News Flash:
An Interview with Kahlil Joseph
By Robert Daniels
Kahlil Joseph is such a multifaceted creative, it was always difficult to imagine how his unrestrained voice as an audacious video artist would translate to the measured practice of feature filmmaking.
Joseph’s application of archival footage, home videos, and historical stills with surreal imagery in short films for Flying Lotus’s Until the Quiet Comes, Kendrick Lamar’s Good kid, m.A.A.d city, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade re-elevated the music video back into the realm of visual art. His keen deployment of Black cultural imagination also gave the near immeasurable kinetic rhythms of Black life a visual voice. It’s therefore unsurprising that the news media, a capricious form that often serves as the sole arbiter of how Black existence is seen and interpreted by outside eyes, would become an important subject for Joseph.
An extension of his 30-minute video installation BLKNWS, Joseph’s debut feature BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is an expansive accumulation of Black literature, art, and politics contained in a documentary format whose spontaneous blending of Afrofuturist renderings, news desk segments, snippets of music, YouTube videos, and movies, and interview clips with Black academics, thinkers, and journalists, collapses temporal and diasporic boundaries to provide as near a comprehensive survey of Black reality as cinematically possible.
Its filmic translation is predicated on W. E. B. Du Bois, whose conceptual project Encyclopedia Africana, fully realized by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Anthony Appiah decades after Du Bois’s death, serves as the film’s loose throughline for the referencing of figures like Saidiya Hartman (one of the film’s five writers), Marcus Garvey, and Anas Aremeyaw Anas. Its collaborative nature also borrows heavily from music: Joseph serves as the primary artist, while filmmakers Garrett Bradley, Raven Jackson, Arthur Jafa, and Kaneza Schaal are featured directors on the film’s various “tracks.” This vat of cross-disciplinary approaches gives BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions a kind of artistic fluidity and creative energy that matches Joseph’s boundless imagination.
I spoke with Joseph over Zoom during New York Film Festival about redefining the news through a Black lens, assembling a dream team of directors, and working outside of filmmaking practices.
Reverse Shot: Why were you interested in the news as a medium, so to speak?
Kahlil Joseph: I think it was around 2016 when I started to understand, for the first time, how powerful the format was as a moving image. I’d always considered myself up until that point a student of the moving image. But the news was never in my purview. In 2016, I remember Ryan Coogler was editing the first Creed, so he had come by the studio late and I think he wanted to get an introduction to somebody for some music, but there was nobody else there. We were watching the news, and we were making some comment as to how Black people were portrayed in the news and how it's always been bad. I remember saying, jokingly: “We should do the news ourselves.” I realized, either in that moment or shortly after, who we were in relation to the media landscape.
Ryan and I were actually both really interested in trying to create BLKNWS. But shortly after Creed came out, Black Panther became his next project, so he just said: “Bro, I’ve got no bandwidth to really think about anything else. You should just go do it.” I touched base with him for a while as we were getting started because it was a 30-minute show that I had concocted, and I pitched it as a 30-minute show to about four or five major media companies and platforms. I had just come off Lemonade, so I was able to basically get meetings easily because everyone was curious about what my next project would be. I remember in all those meetings I could tell they were like: “Wait. You want to do news next?” No one said “yes.” All I was asking for was money to do a 30-minute show. And I forgot who it was, but someone pulled me aside and said: “I think your idea is bigger than a show.” Which is one of the reasons why very few people are saying yes. And I remember thinking “What bigger than a show?” A network. Who has the bandwidth to be thinking about that, right?
Still, I also started to iterate on what it was since no one would give me the money to go shoot stuff. That's when I just decided to make a prototype from material that was online and from that I just shot the news death segments with friends. Amandla Stenberg is a friend; Helen Molesworth was a really close friend. Once the project got picked up by the art world, I had to do a lot more research into what the news did historically, formally, intellectually etc. That's when BLKNWS really started to take off, when I understood all the deeper implications.
RS: Here, the news isn’t just a medium, you’ve basically made the news into a genre. How did you go about translating this loose thing into a fixed form?
KJ: Well, technically the news is something you didn't know before you knew it. Which is a lot of shit. Most people know what they know and everything else technically is news. So, what immediately triggered all this was the thought that the news has nothing to do with current events, which is what we believe the news to be largely. It actually is historical. If I told you about something that happened in the 1800s, you could literally say: “That’s news to me.” Also, YouTube is so big, in my opinion, because people are natural learners. We naturally like to learn. There's a narrative that education stops after school. YouTube has really proven that to not be the case. I don't know about you, but we’ll end up watching a two-hour YouTube clip talking about the most random knowledge base from some guy or some woman in some other part of the world who's done all this research and connected all these dots, but we have a hard time sometimes watching a movie.
I realized that we Black people really have never had our CNN or our New York Times, but we're remarkably well-informed. Even a lot of the uneducated class of folks are remarkably well-informed. I had to ask myself: How is that? Why is that? How are we getting this information?
Having spent so much time in the art world, I understood that what makes something a work of art isn’t necessarily from the most talented drawer or the person who can paint the best. It's all context. In the history of art, originally it was painting, sculpture, sketch, and then conceptual art entered the frame in 1920, where anything could be art if you’ve given it context. It's all about the meaning around the work and not the work itself. For news, I feel like it's always been a current event, a human-interest story, or unfortunately, which has been the case since the 1980s, someone's opinion that can be counted as news. We're essentially in a moment where anything can be news. So, I’m introducing BLKNWS with the idea that a standup joke, a meme, a song, a concert, an interview with James Baldwin, given context, is news. BLKNWS is giving historical and other relevant context to all these things.
RS: If news and art can be anything given the proper context, then you could almost say that a film can be anything if given proper context.
KJ: Well, you know, it's interesting: we profile this Ghanaian journalist named Anas Aremeyaw Anas. In the film he essentially goes undercover to expose bad actors by getting irrefutable evidence. Now in the United States and Europe, his approach is illegal. It technically isn't journalism. It’s unlawful. If I was to do what he’s doing, for The New York Times, I would be thrown in jail. But in Africa, the rules are very different. He's considered a hero, even to the West. If what he's doing technically isn't journalism to us, and yet we celebrate to the point President Obama is valorizing him in speeches, then what does that mean when you pull out and look at how we do things? Here in the United States, we have a history of making anything Black people do unlawful. It used to be unlawful to read or to walk together in public, to look white people in the eye. So, when you think about the history of the legal system and this idea of fugitivity, it makes sense to me that we constantly exceed the terms of a given thing.
I talk a lot about how there’s no way the Belgian inventor who created the saxophone would have anticipated the rules that John Coltrane would enact and break. John Coltrane defined that instrument and everything it stands for, but he does not play it at all in the way that the inventor intended. It’s the same with basketball. The rules had to keep shifting to accommodate our level of imagination. We have yet to really enter the film space, in my opinion. At first, in fact, I wasn’t interested in it becoming a film. It just didn't feel like that's how I wanted to enter the film world, if you will. That's not what BLKNWS was for me. It was supposed to be an idea for a larger media company. I'm really grateful that something so unwieldy was able to find its way into a picture.
RS: There’s so much spontaneity in this film, but its homebase, through its various citations, is Du Bois's idea for an Encyclopedia Africana. Though Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah fulfilled his vision in 1999, the version you’ve invented, which references current events, is conceptual in nature. What was the methodology for conceiving it and keeping it together?
KJ: I've never made an album, but it feels like we were doing some version deciding the best sequencing of these tracks or of these things we made. I say that because there was a version of what's the beginning, the middle, and the end, and then when the encyclopedia entered the conversation, it was very clear that was the beginning. I've listened to a lot of great filmmakers talk about the craft over the years, and there's a version of working on scenes and then you put those scenes together to make a film. Obviously, we both know that there's traditionally a script that's guiding the general course of a story. That doesn't mean it can't change in the edit. But we were interested in making the most authentic thing for the material.
RS: You had several filmmakers contribute to this film: Garrett Bradley, Raven Jackson, Arthur Jafa, and Kaneza Schaal. What kind of directive or guiding principle did you give them as they were making, as you call them, tracks (or parts) for this film?
KJ: I don't know if this was conscious or not, I don't remember, but all those collaborators are equally straight-up professionals. But they’re also relatively new to making films. AJ's never made a movie. Garrett has only made Time. Raven Jackson at the time had just finished her first feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Kaneza Schaal comes from the theater world. So, there was this openness to what a movie could be, which was inherent in all our exchanges. We hadn't been doing this for 40 years, which means we weren’t entrenched in how something is supposed to be done. A lot of the collaborators I just mentioned also come from other fields: poetry, documentary, fine art, and theater—so they were already bringing cross-disciplinary ideas.
It was exciting, especially because a major Hollywood studio was allowing this to happen without any oversight. The original studios that were involved didn't have any say in what we were doing. It was more like these artists were collaborating with me. I think Participant went to see AJ shoot. But Participant didn't come with us to Africa, where Garrett shot; they weren't in L.A. on Kaneza’s shoot. Raven collaborated most directly with me. It was almost like two rappers on the same track. She would get an actor and then I would get the same actor and direct another scene through the same set of scenes, which was unique and exciting. So, Kaneza directed her own thing. AJ directed his own thing. Garrett directed her own thing. Raven worked closely with me on the same script. In many ways, no one knew how any of this stuff was coming together in the same way musicians who collaborate on someone's album don't really know what the rest of the album will sound like. They're just working in a very targeted way, whether it's a track or a beat or a hook.
RS: It must have taken quite a bit of trust on the part of the collaborators to shoot their parts with the belief that it would eventually come together.
KJ: Well, BLKNWS, the original artwork, is a group effort. So, it was inherent to the source material. It almost seemed inauthentic for the film to only be my voice when BLKNWS is so polyphonic. It's a whole bunch of people's ideas and edits and tastes and footage and beliefs. If you were to watch 20 minutes of BLKNWS, you’d see quite a few ideas that I don't necessarily believe in, in the same way a good newspaper shouldn't reflect only one side of a story.
RS: I’m wondering if the cinematography was the same. Bradford Young brought much of the visual language together. But were there other DPs working in conjunction with the other directors, and what was Bradford Young’s reaction to this process?
KJ: Bradford Young needs to be interviewed on his own, in terms of what his process was because I'm still in awe of his ability to work with Kaneza, Garrett, and AJ. For Raven Jackson's contribution, it was unique. She worked with Jomo Frey, who shot Nickel Boys and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt as well. I think she was still editing her feature when she agreed to collaborate with me, so she requested that she work with Jomo. Me and Brad were like: “Yeeeaahhh” [Joseph says with the look of a coach who was asked if he wanted to pair Magic with Jordan]. It became an interesting process because we were shooting in the same location. Imagine being in an empty hotel, Jomo and Raven are on the seventh floor with an actor. Brad and I are setting up for the same scene with the same actor but with a different lens and a different lighting setup. Obviously, it's a unique form of collaboration.
RS: You’ve talked about being deeply influenced by music, and so I must ask about the sound mastering in this film. There are so many video sources for this: cellphone, YouTube, news etc. Could you talk about maintaining the auditory cohesiveness of the film?
KJ: It took a whole lot of effort, and we went through a handful of different people. At one point I even approached an album engineer to master it in stereo because it kept feeling too much like a movie and it obviously doesn't play like a movie. So, we went through these different variations, and we found a great, happy medium or a sweet spot, which harnessed what the Cineplex has to offer. I also kept in mind that 99.9% of the people who will ever see my film will see it on their television or laptop. The theatrical experience is composed of such a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people who will see it. Even if I were to sell a billion dollars in ticket sales, the history of film says that in 10, 20, 30 years, people will be watching it at home, just like with Fellini or any of the great filmmakers of the past’s work. Understanding that and understanding that music is the gold standard for mastering sound—I don't think it's films, per se. A Beatles record is probably more of a sonic engineering feat than an action sequence in Saving Private Ryan—I made it a point to talk to music producers and engineers about mastering this project.
RS: As much as I love the theatrical experience, most of my favorite movies haven’t been seen there, which is a fact for everyone. Most of the great movies aren’t watched in a theater.
KJ: The irony is that Antonioni and Fellini could never have conceived of their movies being watched on home video, let alone iPhones and iPads. For the foreseeable future of mankind, those films are probably going to be watched on streaming. There's the famous story of Jimi Hendrix mastering his music for the transistor radio because that's what the GIs listened to, so he mastered his work for FM radio. He wasn't thinking that somebody was going to have some thousand-dollar system listening to his music. That always stuck with me, meeting people where they're at.
Photo: Berlinale website