BlackmanVision Film Production

Still from Oil Spill - The Exxon Valdez Disaster ©Smoking Dogs Films 2009

Smoking Dogs Films is located in Hackney London. It is made up of John Akomfrah OBE, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson who were members of the highly acclaimed and award-winning Black Audio Film Collective whose titles included Handsworth Songs and Seven Songs for Malcolm X. Their most recent documentary,  Oil Spill – The Exxon Valdez Disaster, will be transmitted on BBC 2 on the 26th March at 9pm.

Why the name change from Black Audio to Smoking Dogs?
Black Audio dissolved as a collective in 1998 an several members went on to do other things like music, more gallery based work and visual arts. And so the three of us who wanted to continue working in film thought it was time to plant some new grass. Running the collective had been an incredibly complicated political and cultural project involving trade unions, grant making bodies, local councils and television stations. We wanted to do something looser and freer. So the name change was part of the overhaul of priorities and agendas. It offered the possibility to put on hold some of the complex institutional negotiations running a collective entailed.

Also by the end, much of the collective’s project, the fore-grounding of Black representation and alternative narrative strategies had become familiar tropes of Black independent cinema. So the name change was about grappling with and naming our transition/evolution to a new cultural project. When you formulate a new manifesto or adopt a new identity or take on new set of concerns, its really important to signal that in the most iconic way possible. And a name change suggests that – its says we outta here y’all. We on a new tip now, we on the move.

What is the ethos behind Smoking Dogs?
After the fifteen years of collective practice our desire was to create a new atelier in which to do challenging, inspiring, provocative work across a range of platforms – cinema, television, galleries. And to enjoy it!! And so from the beginning the idea was very much to try to widen the visual and narrative possibilities of black related subjects. We want to create a space in which we can continue to have complete control over our output and the conditions of the work.

One of our favorite books is As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (Allison & Busby, 1977) by Val Wilmer. We loved the people she chose as her subjects like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. But more than anything, we loved the title of the book : As Serious As Your Life. And that pretty much became the defining mantra for us : lets do fun and interesting shit. But that’s as serious as our lives. And if we are going to be poor or unpopular, fine. But lets be poor and unpopular our way!

What inspired you to make the film about the Exxon Valdez disaster?

Like the Berlin Wall coming down, or the end of apartheid, the Exxon Valdez disaster was one of those zeitgeist defining events for our generation. It was the first time many of us saw an environmental disaster on that scale, the first inkling of what had changed in our relationship with fossil fuels and when the first green shoots of eco-consciousness started to take root in our souls.

And it happened twenty years ago to the day. We wanted to remind people that it happened and that the effects of that spill are still with us today.

The other thing was just honoring a promise to ourselves to do more environmental based work. Because, the name Smoking Dogs always suggested for us an environmentalist/ecological interest. We are the smoking beagles of those ghastly laboratory experiments with cigarettes!!!

Why do you think people don’t associate people of color with environmental issues?
Part of it is just to do with the metro-centric prism through which “Black politics ” is viewed both within as well outside Black circles. And it is by no means the truth of Black life on the planet. If you live and work in Sub Sahara Africa, environmental questions are not marginal to your life. They frame it in a very concrete way and your political activity or cultural work reflects that. Fela Kuti was singing about multinationals and what they do to the African environment in the 1970s!!

And if you are a South Asian artist working on the subcontinent, what the agri-multinational Monsanto wants to do with rice, is not marginal at all.

The disassociation happens because to be Black is assumed to be a wholly self contained single issue entity. Paul Gilroy calls this racilogical reasoning which is certainly rampant in the broadcast and film worlds. The assumption is if you are Black then all you ever think about or are concerned with are racial issues. But we are not one-dimensional.

When we went to Alaska to make the Exxon film we were warmly received as filmmakers. They were so amazed that we had come all the way from the UK to make a film about an event which happened 20 years ago because many we met knew of our work. They kept reminding us of the awards we had won, our achievements and John’s OBE. It was really humbling and made us feel even more determined to do justice to their story.

They knew and we knew that there some issues that are universally defining. And one of those is about our global relationship to hydro carbon fuels. But it’s also about the impact of those fuels on our planet. So we don’t feel we are trespassing on someone’s patch. It is our land too.

What are you working on next?
We are extending our fictional productions. We have two fictional films in development one based in Africa, one in the UK and a six-part series for here. We are mentoring younger talented film makers to get more exposure for their work. And after so many years we are aiming to film our feature documentary on Fela Kuti later this year

What caught my eye and touched my soul in 2008.

1. Bird Club – performance art celebrating the queer feminine. Live, warm and moving.
2. The Genome Chronicles – film by John Akomfrah – commissioned for Donald Rodney Retrospect curated by Keith Piper. Painful, wistful, haunting
3. Transgender Film Festival – inclusive, innovative, challenging
4. Savage Grace – film by Tom Kalin about the doomed heiress Barbara Daly Baekeland and her son Antony – brave, exquisite costumes and cinematography, disturbing
5. MUST – Peggy Shaw and Clod Ensemble’s performance- raw, physical, sinuous, poetic
6. Survivors – TV series population survive deadly virus – uneven performances, integrated casting, 1 queer survivor, annoying, gripping
7. Club des Femmes – female cinema re-visited – political, feminist, counter culture
8. Femmes of Power – photographic essay on queer femininity eds. Del La Grace Volcano, Ulrika Dahl – visual, eclectic, much needed to shift the dominance of butch/andro imagery in queer culture

In 2009 I can’t wait for

1. Mississippi Damned – written and directed by Tina Mabry – three Black children try to escape their abusive situation
2. Push – directed by Lee Daniels based on the novel by Sapphire.
3. Weather Girl – film co-produced by Steak House comedy about an adult woman finding love