Small Axe

Arriving by way of Amazon Prime Video, Small Axe is an anthology of five films directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, 2013).

Together, the series depicts life from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s with a focus on London’s West Indian community.

Immediately, the audioviewer is met with a keen sense of intimacy that is emphasized by the very closely mic’d sounds. The mic check in the first few seconds of this extended trailer overlaps with the unassuming sounds of hands engaged in food preparation; notably, the volume levels are about the same as they overlap. We hear singing in the kitchen. “Cause I know you feel the same—I can feel it in your eyes,” they sing—and the viewer feels very much as though they’ve stumbled upon a scene out of a documentary, which is certainly the intent.

All we hear is the singing and some laughing, and this extends as the footage shifts to larger and larger scenes, with a group of some fifty or so people in the street dancing while the soundtrack remains firmly rooted in the kitchen scene. Some light percussion enters along with a bit of expository dialogue as the scenes continue.

This aural intimacy is in keeping both with the sense of realism the film obviously wishes to invoke (being as it is “inspired by real-life events”), as well as the overall ethos of the series. The name, after all, is comes after an African proverb: “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” A small axe, and a small but effective film score to match.

The music picks up a little in tempo at 0:53 as what sounds like muted strings (as a percussion layer) gains intensity along with the spoken word. Note how we hear the first piece of diegetic sound in quite a while at 0:58 with the sound of a locker door slamming shortly after we hear “we mustn’t be victims, but protagonists of our stories”—how the door slamming is a punctuation of this line, as much as it is a reservation of sound for one of the protagonists in question. This stands in opposition to us hearing the sound of any of the riotous scenes surrounding it. We do hear more and more of these environmental sounds seeping in, but only after this juncture with the locker door, and only with relative subtlety.

With the inclusion of these diegetic sounds gaining intensity (but still firmly beneath anything else on the soundtrack), the percussive strings become even faster. This reaches a peak at 1:13, and we hear a simple choral refrain of the proverb along with a title card.

With selections screening at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, Small Axe first arrives on the small screen on the BBC November 15th before making its way stateside on Amazon November 20^th, with a release schedule over the following month.

— Curtis Perry