In “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” — which was reinstated at the Sundance Film Festival after a dispute over its edit — director Khalil Joseph radically reimagines the world through a Black lens, while self-reflexively observing the difficulties of doing so. The film is a pulsing, essayistic docu-fiction piece that defies categorization. It unfolds partially on a futuristic, polygonal transatlantic vessel boarded by a journalist (Shaunette Renée Wilson) and an arts academic (Keneza Schaal, playing a fictionalized version of real curator Funmilayo Akechukwu). However, this narrative framing device — which often loops back on itself, as a dreamlike film within the film — is merely an anchor for a more elliptical, esoteric narrative about personal and political history.
Co-written by numerous artists and academics, the film is as much about Joseph’s own tumultuous family history — upon which he reflects through photo collages and anecdotes told exclusively in subtitles, without the aid of voiceover — as it is about the life and influence of sociologist and Pan-African activist W. E. B. Du Bois. It’s academically dense, taking its cues from Du Bois’ “Encyclopedia Africana” and presenting snippets of footage from throughout the 20th century based on people, places, artworks and other concepts that appear throughout the compendium. Each one even has its own page citation; the film is rich and rigorous in its unveiling of both history and modernity.
Among these touchstones is techno music, a genre whose Black origins are often obscured, but which Joseph deploys to tremendous effect, turning the sounds of Detroit first wave artists (like Juan Atkins) into guiding tempos for his oblique editing, which take on the ebbs and flows of a carefully curated album. This musical foundation allows “BLKNWS” to swiftly set the scene with numerous historical and cultural reference points: “Marcus Garvey! Whitney Houston! Haiti! Reparations!” and so forth. Few archival stones are left unturned in Joseph’s adaptation of his 2018 two-screen art installation, which uses a fictitious Black news network as its window to the world. This methodology (with a few added Black Twitter memes for good measure) carries over to the feature version too, which contains imagined stories of the dissolution of the British monarchy, an institution responsible for colonizing much of Africa until the 20th century.
The film uses this tongue-in-cheek fiction as a platform to explore decolonial ideas and images, including Garvey’s Back-to-Africa political movement (the aforementioned sci-fi ships are descendants of the Black Star Line ocean liners), as well as contemporary efforts to liberate African countries from neocolonial influence. It requires active, attentive viewing to catch all its rapid-fire references, but its tapestry is also hypnotic enough to be overwhelming, should you prefer to lean back and let it wash over you.
This isn’t the first time one of Joseph’s two-screen installations has been given single-screen form. He was also behind the “good kid, m.A.A.d city” short film made with rapper Kendrick Lamar, a music video project that captures modern Black life in purely impressionistic hues. It’s almost an Afrofuturist translation of Terrence Malick, an influence that appears to permeate “BLKNWS” as well (this time, with a more Pan-Africanist approach), especially in the moments the movie slows down and becomes more introspective.
The film is, in many ways, an attempt to reimagine a world in which Blackness is the primary lens of seeing and understanding, but the choral echoes of Paul Goodwin score what is practically a spiritual lament over the limitations of this redefining, appearing in close proximity to glowing re-creations of the solar system, and of sunlight skimming off Earth and the other planets, in the vein of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”
Joseph even notes the omission of significant women liberationists from the “Encyclopedia Africana” — a shortcoming of the film’s most influential text, and thus, one of its own — while the voices of other academics explain the notion of a shared cultural language built on displacement. To subvert whiteness with Blackness as a cultural and psychological lingua franca cannot possibly undo the wounds that molded modern Blackness in the first place, a diasporic concern that places even the most joyous liberation and self-expression in an especially morose context. Perhaps what Joseph is trying to achieve is a paradox in the first place — a tension that informs the film’s most overt aesthetic clashes, as it moves between modes and influences.
As characters aboard the futuristic ship search for answers within their dreams and painful generational memories, Joseph also creates various dramatized versions of Du Bois — one of whom is also played by Schaal — as he looks back on his life’s work (and on Garvey’s influence) much in the same way that Joseph does through montage. While it may seem heavy-handed for a political film to compare its own existence to political thought-leaders, “BLKNWS” makes judicious use of other Black movies and media from this century and the last (most notably, Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time” and works by Arthur Jafa), ensuring a self-awareness of “BLKNWS” having entered itself into an ongoing, decades-long conversation on art by mere virtue of its existence.
From academic talks to viral videos to debates on modern museums, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” combines footage from across a vast spectrum of thought, experience and influence, creating formally audacious montages that are thought-provoking and soul-stirring all at once. Edited with the audio-visual mischief of late-era Jean-Luc Godard (and with the meta-textual flourishes of Godard’s 1987 postmodern “King Lear”), Joseph’s first feature becomes a stunning mise en abyme rife with rhythm and energy — as intellectually potent as it is emotionally stimulating.
