issues of identity.
The Stuart Hall Project is part of Akomfrah's expanded cinema project on Hall and had its genesis in a three-screen film installation, The Unfinished Conversation (2013), first presented at the Tate Britain in London. In an interview with Georgia Korossi ("The Stuart Hall Project: John Akomfrah Interview," BFI News, Feb. 21, 2014;...