The Last Angel of History. - movie reviews

The Last Angel of History Review

The Last Angel of History. - movie reviews
Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1997 by Jeffrey Skoller

Evoking Walter Benjamin's famous image of history as an angel who is at once looking backward at the past as she is flying forward toward the future, John Akomfrah's latest film essay is a similarly non-linear flight through a history of science fiction art and its relation to the Pan-African experience. As Akomfrah himself has said: these issues are not simply related, "the Black experience is science fiction!"

The Last Angel of History (1996) looks at tropes of the science fiction genre with its images of spaceships, time travel and high-tech futurism as they appear in Pan-African culture. In his film, Akomfrah claims science fiction as an integral part of some of the most innovative elements of African Diasporic culture. He sees sci-fi as the expression of a metaphor for both "otherness" in relation to the white world, and certain discourses of black cultural liberation. These are large claims, but they are made uniquely if not quite convincingly in the film.

The Last Angel of History is produced by Akomfrah as part of the London-based Black Audio Film Collective, one of the seminal black media groups to emerge out of the British media workshop movement of the 1980s. Since 1983 they have produced a series of innovative film essays including Handsworth Songs (1986) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), each providing a unique exploration of the politics of representation and questioning national identity within the African Diaspora.

Working across the history of black music, literature and contemporary post-colonial and post-humanist cultural theory, the film connects ancient African folklore and current "afro-futurism" in black avant-garde and popular cultures to create what Akomfrah calls a "digitized race memory." My own understanding of the "digital" in relation to "race memory" comes from digital hyper-media models that emphasize intertextuality through the interactive, nonlinear linking of and navigating through, disparate moments in time, geographical sites, texts, images and people. It is from working across such disparate elements that one can begin to define what might constitute a digital narrative of black history.

The Last Angel of History begins with the figure of early twentieth-century itinerant bluesman Robert Johnson, who, as legend has it, made a pact with the Devil so that he might become the world's greatest bluesman. This otherworldly connection explains for many the power and innovation of his music. Johnson becomes part of a lineage of innovative artists including futurist composers Sun Ra and George Clinton. Sun Ra claims to be from another galaxy and with his big band, the Arkestra, weave together sonic images of space-time travel and exploration with early Egyptian mythology. This kind of "future-past" evocation is also a metaphor for his unique musical hybrid of traditional Jazz and avant-garde forms of African American and European music. Clinton, an inventor of electronic funk music, also fosters a persona of an extraterrestrial: he arrives in his Mothership to expose the human race to the cosmic mind/body expanding music of Funkadelic. Like Sun Ra in Jazz, Clinton uses intergalactic travel as a metaphor for a kind of hybrid exploration of popular music forms from R & B, to psychedelic rock, to purely electronic music. This lineage is placed in relation to contemporary popular forms such as Techno, Dub, Jungle and Rap music and their pre-occupation with high technology as a way to create new sounds never heard before.

In the film's non-linear fashion, we see an array of archival photographs and film footage of these artists in performance along with interviews with Clinton and various contemporary musicians and critics including Greg Tate, Lee Perry and DJ-Spooky. This history is intercut with images of early Egyptian culture and African folklore about man's relation to the cosmos. The interviewees speak of the interconnectedness of certain African traditions of astronomy and sun/sky worship and the contemporary spaceship image. They see this current image as a metaphor for notions of liberation through creative exploration and experimentation. Perhaps the most moving interview in the piece is with one of the first astronauts of African descent to travel in space. He speaks about taking the flags of Africa with him, to connect the ancient tradition of African astronomy to current space travel. He also speaks of how science fiction genres sparked his interest in space travel, citing the character of Lt. Uhura in the TV show Star Trek as a pivotal image. Woven into these images and interviews is a character called the Data Thief, who, from 200 years in the future, uses the "information superhighway" to explore the past, present and future of the black diaspora. We find him at different moments of the film hacking at a PC station or gazing out over post-apocalyptic American landscapes. While he muses over African history we see images of African paintings, sculpture and community and religious ritual. At other moments he is inside the computer as if the lines between the human body and the digital body have become indistinct.