Burning an Illusion (1981, Menelik Shabazz)

Wednesday 20th March 5pm, Richard Hoggart Building cinema

Join us on Wednesday the 20th of March from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) for our final screening of the spring term, Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981). The film is 1 hour and 45 minutes long, so the screening will finish at 7pm. (In our spring term programme we originally advertised that this screening would be of Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972). However, we couldn’t source an adequate copy of the film and so will show it at a later date.)

Here’s an introduction to the film, from Sight and Sound in 2022:

Shabazz’s fiction debut was only the second British feature to be made by a Black director in the UK, following Horace Ové’s Pressure in 1976. Shabazz spent time on the set of Ové’s film and was inspired by it. In contrast to Pressure, though, Burning an Illusion is immediately distinguished by its placing of a Black female character at the centre of the narrative in a way that was unprecedented in British cinema up to that point (though Colette Laffont’s investigating protagonist in Sally Potter’s 1979 short Thriller should not be overlooked) – and that remains all too rare even today. 

The film’s focus is on Pat Williams (played by Cassie McFarlane in an Evening Standard award-winning performance), a 22-year-old office worker who narrates her story of love, strife and political awakening in early 80s London. Pat is introduced as a heroine with thoroughly conventional aspirations – she has her own flat and is looking to settle down with a partner – but her priorities are dramatically challenged and changed by events. Her progress is at once specific – rooted in her lived experience as a Black woman at this time – and archetypal, constituting a classic journey of self-realisation that takes the character from a state of innocence to experience. That arc plays out primarily through the shifting dynamic in Pat’s relationship with Del Bennett (Victor Romero Evans), the charismatic, moody boyfriend whose incarceration following an incident of police violence brings Pat to Black Power consciousness and activism.

For more, read the full article by Alex Ramon here. For some further viewing on Black British lives from the 1960s to the 1980s, see Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (2020) anthology on BBC iPlayer here and his documentary series Uprising (2021) here.