Memory Room 451 (movie)
- User score: 4.5
- Production country: United Kingdom
- Producer: John Akomfrah
- Production companies: Black Audio Film Collective
- Genre: Science Fiction, Documentary
- Release date: 1/1/1996
- Run time: 25 min.
Movie description
The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.
