COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 2: TESTAMENT

What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.

The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.

John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective TESTAMENT 1988, 80 min, 16mm-to-DCP TESTAMENT is among the earliest feature-length works created by the pioneering UK-based art group, Black Audio Film Collective (of which John Akomfrah was a founding member). Synthesizing the languages of Third Cinema and avant-garde montage with the lamentational affects of postcolonial disillusionment, TESTAMENT offers a probing spectral meditation on the condition of the African postcolony. The film’s protagonist, Abena, is an exiled activist turned television reporter who returns to Ghana two decades after the 1966 coup that brought an end to President Kwame Nkrumah’s experiment in Pan-African socialism. Adrift in a “war zone of memories,” Abena is caught in the cleavage between public history and private memory. Characteristic of the collective’s now-signature blend of archival documents, fictional sequences, and layered sound scores, TESTAMENT enfolds depopulated frames, frigid tones, allegories of mourning, and a cast of enigmatic characters to evoke an emotional landscape of loss and arrested political possibility.

Introduced by Christian Nyampeta.

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