The Stuart Hall Project

This is a stirring documentary tribute to the cultural theorist Stuart Hall – born in Jamaica and living in Britain since the 1950s – by the filmmaker John Akomfrah. Hall’s life and words are acute reflections of the world and Britain’s role in it in the second half of the twentieth century and he has long concerned himself with issues of identity, race, social change and much more besides. Akomfrah finds an imaginative way of telling Hall’s story: he cuts his words, taken from archive media appearances and, presumably, a new interview, to archive imagery, both of Hall himself and the events and situations he alludes to. It means we see the past few decades through very special eyes. Perhaps most disturbing is how we almost entirely lack – or at least give few platforms to – such public intellectuals in today’s Britain. For a man with his finger so lucidly and impressively on the pulse throughout his life, his parting words are especially moving: ‘I feel the world is stranger to me than I have ever felt before.’