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16 August 2013updated 27 Sep 2015 3:55am

The Stuart Hall Project celebrates the cultural crusades of an important historian

Jonathan Brick on a new film about Stuart Hall, the lecturer and academic born in Jamaica who found a home in British academia but not Britain itself.

By Jonathan Brick

Stuart Hall lectured at the University of Birmingham and presented BBC programmes on behalf of the Open University. He also founded what would become the New Left Review. His views were informed and personal, and he constantly spoke and wrote about social change and international affairs in the postwar, postcolonial world.

John Akomfrah has used both his own appreciation for Hall and exhaustive footage and stills of him for this cinematic eulogy. Hall is shown to be a man of clear, thoughtful expression when given a platform to respond to big global events. Akomfrah has previously worked on films about Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X, and The Stuart Hall Project is an exploration of politics underscored cleverly by Hall’s beloved Miles Davis. Hall says the trumpeter “changed my soul” and forced him to move away from Jamaica.

“I was an outsider from the time I was born,” Hall says, calling himself a “twenty-first century man”, representative of the group of people who have mixed heritage. He is a man of many origins, “three shades darker than my family.” Hall seems in control of his own destiny from a very young age, as a reaction to his sister’s mental breakdown when she fell in love with a white doctor.

Hall ends up at Oxford, alluding to the “profound shock” of his new country. He was a black man in a Britain becoming more used to seeing former citizens of colonies arriving for jobs or education. By the end of his twenties, he says that he does not “belong anywhere any longer”. He chuckles when he spells out that he is a man of “many ‘routes’”.

With Homer and Joyce as literary guides, he throws himself into socialism, and into publishing magazines dedicated to discussing it, forming proofs on his knees. His fellow academics are important to him, but he has no real role models for his work. Cultural criticism, after all, sprouted in his era as a response to social change in Britain; one key term Hall uses is “interpenetration” which leads to cultural globalisation.

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The BBC’s Panorama interviews him at The Partisan cafe, where he iterates that he is “angry”. He wrote pieces called ‘The Deep Sleep of England’ for the Universities & Left Review, in which he responded to Soviet struggles in Egypt and Hungary. We later see a still of him marching against the H-bomb, and hear him recall three years at CND meetings, calling on Britain to set a unilateral precedent for the UN.

The meetings gave him an appreciation of industrial northern Britain, which he shares in his broadcasts. Hall also speaks for those who simply had to escape their birthplace, with Akomfrah using footage of ships on sea. Throughout, the footage matches the narrative perfectly, and the layer of Davis’s modal jazz gives it an artful quality.

Akomfrah uses chapter headings such as ‘A Public Intellectual’ and ‘The Neo-Liberal Problem Space’ to construct his filmic essay and frame Hall’s recollections. Cuba and Ghana are examples of nations whose people fought to be “free not to be unequal.” In his adopted country, however, Hall reckons British politics cannot whip up its people; the old class society became a mass society and belatedly joined the new century.

The rock revolution, which Hall says brought adolescence into the public arena for the first time, leads to the stirrings of 1968, the rise of a “genuine underground” in “anti-adult” protests. By this time Hall is a professor, also pioneering film criticism as a subject for teaching. He lectured for the BFI and wrote the book The Popular Arts (1964); astutely, he recalls how drawn he was to films where the protagonist was on the move.

Hall experienced the racism of Birmingham’s denizens when he married a white woman. For “coloured” kids, as Hall terms them, “the vice of colour seems to entwine with aptitude and intelligence.” He seems more resigned than angry at this, as he describes the “muted optimism” for assimilation.

As Enoch Powell is shown marching off to work, Hall accuses the country of amnesia, provoking fear and alienation in the new arrivals. Thus the dream of assimilation is “buried on both sides.” Identity is writ large in his discussions, a “conversation” that can “never be traded away.”

He shows no real love of Britain in the film, choosing to praise concepts and ideals instead. When feminism makes itself known in the 1970s, he admires the “conviction in the head” held by its advocates. By the end of that decade, he had noted the lack of “particularity” in things, and is pessimistic both for the welfare state and Britain’s “multicultural drift”. As the film shows, sometimes it takes a relative outsider to bring home cultural truths, and Hall has been one of the most perceptive on the left to do so.

The Stuart Hall Project screens at the Curzon Renoir and the ICA from 6 September and BFI Southbank from 13 September

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