Funmilayo Akechukwu in BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.Rich Spirit/Supplied
Writing in Stolen Life, American cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten offers his concept of “fugitivity” as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed . . . it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.”
A study of the social conditions of Black life, Moten’s work (along with that of several other Black artists, scholars and cultural practitioners) helps inform BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, the debut feature film from Los Angeles-based director Kahlil Joseph.
Terms & Conditions, an expansion of his groundbreaking, two-channel installation, BLKNWS, which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is dense, polymorphic and deliberately slippery. And, much like its forbearer, it works to translate the idea of a Black newsreel into contemporary times. The two-hour experimentation towers in scope in comparison with some of his more well-known screen-based collaborations (his co-director credit on Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade, for example).
The feature is a free-association exercise in citation, collaboration and personal record that spans 247 years. Grounded in the work of American sociologist and pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois – in particular, his conception of the Encyclopedia Africana, an ambitious, unfinished project that aimed to be a comprehensive reference work on Africa and people of African descent worldwide – Terms & Conditions weaves in archival footage, Black internet ephemera, scripted narrative segments and speculative journalism.
Ahead of the film’s Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 5, The Globe and Mail spoke with the filmmaker about what it means to work as a fugitive to the systems that try to contain Black art and possibility.
What was the artistic process for you in terms of building this artwork, BLKNWS, into a feature length film?
I treated it like an actual adaptation – despite never having done an actual adaptation [laughs]. I approached it kind of like a newspaper: I always understood myself as the editor-in-chief, handling all of these different articles written by different people. BLKNWS had all of these incredible segments that were kind of authored, if you will, by this endless array of POVs. And so I tried to figure out how to incorporate that way of making something into a feature film.
I’ve heard you speak about sampling as being the future of cinema; how did you approach sampling in Terms & Conditions?
There’s a history of sampling that predates me – that Godard, in my opinion, started. I’m trying to push those kinds of experiments a little further and incorporate sampling across the whole film, including sampling Godard himself. I am also being humorous and having fun with the medium, which I think is important.
Playful in writing is one thing, but playful in form is a whole other thing that I think, audiences, we’re looking forward to. That’s why I think something like YouTube is absolutely crushing it. It’s way ahead of cinema in terms of form and innovating at such speed because there are no gatekeepers saying this is how it’s done. It’s kind of like music in that way: Once they started letting Black people play, new genres were emerging every year.
In a similar way, the film toys with a lot of these tools of supposed fact and objectivity – mediums such as broadcasting, journalism, encyclopedic entries – particularly as they’re prescribed in the West.
Yes, even the title, Terms & Conditions, is a play on how so much of everyday life feels like it requires this opting-in to a kind of legality. The terms that we agree to are largely hidden from the surface of what we see going on, but we can intuit that our involvement is triggering actions behind closed doors. We’re now just understanding that the world we live in, in the West, is absolutely mired in this kind of legalese.
The movie is also kind of inscribing itself into the ether. So while the encyclopedic entries you see in the film aren’t necessarily entries in the formally published version of the encyclopedia, they are inscribing themselves somewhere, whether it’s within our own consciousness or whether it’s something even more abstract, even in terms of the universe itself or this idea that BLKNWS is inscribing itself as another kind of encyclopedia. It defies what we understand an encyclopedia to be.
How do you see your work in relation to the idea of fugitivity?
Fred visited us during one of our sessions in the writer’s room and he talked about many things, but one of his trains of thought that really got me going was how the Black American relationship to the law has always been so unique. From the very beginning of our time here in the Americas, everything we did had a legal framework, from having children, to what we could do with our time or our videos, who we could look at. Reading was unlawful; walking together in groups was unlawful. So, at certain points, everything we’ve tried to do has been against the law, which has profound impacts on what we understand to be the law. I see that in everything.
It was a guy in Belgium in the 1800s who invented the saxophone, but it was John Coltrane who has come to define what you can do with the saxophone; and, similar to Jimi Hendrix and the guitar, he did it in ways which were never the intentions of the instrument itself.
Whatever we do or enter into, we’re going to expand what’s possible and, by and large break, the laws of it; whether it’s how we wear our pants or how we wear our hair, we are not meant to abide. In that sense, fugitivity, for me, is almost a necessity.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions screens at TIFF on Sept. 5, 6 and 11 (tiff.net).
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Special to The Globe and Mail
