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Introduction

 Kahlil Joseph often refers to his films as “a new kind of music film and not just […] film about music.”[1] Joseph’s work has been screened on concerts stages for thousands of fans at Kendrick Lamar/Kanye West concerts, at both the Sundance and Toronto International Film festivals, and on MTV. Viewers can recognize Joseph’s films across these dramatically different cultural spaces through their surreal and dreamlike organization, rich textures and moody cinematography, and an unwavering commitment to exploring the details of black lives on screen.[2] The characters in Joseph’s films appear suspended between extremes: in “Until the Quiet Comes.” the dancer Storyboard P’s choreography is both human and robotic; in “Video Girl,” a man on death row moves wildly just before being restrained for lethal injection. His videos offer an opportunity to consider the moving image, public space, and race at the intersection of hip-hop, blackness, cinema, collectivity, and black spaces. Furthermore, Joseph’s work visualizes liquid blackness’s founding interest in finding fluidity in the expression of blackness in the photographic/cinematic image. His unique artistic and social vision had led to a dynamic career. He has had success working individually and as part of collaborative practices, which includes collaborations with an established earlier generation of black filmmakers and scholars; he participates in both the high and popular art realms; and his content moves between the universal concerns of life and death and the particularities of urban space.

Kahlil Joseph is the youngest in a lineage of artists and filmmakers particularly concerned with the definition of a black aesthetics, which liquid blackness has been studying since its inception in Fall 2013, when it co-hosted the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black American Cinema film series with Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies. Joseph’s surreal and expressive visual style create dreamlike worlds for his black characters and his collaborative filmmaking style includes work on the documentary/essay film Dreams are Colder than Death (the subject of our Spring 2016 research project) alongside the cinematographer and filmmaker Arthur Jafa . The 2016 liquid blackness research project and event “Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph” explores the thematic and film historical continuity between Dreams Are Colder than Death and previous liquid blackness projects about the imbrication between aesthetics and politics. Thus, this project is the next step in a set of both long-term short-term research projects. This includes: our research on experimentations with an uncompromising black film aesthetics that began with the L.A. Rebellion films, and later elaborated with research on Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977); our interest in artists’ collectives; and our continued preoccupation with pursuing expansive expressive possibilities for blackness.

[1] Alan Light, “Arcade Fire Seeks More Than a Rockumentary With ‘The Reflektor Tapes,’” The New York Times, September 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/arts/music/arcade-fire-seeks-more-than-a-rockumentary-with-the-reflektor-tapes.html.

[2] Niela Orr, “It’s About the Notes You Don’t Play: Friday Evening at the 3rd Annual Blackstar Film Festival,” Shadow and Act, accessed January 17, 2016, http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/its-about-the-notes-you-dont-play-friday-evening-at-the-blackstar-film-festival-20140802.

 

liquid blackness in Conversation with Kahlil Joseph

 
 

Research 

Across his works, Kahlil Joseph demonstrates a commitment to black sociality and what liquid blackness has termed an “aesthetics of suspension,” in which two extremes that typically express contradiction are instead held simultaneously, often in tandem with equally suspended temporalities and spatialities. For us, this is an ethical move that has become increasingly urgent especially at this time when the troubling ways the vision of black death is constantly modulated across our highly networked contemporary media landscape. Joseph’s work offers to the opportunity to see black people exist, feel and move otherwise. Their moves and their destiny are never predetermined. Rather, they unfold in unexpected (i.e. suspenseful) ways. By relying on its architectural meaning, whereby suspension is “the technique of dispersing a structure’s mass across multiple grounding positions,” to make a structure “light” because of how its material elements are held in tension, “holding blackness in suspension” is a way to keep it philosophically safe. It also means that blackness is the very “thing” we put it at the center of our conversations, theoretical approaches, and ethical concerns. “Suspension” therefore offers a concrete way to seriously interrogate the discrepancy between popular culture’s unwavering obsession with blackness and the continued devaluation of black lives. Thus, we “hold blackness in suspension” to leverage the already pervasive mobility of blackness apart and away from the black body in contemporary culture in order to ground an ethical obligation toward the black subject. The outcome of this research is the October 2017 issue of liquid blackness, “Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension,” and an InMediaRes theme week. Both collections of writing include studies of Joseph’s work and several other artists and films that help crystallize the concept of suspension through their artistic practices (modes of production and exhibition), fluid visual styles, and ethical commitments.

FKA TWIGS – VIDEO GIRL

 

Publications

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 liquid blackness 4, no. 7 “Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension” Contents

Alessandra Raengo – “Introduction on Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspensions”

Daren Fowler – “To Erotically Know: The Ethics and Pedagogy of Moonlight“

Arzu Karaduman – “Hush-hush, I Will Know When I Know”: Post-Black Sound Aesthetics in Moonlight“

Netrice Gaskins – “Algorithmic Analytics: Race, Blackness and Data in Song of Solomon and ‘Alright’”

Steve Spence – “Hip-Hop Aesthetics and La Haine"

Sarah Smith – “Aesthetic Deception in Selling the Shadow"

Lauren McLeod Cramer – "Icons of Catastrophe: Diagramming Blackness in Until the Quiet Comes"

InMediaRes Theme Week - liquid blackness Presents: "Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph"

Lauren McLeod Cramer – Holding Blackness in Suspension: A Study

Charles P. Linscott – Distinction and Conjunction in the Films of Kahlil Joseph

Sarah Jane Cervenak – byway

James Tobias – Untitled

Alessandra Raengo – Suspension, Revisited

 

Music Video as Black Art

Hailed as one of the most innovative and sensitive artists working in the “art music video genre,” broadly construed, Kahlil Joseph’s work has expanded in recent years toward both the essay film and the deliberately unruly (black) digital archive. It thus offers an opportunity to consider anew the political reach of musical and visual forms as they express the aesthetic genius of black social lives. 

Gunn, Jenny. "Intergenerational Pedagogy in Jenn Nkiru's Rebirth is Necessary." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 163-168.

Linscott, Charles P. "Chip". "Secret Histories and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus Go to the Movies." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 145-150. 

Prettyman, Michele. "The Persistence of "Wild Style": Hip-Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 151-157.

Raengo, Alessandra. “Sounding Out a Stumble: Melancholic Loops in Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper“ liquid Blackness Reviews. October 29, 2018. 

Raengo, Alessandra, and Lauren McLeod Cramer. "The Unruly Archives of Black Music Videos." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 138-144. 

Tobias, James. "The Music Film as Essay: Montage as Argument in Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 157-162. 

Uri McMillian interviewed by Mark Anthony Neal, “Left of Black with Uri McMillian,” Left of Black, YouTube video, 24:37, John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, October 6, 2017, 

 

 

FLYING LOTUS – UNTIL THE QUIET COMES