The impact of Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs (1986) is often attributed to the ways in which it proposes a poetics of the archive; but how, precisely, does the poeticisation of the archival image operate in Handsworth Songs? By examining Handsworth Songs' reconfiguration of sequences from Philip Donellan's The Colony (1964) its use of Mark Stewart and The Maffia's version of Jerusalem (1983) and it's adaptation of sound design in Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain(1942), the poeticisation of the archive might be understood as an intervention into the inheritance of post-war documentary made available by legitimation crisis.
