The Last Angel of History
1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
ResumoEvoking Walter Benjamin's famous image of history as an angel who is at once looking backward at past as she is flying forward toward future, John Akomfrah's latest film essay is a similarly non-linear flight through a history of science fiction art and its relation to Pan-African experience. As Akomfrah himself has said: these issues are not simply related, the Black experience is science fiction! The Last Angel of History (1996) looks at tropes of science fiction genre with its images of spaceships, time travel and high-tech futurism as they appear in Pan-African culture. In his film, Akomfrah claims science fiction as an integral part of some of most innovative elements of African Diasporic culture. He sees sci-fi as expression of a metaphor for both otherness in relation to white world, and certain discourses of black cultural liberation. These are large claims, but they are made uniquely if not quite convincingly in film. The Last Angel of History is produced by Akomfrah as part of London-based Black Audio Film Collective, one of seminal black media groups to emerge out of British media workshop movement of 1980s. Since 1983 they have produced a series of innovative film essays including Handsworth Songs (1986) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), each providing a unique exploration of politics of representation and questioning national identity within African Diaspora. Working across history of black music, literature and contemporary post-colonial and post-humanist cultural theory, film connects ancient African folklore and current afro-futurism in black avant-garde and popular cultures to create what Akomfrah calls a digitized memory. My own understanding of in relation to race memory comes from digital hyper-media models that emphasize intertextuality through interactive, nonlinear linking of and navigating through, disparate moments in time, geographical sites, texts, images and people. It is from working across such disparate elements that one can begin to define what might constitute a digital narrative of black history. The Last Angel of History begins with figure of early twentieth-century itinerant bluesman Robert Johnson, who, as legend has it, made a pact with Devil so that he might become world's greatest bluesman. This otherworldly connection explains for many power and innovation of his music. Johnson becomes part of a lineage of innovative artists including futurist composers Sun Ra and George Clinton. Sun Ra claims to be from another galaxy and with his big band, Arkestra, weave together sonic images of space-time travel and exploration with early Egyptian mythology. This kind of future-past evocation is also a metaphor for his unique musical hybrid of traditional Jazz and avant-garde forms of African American and European music. Clinton, an inventor of electronic funk music, also fosters a persona of an extraterrestrial: he arrives in his Mothership to expose human to cosmic mind/body expanding music of Funkadelic. Like Sun Ra in Jazz, Clinton uses intergalactic travel as a metaphor for a kind of hybrid exploration of popular music forms from R & B, to psychedelic rock, to purely electronic music. This lineage is placed in relation to contemporary popular forms such as Techno, Dub, Jungle and Rap music and their pre-occupation with high technology as a way to create new sounds never heard before. In film's non-linear fashion, we see an array of archival photographs and film footage of these artists in performance along with interviews with Clinton and various contemporary musicians and critics including Greg Tate, Lee Perry and DJ-Spooky. This history is intercut with images of early Egyptian culture and African folklore about man's relation to cosmos. The interviewees speak of interconnectedness of certain African traditions of astronomy and sun/sky worship and contemporary spaceship image. …
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