Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films

Black Audio Film Collective's distinctive approach to documentary filmmaking culminated in this film inspired by the story of 1960s black revolutionary leader Michael X. However, to call it a 'biopic', or anything resembling one, would be to miss the point. Who Needs A Heart is interested in the effect that the political spirit of the '60s, which threw up such a complex personality as Michael X, had on black/white relations on the one hand, and on the relationship between art and society on the other.

Narrative has been replaced by a collage of fragments. The soundtrack, which could fill a theatre by itself, has a hallucinatory relationship to the story. And the direction seems to have inhaled some of the experimental substances of the time it represents. Which isn't to say that Who Needs A Heart is a bad film. On the contrary, it is compelling, exhilarating and inexplicably moving, once the viewer realises that any attempt at a rational explanation is pointless.

The film reveals relatively little about Michael X, self-styled leader of the Black Muslims in London and president of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. It does, however, present a vivid description of the social scene through which such political movements flowed, and the emotional and psychological consequences for the young people caught up in it.

The connections between Michael X and the more famous revolutionary Malcolm X are investigated. As in Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986) and Seven Songs For Malcolm X (1993), footage from Malcolm X's life punctuates the narrative. Interviewed by the Black Film Bulletin in 1993, Akomfrah revealed that his motivation was to reclaim the memories of Malcolm X for the black world instead of leaving him as just another American icon.

One effect common to all three films is a strange silence interlacing the narrative, as memory and history swim past each other. In Who Needs a Heart, this is taken quite literally: actors are silent for most of the film, acting out a story with elaborately stylised gestures, while dialogue is patchy and sometimes deliberately out of sync.

Ann Ogidi

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