BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

Seinen Anfang nahm dieser komplexe Filmessay vor fünf Jahren auf der Biennale in Venedig: als Videoinstallation, die die Lebenserfahrung Schwarzer Menschen in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft in einem Kaleidoskop diverser Bildformate auffächerte – aus der Perspektive eines Schwarzen Nachrichtenkanals. Nun hat Khalil Joseph, bekannt als Musikvideo-Regisseur von Beyoncé und Kendrick Lamar, sein Projekt zum Film erweitert und um afrofuturistische Spielszenen ergänzt. Wie Samples im Hip-Hop treffen Politikerreden und andere Archivaufnahmen auf Social-Media-Clips und Memes – 21 Tracks lang. Ein filmisches Remixalbum zu pumpendem Techno. (Gian-Philip Andreas)

The opening shot of the cover of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience is, like many things in this film, at once a declaration of principles and a red herring. The first feature by artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph is no mere accumulation of facts, but rather an encyclopedia of Black imagination. Wildly combining a futuristic ship which inverts the transatlantic slave trade with biographic takes on W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; elements of autofiction with a deliberately profane grasp of film history; and computer-generated imagery with amateur works by anonymous creators, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS assembles a sonic and visual machine inspired by a long lineage of thinkers. Despite being explicitly based on the works of contemporary intellectuals such as Fred Moten, Arthur Jafa, Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman (with the latter two both credited as co-writers), it hardly feels academic. The freshness of the material, the musicality of the editing and the restless rhythm deftly translate the “everyday anarchy” of Black experience into cinematic terms, as Hartman proposes. By “drifting between categories”, as one character says, the film dances its way out of convention. (Victor Guimarães)

Kahlil Joseph (Auswahl): BELHAVEN MERIDIAN (2010, K), THE MIRROR BETWEEN US (2012, K), THE REFLEKTOR TAPES (2015), FLYPAPER (2018, K), CIRCUS MAXIMUS (2023, KO-REGIE)