From 50s migrant to 80s Thatcher critic, the cultural theorist has long led the debate on race and politics. A new film charts his life and his decades-long influence on the culture of modern Britain
As the Labour party prepares for another round of soul-searching next month about the left's place in modern Britain, it could do worse than organise a pre-conference screening of John Akomfrah's wonderful documentary The Stuart Hall Project.
It would be perverse to suggest that Professor Stuart Hall, 81, has been a neglected figure in British cultural life over the last six decades. He was a founding editor of the hugely influential New Left Review in 1958 and the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme (at Birmingham University in 1964). He has been the most prominent of black British intellectuals since the 1960s, a prominent figure of the Open University and among the most trenchant critics of Thatcherism.
Even so, watching Akomfrah's film, which traces Hall's journey from childhood in Jamaica, through his arrival in Britain and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1950, to now, you come to see how pivotal his voice has been in shaping the progressive debates of our times – around race, gender and sexuality – and how an increasingly conservative culture has worked lately to marginalise his nuanced understanding of this country.
As an alternative history of Britain in the last half century, The Stuart Hall Project, which has its British premiere on 6 September after a warm critical reception at the Sundance film festival in Utah, could hardly be bettered.
The chilly class-based world into which Hall arrived, strictly black and white in every sense, has been transformed by any measure into a far more inclusive and tolerant place.
It has always been Hall's contention that there is no such thing as a simple shift in history; that even the most comprehensive revolution in ideas carried the baggage of what came before, and this two steps forward one step back progress is the theme of his own life.
As Akomfrah explains, in talking about making the documentary: "I always wanted to try to do a film about the new left in Britain, that postwar period that is so often ignored. And the more we looked at it the more we realised that we could tell this whole story through Stuart's amazing life."
Akomfrah first met Hall after inviting him to be involved in his first documentary, Handsworth Songs, about the riots of 1981. "We called him because we knew he had been there and lived there," Akomfrah says. "And he came down and watched a rough cut of the film and responded to it. And after that the group of young film-makers, of which I was a part, gravitated towards him."
For such a rigorous thinker, Hall displayed unusual kindness; tolerance and generosity of spirit were not only articles of faith for him, Akomfrah suggests, but also central to his character: "If you go to any of his birthday parties, which I have been doing for a while now, they always seem a very good indication of his influence and his warmth.
"There will be people there from literally every decade of his working life, people from the New Left era, from the Open University, from Iniva [a contemporary collective of young minority artists, of which Hall remains mentor-in-chief]. The age range is astonishing, and Stuart is there in the centre of it all …"
I interviewed Hall six years ago at the time of the opening of Rivington Place, an arts centre in east London, which he fought to establish and which has a library that bears his name.
At the time, he was contemplating a retirement circumscribed by kidney failure and the need for dialysis. He subsequently had a successful transplant, but his health has deteriorated further and lately enforced something of a retreat from public life. Akomfrah has been working on his film for three years, and much of it arose from conversations with Hall. In digging into the archive, even he has been surprised both by how far back Hall's influence goes, and the consistency of his analysis and argument.
For those, like me, who remember Hall chiefly from the 1980s as the most articulate voice of multiculturalism, it is fascinating to see him in the mid-50s, a hipster with a Che Guevara beard, in the company of such august figures as EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class (published 50 years ago this year), or Raymond Williams, the seminal cultural critic, or Ralph Miliband. He looks singularly cool among tweedy pipe-smoking academics. Akomfrah emphasises this theme by giving a Miles Davis soundtrack to the scenes of postwar Britain; smoggy London is cast in a kind of blue light. As Hall recalls: "Miles Davis put his finger on my soul and it never went away."
Akomfrah adds: "I always knew Stuart had an interest in jazz, but I had no idea really of the depth of that; again in conversations it became clear this was really a shaping force for him.
"And the more we got into it, the more I realised that there was an affinity in the way the two of them went about things: very alive to the moment, to what was going on at any given time, and responding."
It was also a shock to the director's sense of history. "I was into jazz in the 80s," says Akomfrah, "and there was a sense in my mind that the artists and film-makers I was working with kind of discovered that tradition, and here was Stuart, you know 20 or 30 years earlier, already making those connections."
Hall was also ahead of his time in other ways, not least in his understanding of assimilation and its discontents as the great political theme of our times. He was fated to this knowledge in a way.
Born to an aspirational family in Jamaica, he emerged into the world a few shades darker than his siblings or parents. His mother, craving whiteness and respectability, appears to have been disturbed by his arrival. She would not let him bring black boys home from school.
"We were part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jew," Hall recalls. The highly caste-based Caribbean was a failed test case for the world in which we now inhabit, "the home of hybridity" Hall was, as he came to understand, the shape of things to come. As he comments in the film, when he asks anyone in London now where they are from, "I expect an extremely long story".
His journey toward finding a home in Britain has not always been an easy one. Having married the (white) academic Catherine Bennett, with whom he has two children, the couple experienced a great deal of racism on the streets of Birmingham. Hall resisted bitterness and, mostly, anger, and stuck to his exemplary arguments.
In doing so, Akomfrah suggests he helped to open up a space for those who followed. The director himself came to Britain from Ghana, where his parents had been prominent in anti-colonial politics, in the 1960s. As he has said elsewhere: "For my generation in the 70s, [Hall] was one of the few people of colour we saw on television who wasn't crooning, dancing or running. His very iconic presence on this most public of platforms suggested all manner of 'impossible possibilities'. With him and through him we began to ask the indispensable questions: who are we, what are we and what could we become."
It seems, I suggest to Akomfrah, that with the Ukip-inflected political debate around immigration ever more charged, a good moment to be revisiting such recent history. What kind of audience is he hoping for his film? "It's funny," he says. "First and foremost, we wanted Stuart to see it.
"It was only really afterwards when we thought what kind of public it might reach. I mean it was made with cinema in mind and there will be a release there. But then we are talking to various television companies including the BBC."
What did Hall make of it? "It was a nerve-racking moment for me and it was very odd watching him watching it. I think there were things he had forgotten, things he hadn't thought about for a long time. He said he felt it was all him, but also someone else, if you know what I mean. I think he is glad we did it."
The title, the "project", suggests unfinished business; does Akomfrah see the postwar new left as relevant today? "I do. It has been fractured in many ways, but among the young generation you see more and more collectives emerging, for example, and no end of small journals and so on, people re-engaging with that tradition."
More than that, though, the legacy of that politics of inclusion, the values that Hall fought and argued for, lives on. "Every time I look at my own life here," Akomfrah says, "and the lives of my children, I see something that the work of Stuart and others allowed.
"They helped to create a way for us to really live here. It didn't happen by accident but through example and struggle; looking back it might be easy for some to be dismissive of that, but I think my daily life is a validation of that work."
The Stuart Hall Project is at the ICA and selected nationwide cinemas from 6 September.
