Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar (eds.): The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982-1998 (2007)

“The Ghosts of Songs is the first book-length exploration of the work of the Black Audio Film Collective. The collective, founded in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, comprised John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Reece Auguiste, Avril Johnson, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and David Lawson, and for sixteen years their films addressed the social, political and racial crises of Thatcher’s Britain and beyond. However, it would be limiting their achievement to see them either as merely challenging the hegemonic forms of mass media, or conversely as polemicist film activists. In films such as Expeditions, Handsworth Songs, Seven Songs for Malcolm X and Twilight City, the collective explored and developed a black film aesthetic. The essays in this volume, contributed by Jean Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, argue that they inaugurated themselves as an artist-group, laying claim to the right to reconfigure the space of cinema around the Afrodiasporic subject, reconceptualizing lighting, film stock, developing and printing, and inventing the forms that black cinema might take.”

Publisher Liverpool University Press, and FACT, Liverpool, 2007
Changing Media, Changing Europe series
ISBN 1846310148, 9781846310140
239 pages

Exh. review: Josephine Berry Slater (Mute, 2007).
Review: Alexandra M. Kokoli (The Art Book, 2008).

WorldCat

PDF (62 MB)

Alternative Film/Video 2016/17: Discussions: Art Movements / Subversion (2018) [Serbian/English]

This book contains transcripts from two roundtable discussions held during the 2016 and 2017 editions of Alternative Film/Video festival in Belgrade. The themes included the relation of alternative cinema art movements (2016) and subversion (2017).

Participants include Hito Steyerl, Marina Gržinić, Eve Heller, Želimir Žilnik, Peter Tscherkassky, Božidar Zečević, Miloš Miša Radivojević, Zoran Saveski, Lordan Zafranović, Slobodan Šijan, Dejan Sretenović, Greg deCuir, Jr., Bojan Jovanović, Petra Belc, Sebestyén Kodolányi, Miroslav Bata Petrović, Miroljub Stojanović, Bruce Checefsky, Miroslav Bata Petrović, Tomaso Aramini, Zoran Saveski, and Miodrag Milošević.

Publisher Students’ City Cultural Center, Belgrade, 2018
157 pages
via Academic Film Center

PDF (19 MB)

Hito Steyerl: The Language of Broken Glass (2019)

“Can artificial intelligence be taught to recognize the sound of glass breaking? Hito Steyerl presents her new film The City of Broken Windows and addresses the use of AI in security systems.”

Lecture given as part of “Stop Making Sense”, the Opening Days of The New Alphabet program, HKW, Berlin, 12 January 2019.

Publisher Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019
26 min
via HKW

MP4 (215 MB)