Soon after the director Kahlil Joseph opens “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” his genre-defying, mind-expanding jolt of a movie, he drops an announcement: “This is not a documentary.” It is and it isn’t, which you discover as Joseph — a visual artist who’s exhibited around the world — lets loose a torrent of found and original images. W.E.B. DuBois pops up here as do Charlie Parker, assorted material works, Queen Elizabeth II and a hyena. As this kaleidoscopic, fast-moving collage film continues, your eyes and mind focus more intently on the whirring sights and sounds that Joseph has begun connecting into a thrilling whole.
Somewhat akin to a visual album (though more boxed set than one-off), “BLKNWS” draws on vast inspirations and exists on a continuum with Joseph’s earlier work. He presented an earlier incarnation of this project as a video installation at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Conceived as a TV show of a type — what he’s described as a conceptual news program — that version drew from a trove of material that he gleaned from a dizzying number of sources, including old movies, the news, family albums and social media. He continued to show “BLKNWS” elsewhere, including as part of the 2020 biennial exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where it was shown in Black-owned businesses in the city.
This version of “BLKNWS” runs around two hours, covers centuries and encompasses worlds past, present and possible. Joseph opens it on an elegiac note with a brief, simple, quietly mournful scene: a frontal shot of two hands opening a first edition of the book “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.” As these hands open the book, some accompanying first-person text explains that this particular volume was given as a gift to his brother, Noah Davis, by their father, Keven Davis. Both men are now dead. “I miss them,” the text continues, a piercing declaration that gives the movie’s introductory section the quality of a requiem, a mournfulness that persists even during the more ecstatic passages.
In 2012, Noah Davis, a painter and installation artist, and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, founded the Underground Museum, an exhibition space in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Arlington Heights. (He died in 2015; it closed in 2022.) There, they presented exhibits, showcased artists and writers (Angela Davis, Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker), and offered free wellness classes. It was a place for people to discover art, ideas and one another. A statement from Noah Davis remains on its website. “I believe that concealing too much in theory is problematic and that art can function in every day life,” it reads in part. “I strive for an artistic legacy that not only transcends blackness but confluences and impacts all cultures.”
Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS” is similarly hopeful, expansive and generously welcoming. It’s an excitingly dense, complicated compilation overflowing with heady ideas and great thinkers. The scholar Saidiya Hartman, whom Joseph credits as one of the movie’s writers along with Christina Sharpe and others, appears on camera several times. The most recurring intellectual touchstone, though, is DuBois. He shows up as a historical figure and as a gender-switching fantasy in the form of two fictional characters Joseph created. In some scenes, DuBois is a young researcher played by the artist-performer Kaneza Schaal; in another, he is an elderly man in Ghana and now played by the actor-teacher Peter Jay Fernandez.
At the start, Joseph sketches in the early history of “Africana,” a project that DuBois dreamed about for much of his life though was never able to realize before his death in 1963. Taking the project as their inspiration, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. went on to edit their own encyclopedia, which was first published in 1999 as a single volume and has since grown into five. The original 1999 edition is the book that appears at the beginning of “BLKNWS.” You see it opened and closed just as Joseph begins furiously citing from it. Among the many far-ranging entries he taps, complete with (helpful!) page numbers, are: “Sun Ra (pg. 333),” the comedian-actor “Charlie Hill (pg. 344)” and “Christianity (pg. 113).”
It can take a few beats to get a handle on “BLKNWS” as its images and text start streaming. I’ve seen the movie twice, and the best way to watch it is to ignore your preconceptions (and those of anyone who blathers about three acts and so on) about what a movie is and can be. Early on, Joseph folds in a brief clip of the French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who here serves as one of his many nonencyclopedic lodestars. “What is bad for cinema is the categories,” she says, as Joseph cuts between her and other visuals. “This is real fiction,” Varda continues, before winding up, “this is fake fiction, this is documentary, this is fake doc … this is a film.”
“BLKNWS” is of course a movie, one that expands and continues to deepen as Joseph presses forward, pauses and circles back to his themes, including the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and its profound wake. As he does, he also shifts between different time periods, insistently blurring the lines between them; he also takes a bold leap into the future with scenes aboard a ship right out of a science-fiction fantasia. Named the Osiris, it is an enormous sculptural vessel crowned by what looks like a regular ocean liner. Onboard is a young journalist, Sarah (Shaunette Renée Wilson), who plans to write about an onboard exhibition that encompasses new work and artifacts that are being returned to their homes.
Each face here, each artwork, encyclopedia entry, quotation, musical passage and seeming digression, is finally of a piece in a movie that asks more than it can ever answer. I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive. As he leaps from here to there, you are reminded repeatedly that newspapers and encyclopedias tell certain stories while art museums, national archives, family photo albums, advertisements and movies tell still others. In “BLKNWS,” Joseph doesn’t merely tell one neatly packaged story, he opens up a world of stories, some still waiting to be told.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions Rated R for language and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’ Review: An Artist’s Mind-Expanding Collage appeared first on New York Times.
