The Stuart Hall Project opens, as one might expect, with the voice of Stuart Hall. Taken from various interview clips and segments of his programmes, for the BBC and others, the soft crackle of a record player adds a sense of warmth, even familiarity, to a personal ode to Mile Davis.
“When I was about 19 or 20, Miles Davis,” he lightly chuckles, “put his finger on my soul.” Various archival images of Hall flash on screen, he continues: “The various moods of Miles Davis matched the evolution of my own feelings.” Background piano picks up its pace. “There continued to be a regretful loss of life that I might have lived, but didn’t live.” Shots of construction cranes loom over skyscrapers in the background. “Something of the nostalgia for what cannot be is in the trumpet music of Miles Davis.”
I’m struck by how often he repeats the name of Miles Davis in this sequence. It’s never Miles, Davis, him or he. The name arrives in full: Mi-ells Day-vis. For a brief moment – two full minutes, maybe? – Hall’s words take on a totally different tone and tenor to what would precede and follow. Social change. Society. Resources. Power. This is the familiar language of academia and politics, and more precisely for Hall, for the discipline he would define and shape so thoroughly: cultural studies. But Hall’s point of emphasis is thrilling, dangerous even, and perhaps daring now as it was then. “... it is the changes in the everyday and not the ‘big’ events that they feel have shaped their lives, and indirectly, their sense of history.”
Almost anything about Stuart Hall would take on an immediate and direct sense of substance, of political appetite, simply due to the reach, impact and significance of his life. Maybe figures survive becoming a ‘subject’ or a ‘topic’; their words and ideas mean as much as they do in translation and summary then when encountered more directly. But part of what John Akomfrah realises with the focus on music is what is specific about Hall that has to be heard, felt, seen.
The place of music in a visual piece is awkward. I almost wrote ‘The music of Miles Davis is more than a soundtrack…’ but what would this even mean? The implication is that a soundtrack is mere background, interchangeable with another piece of music, perhaps indistinguishable from musak. We could turn this on its head, ignore the hierarchical connotation for a moment, and think more precisely about the ways that the soundtrack follows its subject, shapes our perception and sense of the world, how it can make or break a moment, and does all this without us choosing for it to happen. Such music is intoxicating, inescapable. It haunts us, just as Hall seems to be by Miles Davis, just as he envisages culture and history flowing through us.
Damn.
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