The Unfinished Conversation
| The Unfinished Conversation | |
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| Directed by | John Akomfrah |
| Produced by | Lina Gopaul David Lawson Smoking Dogs Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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103 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
The Unfinished Conversation is a 2013 multi-layered three-screen installation directed by John Akomfrah, co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective. Through his celebrated technique of juxtaposing and layering archive footage with text, music and photographs, Akomfrah crosses the memory landscape of Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born founder of British Cultural Studies, to reflect on the nature and complexities of memory and identity.The Unfinished Conversation was commissioned by Autograph ABP. It opened at Tate Britain, London, on 26 October 2013, following its premiere at Bluecoat during the 2012 Liverpool Biennial.
The Unfinished Conversation is a journey through theorist Stuart Hall's work and output on radio and television as a post-war immigrant who arrived in England in the first quarter of the 1950s and pioneered in British cultural studies, as the co-founder of the movement together with E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams of the journal New Left Review. Director John Akomfrah, alongside his fellow Black Audio Film Collective members, was engaged with Hall's academic project since the 1970s due to his appearance in the BBC programme It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum. Consequently, The Unfinished Conversation is a personal project for the director reflecting on his own passage and research on archive-based work related to the notion of black identity.
Akomfrah's project The Unfinished Conversation started as an application to the Arts Council initiated by Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph ABP and executive producer of the project, based on the premise of commissioning a collaboration between Akomfrah and academic Stuart Hall about the notion of visual and black identity. However, the extensive availability of archive material featuring Hall on radio, cinema and television suggested a parallel project, the making of Akomfrah's documentary, The Stuart Hall Project.
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