Kahlil Joseph is no novice when it comes to pushing boundaries in art. Known for his evocative and complex work on Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album and his short feature for Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, Joseph has proven successful in interweaving narratives into music, and more than that, convoluting genre. His work often explores themes that defy easy categorization, and now, his first full-length feature film, BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, is no exception. In many ways, it dares to be his most experimental and exploratory exhibition yet. Inspired by newsreels, the film is the latest iteration of an evolving project that has undergone numerous embodied transformations.
I meet with Joseph in person, on a quiet Saturday morning before the city wakes up for another rushed day at this year’s TIFF50 festival. I am, in no small words, flustered. The eighteen-year-old in me—who built much of her early adolescence on Joseph’s work for Lemonade—threatens my composure. But his temperament is incredibly easy. We sit in a nearly empty café lounge. He wears a cap and a baseball jersey. He speaks at a tempo rarely encountered in our immediate-gratification culture: mellow, unhurried, and so low I set up both of my microphones just to make sure I catch everything. For a filmmaker whose latest creation communicates a multitude of sentiments all at once, I find myself intrigued by this contrast.
The film, BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, weaves together a lot of different forms of storytelling. There’s a continuous storyline spaced throughout, but it’s also part curated album, part news archive, and then also, partially feels like the living, breathing Encyclopedia Africana. In your previous works, you’ve pushed boundaries of genre before, but this feels like a new evolution. What draws you to these hybrid forms?
Joseph: I’ve noticed that I’m interested, whether it’s video in [the] art world or music videos in the music industry and now definitely films—I’m interested in how the form can maybe get pushed, and, I think more importantly, I’m really just trying to make something that is interesting to me; the most interesting thing that I can make that I enjoy. When it feels too generic, it just doesn’t work for me—it doesn’t. It’s not interesting to me. That’s the most honest answer. I’m making stuff for me and it ends up doing things, formally, that are maybe unique and unusual.
I resonate with your varied form of storytelling a lot. The way you explore ways of telling that don’t fit into the structures often set by mainstream media feels like another layer into the lived Black experience—in being adverse to what is placed upon us as “common practice”.
Joseph: If you look at how we participate in, or how we’ve gotten involved with most things, whether it’s sports or music or academia and literature, we tend to push the limits of how it is perceived to be done.
I always come back to understanding that Miles Davis went to Juilliard. That is, he had the most rigorous form of education you could get as a musician at the time and he was just bored. For him, the real education was up in Harlem, jamming with other musicians—they ended up inventing this whole new form of music that could have never been taught at Juilliard. For me, that’s the analogy of our life.
There’s stuff to learn in different institutional spaces or even corporate spaces, but ultimately, it’s not just that. Blackness is a huge part of it, for sure, but I’ve also learned—you know, in Hollywood, filmmakers are really the ones who are pushing the medium—so a lot of times it’s just the doers and the makers who are gonna have to leave behind whatever’s been done, or however it’s been done.
This project shares stories from across the diaspora, but there are moments throughout that are especially intimate, touching on your lineage, your losses, perhaps pain that has been passed down; these stories are only shared through captions, never spoken aloud or narrated. What led you to want to include your lineage and why was it important for you to preserve it in a written form rather than orally narrated or performed.
Joseph: Honestly, the presentation of it was intuitive; the inclusion of it was not so intuitive. The very first moment of it [in the film] felt natural. Meaning, when I first include the encyclopedia [in the opening of the film], and I put it down and I say, this book was given to me with my dad and my brother, it felt really intuitive. It was like… this is kind of interesting. Let’s go.
Part of me did it like that because I knew it would be a radical way to open a film, and unexpected for anyone who might be familiar with my work. Having seen as many movies as I have, I’ve never seen a movie open like that. So again, I was just trying to make the most interesting thing. When we were doing early screenings of different versions of the cut, everybody was like, when is your voice coming back? Where is that whole thing that you started [in the beginning] of the film? They were not wrong. It became a question of, what part of my life do I talk about? Because this is not what I want the movie to be about. This movie is not some kind of open book about my life, and so it became more of a struggle.
I get my love of Black history and my own history from my parents, so it wasn’t hard to keep the thread of my dad and my brother going, you know? We all share it. So, I just kind of started riffing. I started thinking of myself as a songwriter at that point, you know, just keep writing the song.
There’s this section that talks about Land Art, and it speaks of it as requiring pilgrimage or commitment, because a lot of them are hard to get to. How they exist for art’s sake, rather than commerce. Do you see this project or your work in a similar way, and are you hoping for a certain level of commitment or specific relationship with the audience?
Joseph: This is a great question…No? Knowing that for me, great art is just something that…it’s easy to listen to, it’s easy to watch, it’s easy to want to go to the Louvre or the gallery or museum of choice. So on that level, no. Like when you get in the car, you’re gonna listen to your favourite music pretty effortlessly. So there’s a version of making a film that I want people just to kind of—I don’t want it to be hard to find. I don’t want you to have to travel.
That’s more in response to The Resonance Field [Akechukwu]. If you want to go to Roden Crater, if you want to go see the Earth Room—Walter De Maria—in New York, you kind of have to make an appointment. If you want to see the Earth room, you have to go to New York. If you want to go to Roden Crater, you have to go way out, you know, to the desert to see it. The Resonance Field is the most extreme version of that. You have to go to the middle of the Atlantic, which is almost impossible to actually visit on a certain level. You’d have to take a boat, and it’s almost impossible to charter your own boat. It’s also, I think, of all the land artworks, the most terrifying to actually try to visit, because most people are terrified of the open sea. So that was a part of the language about the land art. Less about my own work; more about The Resonance Field.
When I was watching this film, when it first started, I was like…what is going on?
Insert Joseph laughing and a flair of my own embarrassment
Wait, sorry, that sounds like not a good comment, but something about it felt very familiar. I was wondering why it was so deeply familiar, and then the picture of your grandma and your dad was shown at your father’s law school graduation. And your father’s story felt similar to my father’s story. It made me realize that this collection of clips and news archives reminded me of this trait I have inherited from my dad’s side (almost unwillingly) to collect, to archive, and preserve things—some have called it hoarding, but I know that difference.
Joseph: —I don’t know, haha, I’d be careful. You’re still young.
My friend says that all the time, haha. She’s always like, “You have to watch that habit”. But I was wondering if, looking at this film as a collection and curation, if you feel a desire to curate that’s innate or inherited within you? If so, do you feel like this film was something that was gonna happen, even if, initially, it wasn’t necessarily something that you wanted?
Joseph: Yeah, I mean, we’re all curators, right? So, the music that we like and the books that we get and the furniture we buy, and when we meet each other as potential friends and mates, we’re seeing how we curate our lives. We walk into each other’s homes and understand what books we have on the shelf and what ideas we have in our head. So we’re all natural collectors and curators.
To call myself a natural curator would be, I think, disingenuous. My brother probably is the closest thing to a natural curator. There’s like trained curators, and there’s [natural curators], I’ve come to know the difference. There’s an understanding of what’s good and why. I think that’s a natural curator. I’ve talked to a lot of curators who I think sometimes have a very poor idea of what’s good and why, and it has more to do with what will sell, what looks good on the wall, or who’s hot and that’s not a natural curator. My brother was a real natural curator. Of course, I was around him at that really ripe stage of his life. So, I started to have more confidence in my own taste, you know, in a lot of things, which is kind of the first basis of curation. It’s just taste, you know.
Amongst the collection of Black stories and Black news in this film, there’s a moment in the film where you acknowledge the 215 Indigenous children found in BC.
Joseph: Canadian Nicholas Galanin is also a Canadian artist. His work, Never Forget, is in that section [of the film].
He’s Canadian? Never Forget, the piece that looks like the “Hollywood” sign?
Joseph: Yeah, he’s a Canadian artist.
Wow.
Joseph: Nicholas. He’s awesome. He’s great.
The integration of pieces like that reminded me of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work, where she speaks about Land Back as an interwoven movement—that Black and Indigenous liberation are deeply connected. Why was it important for you to maintain that acknowledgment in this project, and how do you see these solidarities shaping the work?
Joseph: A lot of it is just being self aware. Here we are in America with this insanely massive injustice. It’s not even our fucking land. Going into my own history, it’s really difficult to learn constantly what occurred, and is occurring, and then on top of that, to understand that the two histories are tightly interwoven. If you read Frederick Douglass, his biography, I’m learning about his relations with Native Americans, which were complicated. It just made me go down this rabbit hole; there’s other projects I’m developing that dive deeper into the Native American experience in the United States.
Comedy plays a big role in BLKNWS. Charlie Hill—put on by Richard Pryor—in the beginning of that clip, there was an older clip, when Charlie Hill first made his debut, where Richard Pryor is introducing him. We couldn’t clear that clip from Richard Pryor’s estate, his wife. We had to find an older clip of him, which is kind of more beautiful, in my opinion. But originally, it was Richard Pryor introducing Charlie Hill.
Oh shit.
Joseph: Epic, yeah, and we still might explore that in the larger BLKNWS experience. But anyway, yeah, it’s intertwined, and they are an important piece of the American conversation.
This isn’t even our land, you know what I’m saying? The idea that someone would come into your home as a guest and then tell you to leave is just so beyond evil. It’s one thing to take you from your home and bring you to someone else’s home—its own form of evil—but to not even…anyway, that’s where it kind of came from. I had to be honest with myself too.
When our conversation ends, Joseph doesn’t so much conclude as drift (his thoughts trailing off like the fade-out of a song he’s written). There’s something grounding about his calm. A comprehension that experimentation isn’t a risk, but a rhythm. BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions carries that same pulse: looping time, collapsing memory, building something that feels both ancient and new. But perhaps that’s the whole point, that stories don’t end, they echo. And Joseph’s just teaching us how to listen.
Hannah Verina White is a Montreal and Toronto based writer. She has a deep love for the melodramatic and nostalgic, both of which influence the way she writes and the subjects she chooses to write about.