Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Our House
By A.G. Sims

New York Film Festival 2025:
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Kahlil Joseph, 2025, U.S., 107m

You’re likely to have seen Kahlil Joseph’s work and not know it. He’s collaborated with some of the biggest musicians of the past two decades including Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Kendrick Lamar, and Steven Ellison a.k.a. Flying Lotus, on landmark projects. Joseph directed a short film to accompany Ellison’s digi-dreamscape Until the Quiet Comes, which won the Short Film Special Jury Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. In 2015, Joseph’s video installation “m.A.A.d.,” an impressionistic portrait of the city of Compton, which started as a collaboration with Lamar, featured in the artist’s first solo show, Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles. Joseph was also one of seven directors behind the visual album Lemonade, Beyoncé’s 2016 tour de force, a thematically rich and genre expansive album about infidelity and forgiveness whose importance to the pop canon is like that of Carmen to opera. Speaking about his latest film in conversation with Viviana M. Medina at the Berlinale, Joseph said music is the “one space where I would say Black creativity is at its fullest potential … I want to try to get my work closer to what music feels like.”

With his first feature, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Joseph reaches those heights and more. Though intellectually dense and philosophically complex, this collage-work of images, memes, videos, and scripted sequences hits more like good music. Take any five of these at random and you see the vision: images from the history-making pan-African festival of art and culture that was FESTAC ’77, scenes from Amistad (1997), an extended sequence on the influential Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, a picture of the cover of Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and the ubiquitous Relieved Denzel Washington GIF. A sci-fi narrative holds it all together, centering on two passengers on board the fictitious Nautica Transatlantic Voyage, a kind of futuristic submarine that travels from the Americas to West Africa in record time. One of these characters is a “sociological historian,” Funmi (named after Nigerian political activist Funmilayo Aníkúlápó-Kuti), who happens to be a reincarnation of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the other a journalist from The New York Times who is there to cover an art exhibition taking place on the vessel. She’s a personified symbol of the film’s major conceit that everything we’re seeing is Black news, for which history has set the terms. Joseph asks the viewer to connect the dots between these places, figures, and events, both fiction and nonfiction, the point is not to figure it all out. BLKNWS is a movie to get lost in, like a hypnotic chopped-and-screwed tape.

The movie opens with a visual of a first edition Africana Encyclopedia, published in 1999, which Joseph’s late father had gifted his brother, the late artist Noah Davis, who died of cancer in 2015. Africana, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, was inspired by an opus that Du Bois had been developing for several decades. He was still working on it when he died in Accra, Ghana, in 1963. Joseph turns the book’s old, yellowed pages, and the movie takes off from there. A poignant, sentimental backing track turns to a thumping club beat as images race across the screen. Some of the photos are subtitled with a corresponding page number from the encyclopedia, but Joseph has stated in interviews not to take those page numbers too literally. Pictures and videos from his own family archive, which includes some footage his father, Keven Davis, took at the 1995 Million Man March, and more recent shots of his dad’s Harlem brownstone, make the abstract film feel semi-autobiographical.

BLKNWS embodies a vision of documenting Black life, history, and speculative futures that Joseph and his brother shared. Together they cofounded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a partnership with MoCA, where a lot of the ideating happened for this film. Joseph has described the process as like that of a TV writers’ room, except with artists, poets, and scholars. Guests like poet and scholar Fred Moten, who appears in the film, would visit the Underground Museum and lead educational conversations with the working group. In interviews about BLKNWS, Joseph emphasizes the collaborative effort that this film emerged from, and described putting together the disparate parts of the movie like a musician would put together an album, and choosing collaborators like song features. From its inception to the film’s flow and time signatures, music is a lodestar. Recalling Arthur Jafa’s installation Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, some of the videos shown rhyme with the compositions and unfold like a music video. A sequence that starts with a clip from Amistad—a woman throwing herself overboard the slave ship, choosing death over enslavement—melts into a clip of young Black men on motorbikes, then to skaters at a roller rink, all set to a syrupy, slowed down rap song.

The juxtapositions are haunting and attention-grabbing, but what Joseph seems to be trying to capture is the surreality of being Black. A mystical theme courses through the film, suggesting that the spaces we occupy are charged with the energy of whatever came before. A house isn’t ever just a house—it’s all generations of tenants, past, present, and future, communing together across time. And the ocean, by this thought, isn’t just the ocean. It’s animated by the lost souls of enslaved people who were dumped into the sea during the slave trade, metabolized by the water and part of the tides that spill onto shores today. At one point in the film, a narrator refers to a fictional energy field over an unmarked burial ground in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In those imaginings, Joseph challenges the perception of history as something we can choose to leave behind us. By reincarnating Du Bois as the character Funmi, who’s retracing that same corridor of the Middle Passage, Joseph connects Du Bois to Afrofuturist ideology, imagining a world where he could continue his life’s work beyond the grave.

At the film’s outset, after setting up Africana and providing some biographical info on Du Bois, Joseph asserts (through subtitled text) that this isn’t a documentary. However, the movie is partly an impressionistic portrait of Du Bois’s life. And as it proceeds, the lines between documentary and fiction are intentionally blurred. When we see Du Bois near the end of his life being driven in a cab to a Marcus Garvey Memorial site and having a philosophical conversation with his Ghanaian driver about Black identity and pan-Africanism, we don’t know if this is a footnote from a researched biography or speculative fiction. BLKNWS is inspired by history but not bound by it. In one clip, Moten reminds us, “Going into the archives reveals the limitations of the archives.” The concept of ‘critical fabulation,’ coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, a major collaborator on the film,” seems to inspire the unconventional form BLKNWS takes. Hartman’s work specializes in blending history and fiction into her books and essays, imagining what life could have been like for an enslaved person whose place in the historical archive was reduced to a name recorded on a ledger of the dead. In her writing she offers counternarratives to the ones written by the captors. BLKNWS, with its speculative futures that lock hands with the past, is on a similar mission.

The way people think and talk about representation in art and politics has changed a lot in the past decade. The global trend toward far-right extremism has coincided with an increased awareness of representation’s limits to actually change the material lives of marginalized people. But it’s still true that the deluge of images we’re inundated with daily by mass media—in magazines, TV, movies, social media, and on the news—have in many ways demonized Blackness and reinforced white supremacist ideas, with material consequences. In a Black liberation context, the image is considered a site of resistance with revolutionary potential. In her book of essays Black Looks: race and representation, the cultural critic bell hooks theorized about the way images impact “collective psyches, shaping the nature of everyday life, how we talk, walk, eat, dream, and look at one another.” We’re indelibly shaped by what we see. BLKNWS plays with familiar imagery and aesthetics, organizing and repositioning mass media in ways that subvert expectations and inspire new analysis. It’s a radical idea for a different way of looking.