COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 2: TESTAMENT (1988)
Directed by John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective
80 minutes
TESTAMENT is among the earliest feature-length works created by the pioneering UK-based art group, Black Audio Film Collective (of which John Akomfrah was a founding member). Synthesizing the languages of Third Cinema and avant-garde montage with the lamentational affects of postcolonial disillusionment, TESTAMENT offers a probing spectral meditation on the condition of the African postcolony. The film's protagonist, Abena, is an exiled activist turned television reporter who returns to Ghana two decades after the 1966 coup that brought an end to President Kwame Nkrumah's experiment in Pan-African socialism. Adrift in a "war zone of memories," Abena is caught in the cleavage between public history and private memory. Characteristic of the collective's now-signature blend of archival documents, fictional sequences, and layered sound scores, TESTAMENT enfolds depopulated frames, frigid tones, allegories of mourning, and a cast of enigmatic characters to evoke an emotional landscape of loss and arrested political possibility.