Black Audio Film Collective: Film, Memory and Black Britain

Making another kind of Black cinema

What happens when the people repeatedly explained by television take responsibility for making images themselves? Black Audio Film Collective approached that question through films, photographs, installations and work combining projected slides with recorded sound. Active from 1982 until 1998, the group helped expand the possibilities of Black British filmmaking. Its subjects included migration, urban change, political struggle and imagined futures. Its methods asked audiences to listen, remember and make connections, rather than receive a single authoritative explanation. ¹

The collective’s achievement cannot be measured only by the number of Black people appearing on screen. The form of a programme also matters: who asks the questions, which past is recalled, whose speech is interrupted, and what an image is made to mean by the sound accompanying it. Across works including Handsworth Songs, Testament and Twilight City, BAFC explored those choices as part of the politics of representation. Its history belongs to British cinema, but also to the wider story of artists building the means to speak in their own ways. ¹

Seven artists and a collective purpose

The original members were John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and Claire Joseph. Joseph left in 1985 and David Lawson joined. Remembering that change prevents later membership lists from erasing an original participant. Hackney Museum records the group’s varied African and Caribbean connections, a reminder that collective Black identity did not require identical family histories or experiences. ²

The group came together through students’ encounters at Portsmouth Polytechnic. In a 1989 interview, Gopaul recalled members studying different subjects, including mixed media, psychology and sociology. She explained that collective work allowed their different abilities to contribute to a shared practice. They were interested in making films, but also in creating audiences and opportunities for discussion. Their activities included screenings and travelling with their work. ³

This breadth makes it misleading to describe BAFC simply as a director with supporting collaborators. Producing, researching, composing, writing and arranging access to audiences were central to its existence. The credits of its films make those contributions visible, including Gopaul and Johnson’s production work and Auguiste’s direction. ⁷¹⁰¹²

The institutions that made room

Collective ambition still needed material support. The 1982 Workshop Declaration helped create conditions in which independent film and video groups could continue working rather than survive from one isolated commission to the next. As LUX’s history explains, the agreement emerged from negotiations involving independent filmmakers, the British Film Institute and the film and television union ACTT, alongside the arrival of Channel 4. The broadcaster agreed to continuing support for selected workshops. ⁴

The model linked production with education, distribution and access to equipment. It also supported regular employment. These provisions mattered because an organisation needs time to develop people and ideas, not simply money to finish a particular programme. BAFC was among the groups that benefited, alongside organisations including Amber, Sankofa and ReTake. ⁴

This history complicates the idea that innovative art emerges solely from individual determination. Agreements about wages, facilities and broadcasting helped make experimentation possible. It also shows why a screening or a workshop could belong to the same cultural project as a completed film: changing who could participate required more than creating another title for a catalogue. ⁴

Expeditions and the imperial image

Before its best-known film, the collective developed Expeditions, a two-part slide-and-sound work comprising Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality. It examined colonial imagery and nationhood through photographs, text and sound. The Reina Sofía museum’s programme describes the original format as 35mm slides: this was a practice of arranging and reworking images, rather than simply recording new scenes with a movie camera. ⁵

An old photograph carries assumptions about the world it depicts. Placing it beside other images, adding words or changing its accompanying sound can expose those assumptions. Expeditions asked how empire had been pictured and how images of national belonging continued to operate. ⁵

The method also gave audiences a different task. Rather than follow events chronologically, they encountered fragments whose relationships had to be considered. Historical understanding could emerge through comparison and disturbance, through recognising what a familiar image had previously encouraged its viewer to overlook. ⁵

Why audio came first in the name

Trevor Mathison’s contribution makes clear how much of the collective’s thinking happened through sound. In a 2022 interview with artist Claudette Johnson and Something Curated, he recalled an early Portsmouth performance using an Aimé Césaire text. Different voices read fragments through echo and reverberation, alongside projected archive photographs and a powerful bass soundtrack. Speech, image and the space occupied by the audience became parts of the same event. ⁶

Mathison also described the influence of dub on his practice: separating elements, altering frequencies, working with loops and bringing sounds back into new relationships. These methods offer a useful way of understanding audio as construction rather than decoration. A repeated voice or an unexpected noise can complicate what an image seems to say, making the viewer attend to it differently. ⁶

His account places technical experimentation within a personal artistic history that also included drawing, sculpture and installation. Sound was not a secondary service added after the supposedly serious work of filmmaking. It was a means of thinking about fragments, atmosphere and memory, and a substantial part of what made the collective’s work distinctive. ⁶

Handsworth Songs and the events of 1985

Handsworth Songs, released in 1986, addressed disturbances in Birmingham and London during 1985. Channel 4 commissioned it for Britain: The Lie of the Land. Akomfrah directed, Gopaul produced for the collective, and Mathison contributed sound and music. ⁷

The film brought footage of street conflict and its aftermath into contact with photographs, earlier news material, recollections and poetic narration. Images associated with Caribbean arrival and earlier hopes appeared alongside the troubled present. As the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s programme explains, testimonies and commemorations were part of this construction too. People were not represented solely through the dramatic moments when they confronted police or appeared in news reports. ⁷

The film connected different times. A disturbance can become the only event through which an audience knows a district. Placing crisis beside histories of arrival and belonging encouraged viewers to consider what preceded the news image and which experiences it could not contain. ⁷

An argument about how films should speak

The approach did not command universal agreement. The 1989 interview records criticism from Salman Rushdie and a debate involving Stuart Hall and Darcus Howe. It also records dissatisfaction from a Caribbean Times critic who wanted a clearer account of causes and a more definite way forward. These responses reveal a substantive argument within Black cultural politics: what should a film offer people facing an urgent struggle? ³

Writing after a later screening, critic Mark Fisher emphasised the combination of archive, the collective’s own footage and Mathison’s sound design. His account also recalled Gopaul describing the disbelief which greeted young Black people carrying cameras. The right to experiment was bound up with the right to be recognised as a maker of images in the first place. ⁸

The disagreement is worth preserving without choosing between accessibility and artistic ambition as if only one could matter. An explanation can be clear yet incomplete; an open-ended work can prompt thought while frustrating viewers seeking answers. Handsworth Songs made the form of political cinema itself a subject of debate. ³⁸

Testament: the difficulties of returning

Testament, selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes in 1988, moved the collective’s exploration of memory towards Ghana and political exile. Its central character had belonged to a Pan-Africanist movement and left Ghana in 1966. After twenty years away, she returned to make a documentary about its history. The return reopened painful relationships with the past rather than restoring an uncomplicated sense of home. ⁹

The premise joined personal loss to political disappointment. Someone coming back with the apparent authority of a television presenter was also someone whose memories and attachments remained unsettled. The festival synopsis presents the journey as an encounter with longing, regret and dispossession. In this setting, history was not something that could be safely observed from outside. It altered the person attempting to tell it. ⁹

The BFI credits Akomfrah as director and Avril Johnson and Lina Gopaul as producers. Those credits are a useful reminder of the collective labour behind a film often discussed through its director’s name. Its international setting also widened the geographical frame of a British-based group’s work without abandoning questions of belonging. ¹⁰⁹

Twilight City and the changing capital

Twilight City followed in 1989, directed by Reece Auguiste and produced by Avril Johnson. These responsibilities demonstrate that BAFC’s filmmaking cannot all be placed under a single directorial signature. The film combined a fictional correspondence between a daughter in London and her mother in Dominica with interviews about the capital and its transformations. ¹²

LUX’s account describes memories contributed by figures including Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis, Homi Bhabha and Rosina Visram. The London recalled in these testimonies was not one shared, uniform place. Childhood streets, imagined opportunities and the history of abandoned seafarers disclosed different experiences beneath the city’s public image. Redevelopment, especially around Docklands, created a pressing question about who could belong to the new city being built. ¹¹

The family correspondence brought those changes into an intimate relationship. Generational differences, religious attachment and the daughter’s political commitments complicated any simple picture of a united migrant household. By setting these tensions beside arguments about urban change, Twilight City treated the home and the city as connected spaces. Belonging involved memory and affection, but also the practical and political conditions under which people could continue living together. ¹¹

History without a conventional hero

Who Needs a Heart, released in 1991, approached the history of British Black Power through a group of fictional friends. Michael Abdul Malik, also known as Michael X, remained a significant presence, but the film held him at a distance. Contemporary television and radio material registered his public career while the friends’ changing lives occupied a different plane of the story. ¹³

LUX describes a narrative that moves backwards and forwards in time, with dialogue playing a limited role. Music, including recordings by jazz artists such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, carried much of its expressive force. Mathison’s sound design made listening central to the experience, continuing the collective’s interest in what sound could contribute beyond reinforcing spoken explanation. ¹³

The decision to follow imagined people around a historical figure changed the questions available to the film. Instead of organising everything around a leader’s biography, it could explore the atmosphere of a period and the ways politics entered relationships and private lives. That approach also asks the audience to distinguish the historical record from fiction used to investigate its surrounding possibilities. ¹³

The Last Angel of History and imagined futures

The Last Angel of History, made in 1995, combined documentary with a science-fiction premise. A figure called the Data Thief travelled back from the future to gather fragments of Black culture and technology. Edward George played this traveller, bringing another collective member directly into the film’s imaginative structure. ⁵¹⁴

Directed by Akomfrah and produced by Gopaul, the work connected musicians and cultural figures across different settings, including Sun Ra, George Clinton, Lee Perry, Goldie and Underground Resistance. Smoking Dogs Films’ account describes a journey through Black music, technological imagination and speculation about the future. The film did not confine Black history to recovering what had been lost; it also investigated what people had imagined might become possible. ¹⁴

The fictional device gave that investigation a shape. Looking backwards from an invented future could make familiar cultural objects appear newly significant. Music became evidence of invention and thought, rather than simply accompaniment to a social history told elsewhere. Within the collective’s wider work, this was another way of approaching memory: the meanings assigned to the past depend partly on the futures people can envisage. ¹⁴

What continued after the collective

BAFC formally ended in 1998, but its collaborations and questions continued. Akomfrah, Gopaul and Lawson had established Smoking Dogs Films in 1997. The studio’s own history describes an ambition to work across visual art and changing technologies, extending the exploration of documentary, imagination and different forms of moving image. The overlap in dates matters: the development was a transition, rather than a clean break between two unrelated enterprises. ¹⁵¹⁶

In 2007, the Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar curated a major BAFC retrospective, presented at FACT in Liverpool and Arnolfini in Bristol. Developed over five years, it brought attention to the breadth of the group’s moving-image and sonic work. The exhibition setting offered audiences time to consider relationships between works which had originally circulated through different cultural spaces. ¹⁶

The collective’s legacy is therefore larger than a celebrated film or a celebrated founder. It includes production work, sound composition, research, screenings and the shared task of sustaining an organisation. Its films preserve arguments about the power of images while demonstrating other ways to make them. Remembering BAFC as a collective keeps that practical achievement, and the people who made it possible, within view. ¹⁶

Sources

[1] LUX. Black Audio Film Collective: artist record.

[2] Hackney Museum. Black Audio Film Collective, authority record AUTH5782.

[3] BFI, Sight and Sound; interview originally in Monthly Film Bulletin. Julian Petley, ‘Memory is the only raw material we can turn to’: the Black Audio Film Collective on creating a Black cinema; September 1989; republished 23 July 2020.

[4] Luxonline Histories. Tom Roberts, The ACTT Workshop Declaration provides financial security and new audiences for independent film and video workshops; Undated; concerns 1982.

[5] Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Sounds in Diaspora: The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective; 2–16 July 2014 programme.

[6] Something Curated. Interview: Trevor Mathison and Claudette Johnson Talk ‘Dirty’ Sound and the Black Audio Film Collective; 22 August 2022.

[7] International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, IDFA Archive. Handsworth Songs (1986): programme description and credits; 2021 festival record.

[8] BFI, Sight and Sound. Mark Fisher, The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots; 2011; updated 25 November 2020.

[9] La Semaine de la Critique, Cannes. Testament, 1988 selection; 1988 programme; webpage undated.

[10] British Film Institute. Testament (1988): film record.

[11] LUX. Twilight City: distributor synopsis and film record; Undated; film 1989.

[12] Smoking Dogs Films. Twilight City: director and producer credits; Undated; gives transmission as November 1989.

[13] LUX. Who Needs a Heart: distributor synopsis and film record; Undated; film 1991.

[14] Smoking Dogs Films. The Last Angel of History: filmmakers’ synopsis and credits; Undated; film 1995.

[15] Smoking Dogs Films. About Smoking Dogs Films.

[16] The Otolith Group. Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of Black Audio Film Collective; 2007 exhibition; webpage undated.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.