Video artist Joseph Khalil’s first feature length film weaves a multitude of images exploring Black history, society, and culture.
The cutting edge Los Angeles-based artist Khalil Joseph is the creator of many video installations in some of the world’s top museums. His short films have brought into focus vibrant dimensions of African American life, history, and culture. You may have seen some of his music videos, most famously the ones for Beyoncé’s 2016 album “Lemonade.” Now in collaboration with a host of Black intellectuals and creatives, he presents his first feature length movie, entitled BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. “BLKNWS” are the call letters of Black News, a fictional African American broadcast network that provides one of the movie’s frameworks, a playful version of a 24-hour news day telling the Black stories that are distorted in the mainstream. “Terms & conditions” describes the multivarious perspectives of Blackness that are revealed through the pulsating sounds and images of the film. Joseph calls it a record or a mixtape rather than a movie, with different tracks highlighting different themes. For lack of a better term, I’ll say it’s an essay film—but a wide and comprehensive essay achieving an epic scope.
The film begins on a personal note, telling of a gift to Joseph from his father of the unfinished Encyclopedia Africana by W.E.B. DuBois, the great early twentieth century author and activist, one of the founders of the NAACP. DuBois’s ambition was to create a reference work covering the entire history, sociology, and culture of African and African American people, but he died before he could complete it. The work has since been supplemented by scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and is now an impressively large tome. Throughout the film, significant persons and events that appear are accompanied by a page citation from this book. At the same time, Joseph follows DuBois’s life, first in an abstract black-and-white sequence, as a young man interviewing two women in the research that led to his first book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” then later as an old man after he left the United States to live in Ghana, musing about the intractable white racism that still stood in the way of freedom. Joseph uses actors in these sequences, of course. He’s not afraid to employ fictional methods in the pursuit of his art.
And this is just one thread. It would be impossible to describe the dizzying number of brief clips, audio excerpts and cross-cultural hints illuminating Black experience throughout the restless montage of Joseph’s film. Especially memorable are the contributions of women sharing their insights about the role of art in human liberation, the work of Black women activists being somewhat neglected in the encyclopedia. Joseph and his collaborators are not interested in definitive pronouncements, but rather treat the questions posed in an atmosphere of shared spontaneity. We are meant to doubt conventional certainties and preconceptions, even regarding narratives within African American studies.
There are also fantasy elements. For instance, we take a journey on a fleet of ships presenting a world art exhibition called the Transatlantic Biennale, which preserves the lives and cultural heritage of displaced people. Joseph slyly documents not just the world as we know it, but the aspirational world we wish to create.
To watch this film, you need only relax and let its richness cast over you an immersive spell. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions excavates a treasure chest of insight.
