Ghosts of Stories: Black Audio Film Collective's Who Needs a Heart? (1996)

Black Audio Film Collective's Who Needs a Heart? The operation of the value-form makes every commitment negotiable, however urgent it might seem or be. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Public and critical responses to Who Needs a Heart? (1991), a feature-length film directed by John Akomfrah for Black Audio Film Collective, were puzzled and not especially warm. To some, the complex interdependence of representation and politics that is Black Audio's trademark seemed to have collapsed into a stylish pastiche in which politics was only representation. Many viewers at screenings I attended seemed anxious for a clear authorial voice for biographical details about the shadowy figure the film purports to document for a plot line, dialogue-- something to hang onto. By these standards the film was a failure. But in other terms the film pursued--perhaps to a manneristic extent--means Black Audio had used often in the past: a suspicion of documentary evidence, a reliance on poetic recollection, and a sidelong approach to moral narratives. Who Needs a Heart? was commissioned by Britain's Channel 4 for the series TV with a Difference. The film crystallizes around the rise of the Black Power movement in Britain and the figure of Michael X, charismatic leader, opportunist, or petty criminal, depending on who you talk to. It consists of a series of micro-narratives, almost non-narratives, that follow the lives of a fictionalized group of people in Michael X's circle from 1963 to 1975. In their struggle to recreate the history of British Black Power and Michael X, Black Audio found that the archives of personal memory and recorded history were not available for Michael X as they were for his more respectable predecessor, Malcolm X. Michael X is himself a trace of something else. For this reason, Who Needs a Heart? works best as a docudrama, weaving a fictional story around a thread of history. Take this scene for example, which opens the film and recurs about three-quarters through it. It is set in 1972, just after Michael X's scheduled execution has been announced on television. A black woman, wearing an Afro, has been marching in the street with a Free Angela Davis picket sign, when she approaches her friends' house and hears the news. We hear her footsteps, but her anxious speech is inaudible. The couple in the house have been posing for a white photographer, a record of their domestic tranquility and religious devotion (the woman is wearing a head cover). The interior of the house is lit a deep blue, an island of peace in contrast to the tumultuous events outside. The woman in the Afro collapses in the street, screaming and flailing; her cries are subordinated on the soundtrack to the sound-over news report. The woman posing for the photograph, Naomi, and a white woman run out to comfort her; the photographer carries her into the house. Naomi gently pulls off her wig, and strokes her head. In this scene a wealth of information about relationships, political climate and political affiliations is conveyed through action, gesture, costume, music and production design--with barely a word of dialogue. One of the main purposes of Who Needs a Heart? is to confound official history, private recollection and simple fiction, and to point to the lacunae that remain, refusing to be wholly influenced by any of these. The collective found that in trying to excavate the history of Michael X, instead of visual records and oral histories, they discovered silences and disavowal. Those who did recollect X or recalled the `60s radical scene did not want their contributions acknowledged. So, What's the best way of quoting people who don't want to be acknowledged? Make them mute.(1) And indeed Who Needs a Heart? has a pantomime quality. Dialogue, and the kind of knowledge it can convey, are extremely sparse in the film. Entire scenes pass without speech, which is occasionally drowned out by voice-over, but more often obscured by Trevor Mathison's sound track of wild saxophones and what sounds like whale song. …