Seven Songs for Malcolm X + Tribute to Malcolm X

John Akomfrah and Madeline Anderson pay tribute to X via testimonies from those who knew him best.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993)
Dir. John Akomfrah
52min

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisions the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven-part study in iconography, narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The film collects testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and dramatic reenactments to tell the life, legacy, loves, and losses of Malcolm X, featuring interviews with his widow Betty Shabazz, Spike Lee, and many others. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life reference the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

A Tribute to Malcolm X (1967)
Dir. Madeline Anderson
16min

Made for the William Greaves’ WNET program Black Journal, “A Tribute to Malcolm X” includes an interview with Malcolm X’s widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz, shortly after his 1965 assassination.