A week before its original Sundance premiere, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions by Kahlil Joseph had its participation withdrawn from the festival by its investor, Participant Media. The financer alleged the director showed a secret cut of the project to critics at the CAA screening room, justifying their intervention in the film’s participation in the Utah event. Around the same time, the media trades reported that A24, which had joined the project in its pre-production, dropped out of the project a few months prior due to a missed deadline. Suddenly, Joseph’s project gained attention because of commercial legal battles. Thus, a few days later, Rich Spirit acquired the ownership of the work from Participant, a decision they also made when they bought the rights of Donald Trump‘s biopic, The Apprentice, from Kinematic. The film could world premiere at Sundance and resonate for its cinematic quality, not solely for a complicated background production.
Kahlil Joseph, the film director, comes from a visual album experience; he directed Process by Sampha, the historical Lemonade by Beyoncé, m.A.A.d based on Kendrick Lamar‘s Good Kid, m.A.A.d City, Until the Quiet Comes from Flying Lotus, and Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes. However, the artist would develop BLKNWS, simply Black News, as a video installation in 2017. Initially, it had an exhibition at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. In 2019, he participated in the Arte section of the Venice Biennale, one of the most influential art events. Consisting of video excerpts and interactions, the work would show varied extracts of Black media over the years. In 2022, the artist decided to adapt the installation to a feature film, finally resulting in BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions. Hence, Joseph introduces the movie through the perspective of an Africana Encyclopedia, a 1999 edition inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s project of an Encyclopedia Africana. It is a compendium that includes hundreds of Pan-African studies and explains a plethora of concepts revolving the Black culture and history.
The film presents the concept of the encyclopedia, a gift from his father to his brother in 2000, as the starting point of the film. Each new concept on the screen has its title and the corresponding page of the explanation in the Africana .In this sense, we follow an Uber ride in Philadelphia, titled Philadelphia (pg. 775). The footage shows the street view from the windshield perspective, while the car plays Travis Scott and SZA’s Telekenisis on the radio. We hear a phone call from the passenger telling her friend about the trip she took, and a brief explanation of it. It is the most linear interaction in the project, as the forthcoming sequences are a compilation of concepts, excerpts, footage, and discussions on the African diaspora. Joseph connects through images a visual excerpt of a jazz player (pg. 70) to James Baldwin (pg. 320), while transitioning to an interview with the French trailblazer Agnes Varda and her disdain for the classifying of a film as fiction, documentary, or faux-documentary. According to her, it is all film.
Furthermore, Varda’s conceptualization of genre applies to the film that Joseph attempts to produce. It is an amplification of the video installation, utilizing the screen and the project’s length of two hours as an immense canvas. The director rejects the traditional notion of fiction or non-fiction; it is at the same time both and neither of them. Consequently, it combines the concepts of DuBois and his studies on the sociology of the African-American. Joseph wants to comprehend the genesis of blackness in the American continent, which happened through the trans-Atlantic slavery trade in the 16th Century to the 18th Century. In this sense, the director decides on a maximalist focus for the project, adding an immense amount of information and concepts.
In a sense, the director assembles a stellar team to compose the film, as the first African-American cinematographer to receive an Academy Award nomination, Bradford Young (Arrival & Selma), who shoots solely the fictionalized scenes. Furthermore, Paul Rogers, the Academy Award-winning editor for his work on Everything Everywhere All at Once, organizes a kinetic exposition on the sociology and culture of the Black population in the last four centuries. BLKNWS is more similar to Arthur Jafa’s exposition-blended films than traditional studies on the Black population, such as Raoul Peck’s works. Similar to Jafa, Khalil Joseph occupies the exposition venues, expands his ideas on the media, and transports them to the screen, in an effort equivalent to Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Despite the tiredness of the concept and the collages, the director proposes to analyze the history of blackness through the lens of the visual arts, combining the formal codes of exhibitions with cinema rules.
In an era of government efforts to interfere in the Smithsonian and reject slavery, works like BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions expand the importance of Black written works, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s quintessential works. Despite the commercial trouble that sheds a light on the project, the film is a welcome spotlight on the history of the Black community, amidst the denial of slavery, and re-organization of white supremacism in the 2020s America.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions recently played at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the TIFF site for the title.
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