Black Film, British Cinema: In Three Acts

Abstract

Thirty years ago, pioneers in making and thinking about black cultural production were holding the first Black Film British Cinema conference (1988) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). That conference, and the subsequent publication of ICA Documents 7 of the same title, were to become critical interventions for a generation of emerging scholars, students, and practitioners interested in the place of film culture in the formation of national identities. As transformative as that moment was, I would like to revisit why those interventions mattered, and take up one of the key questions that a retrospective of that period poses for the current moment; what has, and what has not, become of black British film?