Film
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmission: Mysteries of July

Reece Auguiste, James Elsey and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: Thursday 6 Aug, 6–8pm
Location:: Minassa

Notes from the London Commune highlights moments from the pre-history of London's liberation. The programme envisions the political imagination of black, proletarian, queer radicalisms as the seed, the soil and the star of a London yet to arrive. Each event has presented a retrospective look at the histories of struggle in the city, from the vantage point of a near-future establishment of London's citywide workers' council.

Directed by Reece Auguiste, founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), Mysteries of July (1991) takes as its subject the unexplained deaths of Jamie Stewart and other young Black men in police custody in the UK. Auguiste combines talking head interviews and dramatic reenactment with a series of intimate tableaux to explore the intense suffering of those grieving the dead. Layering official accounts with witness testimony and static images, the BAFC construct a history beyond the constraints of the hegemonic archive.

The final event of Notes from the London Commune, Mysteries of July is the product of a burgeoning period of integrated practice in cinema. Over their fifteen years of work, the BAFC created not just films, but a cinematic infrastructure which revolved around communal pedagogy and production. Mysteries of July builds on an aesthetic and social perspective which finds community in past and present struggle.

This screening will be followed by a conversation between director Reece Auguiste, series curator James Elsey and The Otolith Collective.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

The Otolith Collective is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Image credit: still from Mysteries of July, 1991, Reece Auguiste and the Black Audio Film Collective.

Reece Auguiste is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Critical Media Practices at University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a moving image scholar and practitioner whose research focuses on all modalities of transnational screen cultures and practices.

Auguiste was a founding member of the critically acclaimed British-based Black Audio Film Collective and is the director of the award-winning films Twilight City and Mysteries of July. His film Duty of the Hour explores the life and times of the American civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks. His essays on screen aesthetics and documentary practices have appeared in Framework, Cineaction, AfterImage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Undercut and the Journal of Media Practice, among others. He is co-editor of Reframing Africa: Reflections on Modernity and the Moving Image. Auguiste has received the Grand Prize at Melbourne International Film Festival, Josef Von Sternberg Award for most original film of the Mannheim International Film Festival, Best Film for Promotion of Intercultural Dialogue at the Mannheim International Film Festival, Golden Hugo Award for best documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, and the International Documentary Association Award for exceptional creative achievement in nonfiction and television production.

Inaugurated in 1983 and dissolved in 1998, the seven-person Black Audio Film Collective are widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artist groups to emerge from Britain during the 1980s. From their base in East London, John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George produced award winning film, photography, slide tape, video, installation, posters and educational and self-organised interventions.

The Otolith Collective is an artist-led organisation that supports intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process based forms of development. The Otolith Collective creates environments that enable discourse and discussion, co-commission artists and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal visions committed to maintaining and animating an experimental, worldmaking approach. Working across visual art, new music, film, video, writing and post lens-based media, The Otolith Collective draws audiences to exhibitions and platforms on the work of Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, The Chimurenga Library Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa and Bahar Noorizadeh, to name but a few.