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Kalu Bluebird music video: some background

        A nation is a set of stories. And the National Trust is a custodian of stories, set up by Act of Parliament tasked inter alia with keeping in good health those country houses which are of national significance – considered to contain within them   important stories about the nation.* The country houses owned by the National Trust are therefore clearly part of the narrative fabric of the nation.  What stories do these country houses tell?   The cultural theorist Paul Gilroy notes in his seminal text After Empire, how ‘Englishness’ is constructed. He points out that historical amnesia and postcolonial melancholia are persistent elements in conventional  ‘Englishness’ narratives (Gilroy After Empire 2004, 95-100, 116-120).   The National Trust, with its 1907  foundational purpose of ‘permanent preservation’ has such conventional narratives available to it and it uses them. So a September 2019 tweet (screenshot below) suggests as an activity: “Discover how top-secret map makers and allotments grown in the dig for victory played an important role in our wartime history.” This tweet shows admirable dexterity. It manages to combine several ‘Englishness’ tropes: ‘map making’ with its allusion to Empire;  the Home office sponsored slogan,  ‘Dig For Victory’ – a reference to England’s much narrated ‘victory’ in World War Two; and most imaginatively, the tweet also manages to squeeze in a reference to that quintessentially English phenomenon (and I have one!) of the allotment.      Yet there are other narratives available. And some artists, myself among them, want to unsettle this rather cosy version of Englishness (or even ‘Britishness’). We are focused on putting forward narratives that acknowledge and move closer to the centre of meditations on Englishness, the depredations, cruelty, stereotyping  and symbolic violence which underpinned the British Empire and colonialism. Violence which still affects us today in all its symbolic, linguistic and conceptual shockwaves. More specifically, we seek, through our art, and by a re-examination of historical lands, buildings, artefacts and archives, to foster the rise of suppressed and hitherto unheard voices – including voices of the ‘Other’.  The Leicester University based Colonial Countryside project has gathered some such artists together – primarily writers. Twitter and Facebook abound with other organisations, artists and historians  seeking to  transform understandings of how Empire and its successor, colonialism, has affected national identity.    Poem – origins The poem which forms the lyrics of ‘Bluebird’ was inspired by the lock, stock and barrel of Penrhyn Castle, a National Trust property in North Wales. Penrhyn Castle itself is a marvellous trompe l’oeil – a stately home  built between 1820 and 1833 (just before the Victorian era)  but presenting itself as something more ancient: a Norman castle.  Thus, the issue of presentation, representation, reality and authenticity is mixed into every brick of the property.  It is a magnificent structure, not only in its architecture. It is decorated and furnished so as to proclaim its owner’s sophistication, civility, good taste, aristocratic roots, wealth, knowledge and power. Nobody who visits can be left uncertain that the primary story there is of the Pennant family’s importance in the world.  The poem is a counter-narrative. It refers allusively to the slave trade origins of the Pennants’ wealth, using imagery to indicate objects in the Penrhyn Castle display –  such as stuffed birds and paintings – where slave trade and colonial connections can be found.  I won’t spoil the poem by pointing out all these references.  But a visit to Penrhyn Castle with the song on your headphone’s playlist would be enough to reveal most if not all!  Song – development The basic musicality of the poem supplied the beginnings of the song.  From this, the song itself was developed, composed and arranged by my 15 yo daughter, Naomi Kalu.  We argued about whether the last, consolidating, note of the song should or should not be played (she won the argument – in the video it is not).    Video – development Jonny Ferryman shot all the video footage in two hours at Penrhyn Castle.  He then edited the video, adding some acoustic effects (the bird song, the sea waves).  Charlotte Maxwell assisted in the direction and with costume. The sound editing was done at HQ Recording Studio.          *The consolidating statute (National Trust Acts (1907-1971) puts it in glorious legalese : “The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and as regards lands for the preservation (so far as practicable) of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life.”   ...

Moonlight – Notes on the film

Notes on the film, Moonlight Last night I saw Moonlight. It played to an audience in city centre Manchester, UK. The 200 seater cinema was two thirds full, with an audience approx 80% white. • The film is noticeable for the complete absence of any white characters. This removes one of whiteness’s central tenets – that there must be a white point of view that the film viewer can watch from, and that this point of view should be the dominant one. Instead, paradoxically, the white viewer is forced to inhabit at various times through the film, a series of black points of view. Almost the entire universe of the film and all its attendant points of view, are black. • One of the inescapable effects of racism is that it hyper-masculinises the black male. (see article on this here : http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=537). Moonlight is a triptych: Tyrone, at three stages in life – child, adolescent, adult. By juxtaposing the vulnerable child Tyrone and the equally vulnerable adolescent Tyrone with the later adult Tyrone, the hyper-masculine presenting adult is rendered sympathetic to white eyes (as well as to black eyes – since black people arguably are as likely to be ensnared in this hyper-masculinity semiotic net as white). The erasure of personality – of any sense of there being in this black male body a unique, vulnerable human being – which is one of the effects of hyper-masculinity, is thwarted by the three-part narrative strategy. It’s brilliantly thought out and executed. The jump cuts in ages also give a ‘dreaming’ space in the film where the viewer can construct in their imagination the details of how one stage led to next. How the child became the adolescent, became the man. It’s a beautiful “telling by not telling”. • The film does not use an establishing shot at its beginning –no bird’s eye view of the district etc (for this method of visual storytelling see for eg Coming To America). Instead it brings the viewer in close quarters with the characters from the get-go. In doing so, it slews off all the sociological contextualising that can make our attention fade – we know that black urban deprivation story, it’s been done many times. Moonlight’s filmic style is closer to the stream-of-consciousness novel technique than the Dickensian storytelling style. There is something going on in Moonlight with the use of shallow depth-of-field that reinforces this. It’s not naturalism – the stereoscopic human eye mechanism generally pings back and forth in the depth of field to bring a deep awareness of surroundings as well as focal point. The Moonlight camera operates usually on a close focal point without much depth of field. This feels like it works on an emotional plane – this is what the characters feel – it shows what the characters would see with their heart. Remarkable also is the intense poetic framing of the shots and the exquisite colouring the film has undergone. You could hang almost every frame of this film in a gallery such is its visual poetry. I’d be interested to hear from big format film makers I know such as Gbenga Afolabi, Clive Hunte or Pavel Prokopic on what is going on technically with this camera work and colouring. They’d know much more than me! • It’s a cleverly positioned film in that the story can reach both white and black audiences while saying different things to these audiences – it has enough levels to do that. If they so wish, a white audience can say, oh this is a coming-of-age film about a black gay man. And that’s OK. The narrative allows that limited reading of the film. They don’t need ask the more difficult questions: what led to Tyrone’s mother and father being so incompetent/ absent parents, what caused the grinding poverty, how did it come about that drugs became a normal career choice in that neighbourhood: ie they can ignore the social context at will. The film permits it. Black audiences may contextualise the film more in their minds, may extrapolate much more. Audiences in African countries may see it as a gay film. There isn’t one ‘correct’ way to view it. • The acting out of inarticulacy is superb by all three Tyrone’s: their silences talk so much. The narrative flips from public to private individual (from public Tyrone to private Tyrone) is the heartbeat of the novel. In that oscillation, in the trauma of that constant, fraught voyage, is all the pain of the film. • Plot wise, the film is simply set up: it uses the ‘humiliate your character early to get the audience to bond with them’ device found in eg the plays of Ibsen. Who cannot root for a small, hugely neglected kid getting bullied mercilessly? • The gold tooth jewellery (grills, fronts, golds) works both on the symbolic and the pictorial/cinematic levels. Tyrone has to remove his tooth jewellery to eat. There are moments in the film when this jewellery is so brilliant, so beautifully framed that we go past its contemporary hustler ‘showiness’ meaning; and in those moments Tyrone’s shimmering smile in all its radiance becomes as beautiful as a Benin bronze; Tyrone seems to know this, at times he peeks from behind this beauty in all his engaging vulnerability. And you think, yes Tyrone is fucked up, and yet… his soul is as pure...