Show 4 - Special Episode - Black British Film on The Cusp of The New Decade

This week on Agoston's Film Odyssey we reach a single-issue special episode about Black British Films exploring motifs and character types in 3 key films from the last few years.

The last tree:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7802246/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_The%2520last%2520tree

His House:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8508734/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_His%2520house

Ear for Eye:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13599944/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_Ear%2520for%2520eye

Check out my website for more content: https://agostonsfilmodyssey.com, and if you like my stuff please support me by subscribing here or at Patreon. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy. :)

Transcript

Hello fellow humans. Beautiful misfits and weirdos. This is Ágoston Hajnal speaking from the wilderness of London in the United Kingdom. I am a film enthusiast with many different passions and curiosities, a Master's degree in Film Studies and another one in journalism. I call this podcast my film odyssey.

If you are listening to this right now I'm glad we have bumped into each other in this over-saturated landscape of sound. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy. 

This week we reach our fourth podcast which is a single-issue special episode. I will talk about Black British Film and explore motifs and character types in three key films made around the cusp of the new decade. I dedicate this episode to the memory of the great bell hooks who was still alive at the time of the original recording. She has been a tremendous inspiration and influence on me and I hope that many more people find her work. Credit also goes to www.zapsplat.com for the soundscapes and sound effects. Without further ado here it goes...


In a world of what bell hooks calls “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”, the black film is struggling not only to survive but to be born and born again. I am Ágoston Hajnal, and this is Black British Film on The Cusp of The New Decade.

After the recent protests of Black Lives Matter, we are at what seems like a watershed cultural moment. Due to systemic inequalities, the primary focus of black filmmakers is forced to remain with questions of representation. As explained by Clyde Nwonka and Sarita Malik, the neoliberal capitalist logic of appropriating and selling blackness as a fresh new commodity and its illusory “celebration of difference” is being used “to mask the structures of power, associated with the production of class and ethnic inequality.” While this will likely lead to more opportunities for black artists and might help them find their audience, these problematic aspects of the system must be called out. Regardless of what will happen, the struggle has already been creating remarkable films about black identity. 

In this podcast, I analyze specific scenes from three recent Black British films The Last Tree, His House, and Ear for Eye, with all three having their genesis way before this recent resurgence of interest. I explore thematic tropes, motifs, and character types, and how these are expressed through film language and performance. Beyond the similarities of these aspects and the filmmaker’s predominantly Nigerian and Caribbean background, the three films are diverse, all showing a multidimensionality of difference and the unique point of view of the artists behind them. 

Although more accessible than the Avant-garde works of 80s black film workshops Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo, and others, all three films go beyond realism as a style to counter-attack dominant modes of representation and the realist tradition of British film. These works fight stereotypical representation through what Stuart Hall called “trans-coding”, “which is about taking an existing meaning and re-appropriating it for new meaning” and also through what Kobena Mercer defined as a critical approach, “that promotes consciousness of the collision of cultures and histories that constitute” Black British diaspora identity, and its representation. 

Even if a true return to the motherland from the diaspora is not really possible, just like one cannot return to Lacan’s “imaginary”, to an absolute beginning and erase what followed, as Hall pointed out, this displacement can still be an “infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, and discovery” and a “reservoir of cinematic narratives.” 

The Last Tree written and directed by Nigerian British filmmaker Shola Amoo is an autobiographical coming-of-age drama about a displaced young black man, partly raised by a white foster mother, and his search for an identity and belonging in postcolonial Britain of the early 2000s. 

The mise-en-scene operates with an intensified subjectivity. The jittery editing of Mdhamiri Á Nkemi and the often tumbling and sweeping but painterly camera of Stil Williams express the motif of an othered, distorted, and fragmented identity that shattered through the whirlwind of displacement and must be pieced together again. 

In the scene where he runs away from his mother's punishment, Olufemi hears his full name, and with it, his identity is reconstituted as Nigerian, but far away from its original context and milieu. This evokes the experience of what Kobena Mercer called “cultural fragmentation and displaced selfhood”. His full of adrenalin state is reflected by the camera circling around him in slow motion and the sound getting distorted, expressing an invisible force field of alienation weighing him down. As he is trying to find a connection with something or someone to base his self-concept on, the depth of field is extremely low. As he misses Mary and is unsure about who he is now, the score is mysterious and yearning. 

This leads us to the second motif of black skins, white masks, and black masks. Based on his handling of themes integral to the diaspora experience, Amoo clearly has a decolonizing intent, looking at questions of race critically and reflectively. 

The phenomena of internalized racism that Frantz Fanon called wearing a white mask is presented in the scene where the also black Dean excludes Olufemi, positioning himself as 'whiter', more belonging to the status quo than someone who is also black, but has a West African name.

Samuel Adewunmi’s complex characterization shows the older Femi’s disposition of stoic macho-ness and repressed emotions. It is a cultivation of a culturally constructed black mask of behaviors - as highlighted by Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien - both contesting and confirming the stereotype. He secretly likes The Cure but pretends to listen to gangster rapper Tupac instead.

Upon considering this identity, we reach our third motif of exile, travel, return, and belonging through post-colonial spaces. 

Teshome Gabriel has pinpointed a “journey theme” in “black film”, centered on questions of “wandering, exile, migration and homeland” where the “land ceases to be mere land, and only exists as a kind of mythic wilderness”, expressing a sense of rootlessness but also endless possibilities. 

In the final scene of travel, we see the impoverished but full-of-light Lagos. The camera is at first at an approximately 60-degree angle to the right, looking slightly towards the past but resolutely moving ahead, then looking fully behind, including Yinke in the same shot now with Femi, evoking both a sense of belonging together and what is called Sankofa, defined by Shin as “a mythic bird, looking into the past to prepare for the future” and “assess its relevance for the present”. Lagos is larger than Lincolnshire but similarly close to nature and has the rushing multitudes of life, like London, coalescing the separate pieces of Femi’s puzzle of identity. 

This leads to the fourth motif, which is about the protagonist finding his black power, agency, spirituality, and freedom.

Femi is the first incarnation of the character type I call The Seeker who in his diaspora existence is looking for what Hall defined as “one true self” and is on a path that Fanon described as “a profound research”.

In the final scenes, Femi crosses a bridge to receive an Ifá prayer from a priest. His chanting in Yoruba is drowned out by the sounds of gentle, sparse rain and birds. Silence and slow motion are used to emphasize the magnitude of this spiritual moment. On the beach, he walks into the ocean, with Segun Akinola’s score turning profound and ethereal. There are flashbacks as he runs as a child through the rural fields of Lincolnshire and howls, mending the connection between who he was and who he is now. His adult howl is deep, primal, and joyous. He now belongs to himself. 

His House, written and directed by Nigerian British filmmaker Remi Weekes, is a horror about a South Sudanese refugee couple who are placed in a house in the UK that is haunted by the specters of their trauma. 

In this film, the othering, distortion, and fragmentation of identities is expressed invisibly through the score and sound design, its ambivalence of tones, and also by Wunmi Mosaku’s and Sope Dirisu’s performances of wide-ranging emotions. In classic horror fashion, the fracture is internal and rarely seen. As the house reflects the characters’ psychological states and takes on a dream within a dream logic, it becomes a surreally changing metaphysical space with different layers of reality and the psyche. Ghosts and a witch appear simultaneously as the wallpaper peels off and the protagonists mentally come apart. This complexity is also expressed through Jo Willems’ shadowy cinematography, special effects, art direction, and mask work, while underneath the elements of the genre, Weekes is telling a story defined by Gilroy as a "narrative of redemption and emancipation".   

Bol wants to put their grief behind them, while Rial wants to pay a debt for having survived. This is the first scene where their opposition crystallizes, facing the camera’s eye. Rial speaks Dinka and Bol sticks to English, rejecting the Dinka religion as the horror of othering invades their relationship, and both start to mistrust and fear each other. This same horror is embodied by the white-skinned witch who invades Bol's body through his wound. He is what bell hooks called “whiteness as a representation of terror in the black imagination.” His violence recalls Fanon's notion of the black colonial subject “bursting apart” and being reconstituted as a stranger to themselves.  

The motif of black skins, white masks, and black masks connects directly to this in the scene where Rial is wearing her bedsheet as an African gown. She asks if Bol told Mark about the witch. She is performing her black mask and “self-exoticism” as defined by Thomas Elsaesser, fighting the objectifying white gaze by giving it what it wants to see, an ironic spectacle of herself as a dark other, crazy and superstitious. In this act of defiance, her pride in her culture and difference is powerfully expressed. She looks down at the English in their Western comfort, nihilism, spiritual emptiness, and polite concealment of hostility and condescension. She taunts Bol for wanting to assimilate through his patriarchal white masking of Western fashion and approval-seeking smiles that diffuse the perceived threat of his difference.

The motif of exile, travel, return, and belonging through postcolonial spaces is shown in the iconography of destitute refugees on roads and seas of uncertainty. Rial is followed by tracking shots through the labyrinthine housing estate, with the frantic movements and the menacing score expressing her confusion. A white teen follows her and a group of local black boys make fun of her South Sudanese accent as she asks for directions in disoriented, broken speech. They wear the white masks of cultural superiority, telling Rial to speak English and go back to Africa, aligning themselves with the status quo of Britishness to reassert their agency and belonging, rather than express pan-African solidarity. As bell hooks says, to travel is “to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy.”

The motif of black power, agency, spirituality, and freedom is expressed in the scene of confrontation with the witch. Bol cuts himself over his survivor’s guilt and trades his life for Nyagak's. In confessing to Rial that he can see the ghosts too, he finally faces his trauma. The witch breaks through the floor to consume him. Paradoxically, the choice of giving himself over displays his agency. Rial is a Seeker looking for her “one true self” through a spiritual and political consciousness, while he has just awakened. We hear a forlorn guitar, intense slow drums, and chants as Rial sorrowfully tunes out his agony. Nyagak appears and forgivingly takes her hand, with Roque Banos’ score turning ethereal by a female aria, then profound by a collective of strings. As she flashes back to her dead sisters as an act of Sankofa and says goodbye to them, Rial defiantly chooses her home to be in the present and cuts the throat of the witch. 

A gentle African song intones as Rial and Bol hold hands again. They are surrounded by the serene ghosts of refugees from all over. The fourth wall is broken as the displaced humans of the Third World give a peaceful but unshunnable look back at a First World audience. No one can dehumanize them anymore. This is their home now and they belong here.


Ear for Eye - adapted by playwright and filmmaker Debbie Tucker Green from her own 2018 stage play - is about UK and US black people contemplating systemic racism, protest vs revolution, past, present, and future. It is an unconventional experiment that challenges its audience – white and black – to decolonize our minds. It mixes theatre and its poetic and rhythmic repetition of dialogue with the cinematic tools of montage, color and black and white cinematography, and animation, underscored by dynamic hip-hop beats. 

The line "Marching days is over" evokes our travel motif in the form of Sankofa and makes it a purely mental journey of evolved political consciousness and a crisis of faith in the teachings of earlier movements. By minimalist staging, the spaces become metaphysical. The characters are not separated by geography or history as UK and US citizens. They are always collectively having a dialogue of Pan-African solidarity not defined by their physical location but by their similar experiences. Standing in a black void, with water at their feet, the space is like the river Styx of black identity. 

Part two deploys the 3 motifs of identity fragmentation, masks, and black power in a long argument scene between a US student and her white male professor. He has a sense of superiority and putative objectivity that ignores psychological and systemic complexities and what hooks calls intersectionality. He uses her admission of depression to discredit her argument, characterizing her as the angry black female stereotype, which according to Hall “reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes difference” and “excludes everything which does not belong.” This also recalls what Paul Gilroy characterized as “a pathological construction of blackness.”

The professor projects his solipsism and anger onto her as his narrative of lone, non-political, depressed youth keeps failing. His well-meaning liberal paternalism is undermined by his urge to brush his white privilege under the carpet and his refusal to name such people as what they are: Terrorists. Countering his criminalization of mental illness, the student argues that it’s not the reason nor the explanation for such acts of violence. The culprit is the sense of entitlement and arrogance of structural, societal, religious, and organized white male supremacy that instills the belief that one has the right to dehumanize and destroy others. She also makes a credible connection between the genocide of black people in the past and the racial violence of the present.

As tensions rise, she becomes conscious of her hand gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions, policing how she comes across to make herself non-threatening in a temporary regression into white-masking. Her hands are cut off by tight frames, unsure of what to do with them as she is trying to orient herself, expressing her othered and fragmented black identity. She becomes sarcastic, then passionately confrontational, not consciously performing a black mask but being othered as such. Her honesty is a plea to be seen as a whole by the white other who cannot see her humanity. Agitated cymbals begin as the background is saturated by a blood-like substance, and the soundscape is a foreboding hum and sirens. Shots of contemplation precede reoccurring snare drums, with sounds of explosions and cries of chaos. Bright points of light explode around the two figures and slow-motion shots of dust storms hover in space. Dissolve to splintered, breaking, and falling glass surfaces and gunshots on the soundtrack, showing the breach of glass ceilings the student attempts and in her defiant argument achieves, one point was driven home after the other like well-aimed bullets. His voice becomes disembodied as he's losing his ground, while the splinters of his verbal attacks are shown by jump cuts. They circle a table, the visual and aural cues not only serving as flashbacks to the events spoken of but signaling the ruptures of verbal blows exchanged and the sense of self coming apart in a fierce intellectual battle. As she finally silences him with the truth of her argument, it is a moment of black power and political agency. As portrayed by Lashana Lynch, she is a Seeker, looking for her “one true self”, full of openness and brave uncertainty. 

At the end, rain falls on the crowd dressed in black and in perpetual mourning. The US young adult runs around in frantic fast-motion disorientation. The others passively console him but don't join him in his rage. As he paces and repeats the same frustrations endlessly, his voice is drowned out by Luke Sutherland’s somber, pulsating piano-synth score, expressing a sense of spiritual limbo. 

In the words of bell hooks “Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” As indicated by Tucker Green’s critical eye, the patriarchal approach of the past and the present has failed to liberate people. Maybe it's time for a "her story." 

Hello, fellow humanoids! True originals. If you are still listening or just joining us now I am Ágoston Hajnal and this is my film odyssey. Please check out my website for more content. It is www.agostonsfilmodyssey.com. That is A.G.O.S.T.O.N. You can also follow me on Instagram, X, Facebook, and Tumblr, links are in the description. Thank you for coming with me on this journey and I hope to see you next time.