Introducing BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, the director and artist Kahlil Joseph advised his audience to let the film “wash over you”. In its original form, BLKNWS was an evolving multi-channel installation exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the Made in LA 2020 biennial and elsewhere. It takes much of its inspiration from a book, though not one with a beginning, middle and end: Encyclopedia Africana, a compendium of African and diasporic culture conceived by W.E.B. Du Bois and realised after his death by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Watching the film is like leafing through the book, as images stream by onscreen, accompanied by a title card and a page number. Figures and concepts like Marcus Garvey (page 63), Harlem (page 100) and Sun Ra (page 333) are illustrated with clips from stock footage and archival photos, as well as memes, TikTok clips and academic panel discussions pulled from YouTube.
The density is meant to be overwhelming and impossible to consciously assimilate in its totality. The soundtrack includes music, poems, voiceover and interview, and cuts forge synaptic pathways between images from sources both well-known and obscure: a clipping of Doreen St. Felix’s New Yorker piece on Alexandra Bell’s political photomontages, a scene from Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999), an overhead view of Nicholas Galanin’s environmental installation Never Forget (2021), a picture of Breonna Taylor, video of teenagers popping wheelies, faded newsreels of the riverboats of the Mississippi, crumpled old photos of Black soldiers of the First World War.
Atop this Joseph layers additional conceits. “BLKNWS” is also an alternative news outlet reporting from the horizon of possibility, encompassing news-ticker breaking updates on the fall of the British monarchy and the rise of the “African Gold Standard”; semifictional investigative reports on the location of the contested Benin ivory masks; interviews with composite characters who embody chapters in African history, such as slave profiteering; and a tribute to the Ghanian muckraker Anas.
Still from BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions Courtesy of Rich Spirit
In its half-decade journey to becoming a feature film, BLKNWS has accrued multiple additional layers. Scripted sequences function as structuring elements of this iteration, dreamily echoing each other across the runtime, encompassing histories real and imagined, records official and legendary. This includes reenactments of a young Du Bois going door to door for his 1890s sociological study The Philadelphia Negro and an elderly Du Bois, now living in independent Ghana, embarking at last on the Encyclopedia Africana in the months before his death. There is also a strand about an enterprising investigative journalist seeking an interview with the curator of the Transatlantic Biennial, an exhibition of works including looted artefacts and a project by Cameron Rowland, all aboard an Afrofuturist hovercraft-like ship.
The Atlantic is a significant component of BLKNWS. In setting much of his film on a voyage which fancifully recreates the Middle Passage, Joseph echoes the work of Saidiya Hartman, a credited co-writer of BLKNWS whose scholarship includes work excavating the forgotten histories of the African diaspora, as well as that of John Akomfrah, whose Vertigo Sea applies a literally oceanic frame of reference to the overlapping subjects of colonialism, commerce and scientific discovery.
Akomfrah is a pioneer of multi-channel Black montage, a tradition in which Joseph’s practice belongs. These are Black film-makers who move between the film world and the art world, and whose work itself is similarly fluid, collaged from associative editing patterns. Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016)—which draws from the shared visual vocabulary of Black American experience, from James Brown performance footage to cameraphone recordings of police violence, all radically compressed within the duration of Kanye West’s song Ultralight Beam—is an obvious predecessor to BLKNWS, and Jafa also collaborated with Joseph on this film.
Still from BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions Courtesy of Rich Spirit
So did Garrett Bradley, whose Time (2020) retells the story of a family, marked by incarceration, with their own primary-source recordings, as well as Raven Jackson, whose childhood reverie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) employs tactile camerawork and scrambled chronology to evoke subjective rather than objective memory. Jackson shares a cinematographer, Jomo Fray, with RaMell Ross, whose Nickel Boys (2024) was released by Amazon Studios without sacrificing the interspersed historical footage and impressionistic camerawork of his earlier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), which in alternating moments of vividness and elision found glimmers of personal and political consciousness that had been inaccessible to conventional storytelling and classical continuity. Primarily, these filmmakers are in search of new ways of knowing.
The challenge in this poetics is that any execution may, potentially, serve the concept equally well—one seemingly illogical but unexpectedly intuitive juxtaposition may subvert dominant storytelling paradigms much like any other. BLKNWS includes individual riffs that nudge the viewer down new neural pathways, such as a montage of loving Black couples from social media and home movies, introduced by a clip from Carmen Jones, or one juxtaposing H.R. Giger’s xenomorph design with statues of the Yoruba deity Eshu, as Wole Soyinka discusses how missionaries contorted the cosmology of the African religion to frame the trickster god as an equivalent to the Christian Satan. But in its overall heterogeneity it can feel cluttered, like rifling through the papers in an autodidact’s library rather than turning the pages of a single encyclopaedia.
Though BLKNWS now exists as a feature film, it’s more apt to call it a visual album—like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, of which Joseph was a key director. Its loose narrative, in which characters morph and recur like motifs, is plotted like a music video. Also including sections on the history of its own development, at the Underground Museum—the former Los Angeles space, founded by the film-maker’s late brother Noah Davis—BLKNWS is a film to wander in and out of, and at best embodies curator Okwui Enwezor’s description of art exhibitions as “thinking machines”, a formulation advanced in a talk that’s included as a clip inthe film, alongside so much else.
Watch a clip from BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions:
- BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was shown at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (until 14 September) and will be part of the main slate at the New York Film Festival (26 September-13 October), showing on 4 October and 5 October