Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Afterimage, Sept, 1994 by Laura U. Marks

The frustration of making Who Needs a Heart? suggests why Johnson and Gopaul, in an interview, hinted that Black Audio is moving away from the "archive/memory approach." Johnson points out that the collective's style, though exemplary for a generation of filmmakers, is in danger of becoming a trope. Now Black Audio is trying to come up with other approaches to their enduring concerns. Also, the golden years of the 1980s, when this and other alternative film collectives were relatively well-funded by Channel 4, will probably not be repeated anytime soon. Black Audio's future is largely in collaboration and co-production. Akomfrah's Touch of the Tar Brush (1991), for example, was funded by the BBC for its "Think of England" series; Johnson has been producing a-three-part series called "Beyond the Street" with director Sindamani Briglal, also for the BBC. Gopaul recently produced The Darker Side of Black, a film by Isaac Julien. Black Audio itself is currently raising money from Scandinavian, French, German, and British television for a film called The Forest of Things. How the collective members use this diversification of sponsors and audiences will be instructive to watch.

One work that seemed to draw from the best of Black Audio style was Alexander Kort and Thomasi Macdonald's Imperial's Ism (1993). The short video indicts the management of the Imperial Chicken Factory in North Carolina, whose workers, mostly black women, died in a disastrous fire because they had been locked inside to prevent theft. Macdonald's impassioned reading of his own poem, tested against the restraint of Kort's grainy images, dignifies even this grotesque casualty of capitalism.

The archive also comes under scrutiny in Chronicle of the Uprising in Warsaw Ghetto According to Marek Edelman (1993) by Jolanta Dylewska, a film that recalls not a magnanimous Schindler-style rescue of Jewish victims but the fierce resistance of Jews themselves. Edelman and other members of the Jewish revolutionary group BUND helped hundreds of Jews escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. Dylowska coaxes revelations from the archival footage of the ghetto, playing it in slow motion or scanning its grainy surface ever closer, in vivid counterpoint to the surreal events Edelman recalls in terrible detail.

The right to make media is one of the human rights celebrated in this festival: witness the participation of the organization Filmfree, which documents the censorship and imprisonment of filmmakers worldwide.(2) Filmfree sponsored the screening of two films banned in China. To make I Have Graduated (1992), about the youngest generation of university students involved in the Tiananmen massacre, the film collective SWYC smuggled cameras into dorms at Beijing and Qinghua universities. Remarkable for their mix of cynicism and romanticism, the students write heart-tugging love songs, recount suicide attempts and the deaths of friends, and know their degrees in philosophy will get them only bureaucratic jobs in the boondocks if they aren't Party members. Production of director Zhang Yuan's film Chicken Feathers was halted because his previous films had been shown outside China without official permission; this is documented in Discussions Caused by a Film's Filming Being Stopped. Zhang is a freelancer, not a member of a film unit, and thus especially vulnerable to government censorship. To share vigil, in real time, with the mourning and chainsmoking crew feels like an act of solidarity with struggling freelancers the world over.