Black British films as valuable as other UK and European genres, says academic

Aamna Mohdin

London: The black British urban genre should be as valuable to British film culture and academia as the French new wave and British social realism, a leading academic has said.

Clive Nwonka, an associate professor of film, culture and society at UCL, began his academic research in 2010, during a critically important era of black representation in British film and TV.

“If you look at my bookshelf, which is quite extensive as I came through the classic film studies tradition, I have dozens of books on the French new wave, German new wave, New Hollywood cinema, and British social realism. Of these dozens of books and collections, how many are on the British urban genre? None. Until now,” Nwonka said.

Nwonka’s book, Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film, published by Bloomsbury, offers the first dedicated analysis of black British urban cinema and TV. It has been widely praised as the first attempt to establish the genre as a subject for serious academic study.

It explores black working-class representation in British cinema and TV from the 1980s to recent years, including Storm Damage, Bullet Boy, Tower Block Dreams, Attack the Block and Top Boy.

“The British urban genre, which is predominantly around black people and about black people, should be as valuable to British film culture and to academic pursuit as all those other areas I mentioned. But it’s not and it hasn’t been,” Nwonka said.

He added: “We need a critical mass of of research like this and it hasn’t been so far because the urban genre is seen in really reductive and regressive terms.”

Nwonka traces the “concerted erasure of black identity from the mainstream sphere of British film and television” in the 1990s to the drama series Top Boy becoming the blockbuster cultural phenomenon it is today.

“I witnessed as a teenager … the absence of seeing oneself on screen in various forms. There was a shift in the 2000s to this kind of post-multicultural celebration of difference and I think that is an outcome of New Labour’s more broader political agenda that had impacts in the cultural realm.”

He added: “I think one of the reasons why the urban as a genre has been denigrated more critically is because it’s always associated with things like diversity or inclusion. [The idea that] if we can get young people off the street to play themselves in film, that will somehow move them away from a life of crime.”

Nwonka said there had never been a period of proportionate and realistic representation of black people in UK TV and film. There have been periods where there is little to no representation and periods where there is an excess of depictions of one type of black British identity.

The noughties and early 2010s is a good example of the latter, where criminality and violent black death were portrayed frequently. Still, Nwonka says he feels reluctant to criticise the work from that period. “I go into youth clubs and speak to young people who say ‘I recognise that Top Boy isn’t particularly positive in terms of the images and narratives, but this is real to me’.”

“Seeing our images for the first time being represented on mainstream TV is important to us and becomes quite compelling; and you have to allow space for that in our critique of positive and negative representation.”

Nwonka criticised what he described as an “unsophisticated binary” that is found often in commentary on black British urban films and TV, where it is argued that negative or positive images will significantly influence society. “We spent our childhood watching James Bond, and it has much more hyper-violence than we saw in Blue Story and Top Boy. Why are we not now decapitating people in the streets?”

The Black Lives Matter protests and the movement that followed has sparked an increase in “different kinds of representations of us as black people in Britain”, Nwonka said. He points to the romcom Rye Lane and drama The Last Tree.

“Now, I think we should appreciate those in our own terms, rather than make comparative analysis alongside a more negative representation of us, because there’s not the same way that other identities are thinking about themselves with representation.”