Screening
John Akomfrah's "The Last Angel of History"
Join us at the Film-Makers' Cooperative on Tuesday, September 24th, at 7pm, for John Akomfrah's fascinating Afrofuturistic feature film THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY, presented by Chris Stoddard!
*$10 SUGGESTED DONATION*
**This program was originally announced as SEPTEMBER 28th, and was initially corrected to SEPTEMBER 27th. It has now been rescheduled to SEPTEMBER 24th.
John Akomfrah, director of Seven Songs of Malcolm X, returns with an engaging and searing examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology.
This cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.
Akomfrah's analysis is rooted in an exploration of the cultural works of Pan-African artists, such as funkmaster George Clinton and his Mothership Connection, Sun Ra's use of extraterrestrial iconography, and the very explicit connection drawn between these issues in the writings of black science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler.
Included are interviews with black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. Astronaut Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr. describes his experiences as one of the first African-Americans in space, while Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols tells of her campaign for a greater role for African-Americans in NASA. Novelist Ismael Reed and cultural critics Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun tease out the parallels between black life and science fiction, while Delaney and Butler discuss the motivations behind their choice of the genre to express ideas about the black experience.
In keeping with the futuristic tenor of the film, the interviews are intercut with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between time and space from the past to the future to the present, not unlike the mode of many rock videos or surfing the Internet. (Synopsis courtesy Icarus Films).
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Akomfrah's film will be accompanied by the 1999 found footage short Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which chronicles the underground music and dance scene in the U.K. during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and is directed by Mark Leckey.
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This event is part of our August/September 2024 series SONIC VISIONS: EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA AND MUSIC.