London Screen Archives Conference – FAN Report

For over 40 years, the decorated artist filmmaker John Akomfrah, has been driven by what he calls an accidental encounter with the archive. His television, film and immersive work, encompassing race, memory and post colonialist narratives, from the Black Audio Film Collective years through to Smoking Dogs Films, can all embrace an interrogation with the unintentional, fragile and unexpected historical traces related to black representation in the archive - or the comparable absence of them.

For the exhibitors, curators, artists, filmmakers and students that attended London’s Screen Archives conference last month, Akomfrah’s erudite and stirring ‘fireside’ keynote chat with Film London’s CEO Adrian Wootton encouraged those working with screen heritage to forage for those absences in the historical record, to be curious on the gaps in the archive and question what has been legitimised and what has been minimised. Above all, Akomfrah recommended zooming out and exploring the ongoing paradoxes between the included and excluded.

This was the prevailing theme for the entire 2024 LSA conference and one that strongly resonated with LSA’s pioneering current project ‘Undocumented’, designed to address these gaps, particularly those connected to black representation in collections across London, delivered in partnership with The New Black Film Collective and supported by the BFI. The Undocumented project, centred firstly in the London boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth, Newham and Hackney, collaborates with Black communities to digitise films and ensure sustainability of moving image collections through screenings and events, volunteering programmes, training and education.

The historical significant location of the conference, London Docklands, an area that pivotally benefitted from the slave trade and the storing of slave harvested goods, was recognised by the host venue, the London Museum Docklands, and further acknowledged with a commitment for the day to gather and make visible the histories, voices and stories from people of colour in London, supported by three expert panels: ‘Cultural Sensitivity and Film Archives’ hosted by BFI’s Arike Oke, ‘Reinterpretation and Storytelling’ chaired by Rachel Wang from Chocolate Films, and ‘Where are all the Black Home Movies’ presented by the recent BAFTA awarded June Givanni.

Across the panels, the delegates were illuminated by insights on how to tell new stories within national collections, how to implement people-centred and culturally sensitive cataloguing guidelines, how to nurture trauma based toolkits for both participants and archivists, how people of colour working in the archive sector can be supported to work in a dominantly white heritage profession (see Museum Detox) and, above all, how to bring agency to marginalised moving image stories and allow them to be seen by local and global audiences.

A key takeaway was presented by Dr Mykaell Riley, a Senior Lecturer, Director for The Black Music Research Unit (BMRU) and Principal Investigator for Bass Culture Research at the University of Westminster, who advanced the notion that histories of people of colour in the archive were not necessarily absent, rather they are firmly present yet fundamentally compressed, preventing deeper understanding and wider circulation of diverse and individual histories.  This observation complimented Akomfrah’s keynote when he concluded that the archive is under constant construction and the formation of image making has always been far more complex and nuanced in relation to black representation than conventional wisdom and the film history books have bestowed.

The LSA conference was a continuation of an unfinished conversation. As alongside showcasing the important work of Undocumented, it provided a call for those working in screen heritage - and for the purpose of this article, those exhibitors and curators in the BFI Film Audience Network - to be skeptical and address those absences in the archive, decompress those stories and histories at the end of database keyword searches and make them visible to wider audiences on screens across the UK.

For more on Undocumented. 

John Akmofrah’s Listening All Night To The Rain presented at La Biennale di Venezia, will be touring to UK museums and galleries including Amgueddfa Cymru’s National Museum Cardiff (Cardiff, Wales) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, Scotland) in 2025.

London’s Screen Archives (LSA) is a unique network of fantastic London-based archive collections with a shared vision – to preserve, share and celebrate London’s rich history on film.