The Stuart Hall Project
| The Stuart Hall Project | |
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| Directed by | John Akomfrah |
| Produced by | Smoking Dogs Films Lina Gopaul |
| Written by | John Akomfrah |
| Cinematography | Dewald Aukema |
| Edited by | Nse Asuquo |
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Release date
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
The Stuart Hall Project is a 2013 British film written and directed by John Akomfrah centred on cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who is regarded as one of the founding figures of the New Left and a key architect of Cultural Studies in Britain. The film uses a montage of documentary footage together with Hall's own words and thoughts to produce what Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called "an absorbing account", awarding it four stars and stating that it has "an idealism and high seriousness that people might not immediately associate with the subject Hall pioneered".Sight & Sound magazine's Ashley Clark described it as "a strongly personal work" that "unfolds simultaneously as a tribute to a heroic figure, a study of the emergence of the New Left and its attendant political ideas, and a summation, in thematic and technical terms, of the key characteristics of Akomfrah’s body of work thus far (intertextuality, archival manipulation, a focus on postcolonial and diasporic discourse in Britain)."
The Stuart Hall Project, together with Akomfrah's three-screen video installation The Unfinished Conversation, tells the story of cultural theorist Stuart Hall narrated through Hall's archived audio interviews and television recordings. Akomfrah explores the myriad ways that Hall influenced black British constructions of identity in the second half of the 20th century. Hall appeared on the British radio and television for more than 50 years and spent his whole career exploring how social change makes sense of who we are, what we are entitled to and what society makes available to us.
Hall continually engages the hybridity and complexity of identity and its relationship to sociopolitical and sociocultural phenomena. He comments that, similar to Miles Davis’s trumpet, it is the seemingly most mundane portions of everyday life that can affect the person we become and more broadly provide an accurate barometer of social change. Society is infinitely changing, and must be closely analyzed in order to pinpoint exactly what catalyses such change, as the cause can be the most subtle. "Where do you come from?" is expected to be followed up with a long story.
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