Educational Media Reviews Online

During this very long interview, cultural sociologist and writer Stuart Hall is never less than brilliant, accessible, and charming. However, his interviewer, Maya Jaggi, is not as captivating as he is, and unfortunately, never challenges Hall or develops a dialogue with him. And the occasional, intrusive background noise—a plane flies by, a cell phone rings—doesn’t help. Hall and Jaggi sit on opposite ends of a couch for the entire film, and every so often there’s a close-up. It’s a static, non-film, but Hall is so engaging that he holds the viewer’s attention. A retired professor, Hall has a charismatic speaking style, a great sense of humor, and a light-hearted, joyful sensibility. He has written many books and articles, including the controversial Policing the Crisis (which he co-wrote) and Is Race Nothing but a Floating Signifier? in which he claims that because color is an obvious marker, there is discrimination, and that racism is more cultural than biological. Most of us, he notes, look at it the other way around.

A black man born in 1922 in Jamaica, West Indies, Hall, a Rhodes Scholar with a PhD from Oxford, has lived in England since 1951. Recruited by the British academic Richard Hoggart in 1964, Hall headed up the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1968 and stayed there until 1979. He was one of the first to teach media studies in the U.K., and his lifelong passion for popular culture, film, television, music, and art, persists.

The film is one long conversation that is broken up into chapter headings starting with “Family and Culture,” and ending with “Permanent Disturbance: A Migrant’s Fate.” Other headings include “The New Left and the New Left Review,” “Early Teaching,” “Policing the Crisis and Thatcherism,” “Questions of Identity,” and “Race, Diaspora and Art.” Some of the topics Hall touches on are the creolization or hybridization of culture; the black diaspora, slavery, post colonialism, politics, power, and Marxism. He never pontificates or sounds pretentious. His intellectual prowess doesn’t intimidate. He supports his claims vividly and compellingly, and even after four hours, he’s not long-winded.

Hall is an ebullient raconteur whether he’s conveying conceptual ideas or talking about his early life. He says he was the darkest member of a middle-class family--his sister teased him, calling him a coolie—in a culture where the color of one’s skin for the most part determined one’s status. He says “Nobody talked color; it was just in the air we breathed.” His father wouldn’t let him bring home boys darker than he was. At 17, he couldn’t bear the constraints of his society; he felt alienated by Jamaica’s colonial provincialism. He was “ajar with the whole world around him,” a place that was “straight-jacketed by English culture.” After his sister had a “tremendous nervous breakdown,” he became interested in Freud, and for a while, wanted to become a psychoanalyst to understand her better. But then he realized that he was “not good in science.” Hall was the first in his family to go to college, and he loved England immediately. He found the country strange and yet familiar, as if he’d been there in another life.

Hall notes that while “there’s a lot of rubbish taught in all the disciplines,” he loved teaching. He talks about beloved colleagues, including Paddy Whannel, the late film and media scholar. Another inspiration was Gramschi and his notion of power which states that power is not just measured in policy and the leaders of a country. It’s about “leading arguments on television, transforming institutions, winning philosophical arguments.” “Power is dispersed along all these sites, it is different from domination,” Hall claims. He weighs in on feminism, labor, and new labor. His insightful comments about President Obama are gleaned from his reading of Dreams from My Father. While it was conceivable that America would at some point have a black president, Hall says, it is inconceivable that Britain ever will.

Hall’s early literary influences include T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland in particular. He read Ezra Pound and James Joyce. He became interested in the modern painters, especially Picasso, Georges Braque and Paul Klee, whose work “shocked and amused” him. He fell in love with jazz—he loved Charlie Parker and Miles Davis—and was a jazz musician. He found the music “exciting,” and it appealed to him “because of its sophisticated urban language” that was different from anything he heard in Kingston.

Theory is inevitable for Hall; however, he doesn’t consider himself a theorist—he’s “too much in the world.” He references the major theorists like Barthes, Foucault, Deluezes, and claims theory is necessary as “it’s a tool for analyzing something.” However, by the end of the 80s, he begins to lose interest in theories. He laughs when recalling a colleague’s comment: “Do you think if I ducked I would miss Lacan?” Hall says some theories were above everyone’s head, and at a certain moment, there was a progression of them, new ones all the time, and if you missed one, it wouldn’t matter.

Hall is married to the writer Catherine Hall, a white woman thirteen years his junior, and felt stung by the racism of some people who didn’t accept his interracial marriage. He is retired and has been dealing with health issues since 1982; he needs dialysis three times a week. He says “I resent dying like crazy. I am not afraid of it because my interpretation of death is the loss of consciousness so I won’t know it. I won’t wonder why I haven’t been to China lately.” He is afraid of the process of it, he says. Hall has grown children and having grandchildren, he says, is “like being born again.”