As part of LSE's Black History Month events programme, this screening and discussion sets out to examine the ways in which the socio-political character of Flame in The Streets speaks to the prevailing racial and sexual struggles of the period with a particular focus on its depicting of mixed-relationships, black masculinity and feminism.
Released in the aftermath of the 1958 Notting Hill riots, Flame in the Streets (Roy Barker, 1961) remains a distinctive British film of the 1960’s in its examination of the racial prejudices that defined the ‘Windrush Generations’ antagonous relations with the wider British Society.
In its attempt to expose the passive racisms of Jacko Palmer by paralleling his family conflict between his wife and daughter over her black partner with his industrial conflicts as a trade union representative defending the rights of a black co-worker, the film provides an optic for contextualising both white racism and interracial relationships as a particular phenomenon of 20th century post-war immigration, interweaving themes of race, class and gender relations.
This event is co-hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Department of Gender Studies.
Dr Clive James Nwonka is an LSE Fellow in Film Studies in the Department of Sociology. His work explores issues of realism, race, class, architecture and representation in British and American cinema, and diversity policy in the British film and TV industries. Nwonka convenes the course White Screens/Black Images: The Sociology of Black Cinema on the MSc Culture and Society. His book The Aesthetics of British Urban Cinema is to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020.
Prof Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989/2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996/2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992/2012) and Death Twenty- four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1977; dvd 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4 1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).
Dr Sadie Wearing is an Associate Professor in Gender Theory, Culture and Film in the Gender Studies Department, London School of Economics. Her research interests are in gender and cultural production and in feminist and gender theory, with a specific emphasis on aging, memory and temporality. She has published extensively on these themes in relation to both popular culture (film and television) and literature in both contemporary and historical contexts. She is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective.