Editing: Antonio Cataldo
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.
Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her first book, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988) examined left political culture of the late 19th century. Her cultural history of the French 1950s, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995), won the Laurence Wylie award for French cultural studies and a Critic's Choice award; it has just been re-published in France under the title Rouler plus vite, laver plus blanc (Flammarion, 2006). May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), a study of French memory of the political upheavals of the 1960s, was published in France as Mai 68 et ses vies antérieures (Complexe et Le Monde Diplomatique, 2005). A volume of essays she co-edited entitled Antiamericanism was published in 2004 by NYU Press. She is the translator of Jacques Rancière's Le Maître ignorant (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford, 1991, and of several essays by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou.