After the Eleventh Hour: Reanimating Radical Film Today
Postgraduate Research Workshop ‘After the Eleventh Hour: Reanimating Radical Film Today’ Organised by Jess Boyall and Ben Stoll
As part of a rekindled PGR Workshop Initiative in the Media Arts Department of Royal Holloway, we (Jess Boyall and Ben Stoll) were given the funding to organise an event relating to our research interests in the Black British cinema and the 1980s workshop movement.
Our workshop, entitled ‘After the Eleventh Hour: Reanimating Radical Film Today’, aimed to examine how politically-engaged and aesthetically experimental workshop films from the 1980s (many of which were originally shown in the now-defunct ‘Eleventh Hour’ slot on Channel 4) have been creatively rescreened in recent years. With 40 people in attendance in the Royal Holloway rooms in Senate House on 19th March 2024, the event ran from 6pm to 8pm and encompassed a documentary screening followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A.
We screened Hannah Kemp-Welch’s audio documentary [voices surface]: An Audio Documentary about Accessing Handsworth Songs. Exploring the making of a 2023 accessible, audio-described version of the Black Audio Film Collective’s 1985 film Handsworth Songs (dir. John Akomfrah), Hannah’s documentary charted the creative and ethical decisions made during the production of this audio-description project. In our event, we screened Kemp-Welch’s audio documentary with creative captions by Care-fuffle alongside contextual images from Akomfrah’s original film. As well as Hannah Kemp-Welch herself, the subsequent panel included academics and practitioners involved in the broader project of making the 2023 audio-described version of Handsworth Songs, all of whose voices featured heavily in the documentary we screened. These were Dr Sarah Hayden (University of Southampton), who led the project to audio describe Handsworth Songs; Elaine Lillian Joseph, the lead audio-describer on the project; and Dr Clive Nwonka (UCL), who had written an essay to accompany the audio-description project. This was a lively panel discussion which brought a rich context to the audio documentary and proposed new directions for reanimating the original 1985 film.
We received wonderful feedback from academics, filmmakers and students across numerous departments (in and beyond RHUL), who praised not only the speakers’ insights, but also 'the convivial atmosphere' cultivated on the night. We also received some constructive feedback from panellists on the formatting of the screening which will be extremely useful for organising workshops in the future. Going forward, both speakers and attendees' have inquired about future plans and we are keen to program another event!
Finally, we would like to thank Professor Daniela Berghahn and Dr Manishita Dass for their guidance in organising the event, Professor John Hill for his assistance publicising the event, and the administrative staff at Royal Holloway and Senate House for their help on room bookings and finance.
