By Ridwana Ali

David Olusoga’s Alt History: Black British History We’re Not Taught in Schools (BBC Stories, 2019) is a compelling example of the post-cinematic video essay, blending archival material, historical narrative, and affective pacing to challenge cultural memory. As Olusoga walks through everyday British spaces schools, high streets, and museums, he questions the absence of Black British narratives in mainstream education. But this is more than informational. Through its digital form, the video becomes a sensory intervention that makes lost histories felt and known.

Steven Shaviro (2010) describes “post-cinematic affect” as an aesthetic that bypasses linear storytelling and instead foregrounds mood, sensation, and intensity. Alt History reflects this through its stylistic use of slow motion, glitch transitions, ambient sound, and fragmented montage. It is not structured like a traditional documentary. Instead, it moves associatively, layering images of the Windrush generation, Roman-era Africans in Britain, and personal testimony, creating a collapsed temporal register in which past and present co-exist. The result is effective: viewers are not just informed but emotionally engaged in what has been excluded.

Francesco Casetti (2015) argues that cinema today often operates through “relocation,” where moving images inhabit new contexts and devices while retaining cinematic logic. Alt History exemplifies this relocation existing on social platforms, formatted for mobile viewing, and structured with segment titles like “Afro Romans” or “Tudor Britain” that appear like framed artworks. These blank frames symbolically evoke the museum walls from which these histories are absent. The video essay thus reclaims history not just through content, but through form.

Ultimately, Olusoga’s essay shows how post-cinematic forms can enact political memory work. Through audiovisual layering, embodied address, and stylistic affect, Alt History doesn’t just tell us forgotten stories, it makes us feel their absence.

References

Francesco Casetti, ‘Relocation’, The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come

Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film Philosophy 14.1, 2010. pp. 1-10

Alt History Black British History We’re not taught in schools- BBC Stories [Documentary]. Youtube. Available at: https://youtu.be/Ut5gtrezN4E?si=KW_HuCulebAwSYs5