Cinematographer Arthur Jafa has made moving images for the last 30 years; there’s Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Spike Lee‘s Crooklyn (1994), and, more recently, his “light touch” as the director of photography for Solange‘s “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “Cranes In The Sky” music videos—all of which examine the interior lives of black Americans.
His latest work, one entirely his own, continues in the same vein by vividly and viscerally tracking the experience of being African American. Titled Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, the seven-minute video contains found footage of black sorrow and success, all set to Kanye West‘s “Ultralight Beam.” It illustrates the ways in which racism has altered the lives of black folks, both personally and collectively.
Just before the New Year began, we spoke with Jafa about the film—which is currently on view at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York—and what it means to make black cinema.
ANTWAUN SARGENT: What inspired Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death?
ARTHUR JAFA: That’s a hard question to answer. It wasn’t any sort of direct response to Trump and all this kind of stuff. I’m always making things, and I have this ongoing practice of compiling stuff that strikes me. Over the course of my life doing this, I’ve trained myself to do the opposite of what’s human nature, and that is to recoil from things I don’t like. Over the last few years of doing this, I’ve pushed myself to push toward things that disturb me. I’ve developed a habit of recording these things because these things often disappear. I’ve promised myself that I’ll try to record the spiritual quality of the things that strike me. To a certain degree Love Is The Message grew out of [this] practice.
SARGENT: How did you organize the imagery?
JAFA: The things sort of organize themselves naturally. One of my friends said in an interview recently that fundamentally what he’s trying to do is to put things in an affective proximity to one another, and I think that really crystallizes it. When you are talking about a mediated thing, a picture or representational image, it’s not “for real.” It always functions in this space of a sign or signifier. These things tend to resonate in a specific way, but what happens is when you place a resonant artifact next to another resonant object, they create a new harmonic. So at a certain point I had a set of images that resonated in response to one another. And like a strand of pearls, I just laid them out. Then I watched it and said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting,” and made a few adjustments.
SARGENT: How long did it take you to make Love?
JAFA: I would say 85 percent of it was done in two hours.
SARGENT: Really?
JAFA: Then, a few days later I happened to be looking at television and Saturday Night Live came on, and Kanye came out and he was performing “Ultralight Beam,” and I was like, “Wow, that’s a really amazing song.” Then I downloaded the live performance, and maybe a few days after that I laid the music down on top of it, and I was like, “Wow—really interesting.” There were gaps in the piece where I felt like the images were at best just treading water; they weren’t really pushing the piece forward. So I tweaked it and closed the gaps around the landmarks. Like the sister who gets pulled over and tells the cops you are terrorizing my kids, that was a landmark moment in the film.
SARGENT: The film is tough to watch because it shows how black suffering and creativity are bound together. What was your reaction to Love the first time you watched it in full?
JAFA: I gave Kahlil [Joseph] a really early cut, prior to putting in his brother Noah [Davis] who passed away, and he was really obsessed with it in a sense. He said it was really volatile. When I first put it together, I cried, then I never cried again. I don’t feel anything actually. It’s disturbing. When I look at it now, I’m sort of dead inside.
SARGENT: What made you cry?
JAFA: These are verifications of what black people know to be true about our status in society, positive and negative. I remember when someone told me phones were going to have cameras on them, and I thought that was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard. Why would you want a camera on your phone? But as we see the impact of it, it has allowed for a mass verification of what black people have been saying.
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