Who Needs a Heart

Another very lively experimental film from the Black Audio Film Collective in the wake of Handsworth Songs, this is akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975. Inspired by the black political figurehead and/or criminal Michael X, the film nevertheless holds him at a distance, tracing his career through contemporary TV and radio bulletins which counterpoint and parallel the lives of a group of (racially mixed) friends and lovers involved in the Black Power movement. Dialogue is strictly a subsidiary element in Trevor Mathison's allusive, inventive sound design; narrative emerges in snatches, as Akomfrah flashes back from 1972 to the early '60s, and then forwards, recalling the properties of the times in music, fashion and art. It's an outside-in approach to cinema, and to politics, but there's more humour than pretension here. An intriguing, rewarding film.