Cinema Travelogue

Image Credit: Courtesy of TIFF

During the post-screening Q&A of BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, director Khalil Joseph cited Godard as a major influence and stated his regret that the man’s passing means this film will never get seen by him. The reference makes a lot of sense, as it was Serge Daney who claimed Godard’s pedagogy turns cinema (the scenographic cube) into a classroom, where the viewer is forced out of the comfort of passive images. No idea if Godard would’ve actually liked this film, but if there’s anything that the BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions is not, it is passive. An ocean (literally) form of collective conscience, featuring characters across time, in and out of sleep, flashing forward and backward in time, trying to process the roles they play in context of each other; a diverse range of topics are covered, like one’s going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole while also taking drastic pivots at the same time.

At times, the very confrontational dramaturgy – characters speaking directly into the camera, the decoupage deliberately splicing table conversations into disjointed units, and giant blocks of slogans that mark each smaller chapter – can be jarring and off-putting as a method of delivering information. But as I think of it more, Joseph is not that interested in lecturing or offering anything concrete as in a film like Ava DuVernay’s Origin. In fact, the overall project is very fluid, if not like torrents; always more interested in questioning than answering and not afraid of pointing out certain contradictions. A particularly trenchant passage is an inserted podcast interview where an entrepreneur is questioned for the role his ancestors played during the slave trade. This question is not there to serve as a guilty conscience -something basically useless- but to assert the interchangeability of roles of people across history; you would’ve most likely done the same if you were in that place at that time.

So the key to Joseph’s celebration of this interchangeability is through the mix of everything that can be referenced and the refusal to be picky. There is a degree of levity brought to each subject that he encounters throughout the film – TikTok memes and podcasts stand on the same plane and operate on the same wavelength (pun intended) as Afro-futurism, museum exhibitions, and archival footage of important historical figures. All proven by the number of times the aspect ratio changes. From the discussion of slave ships comes the assembly of contemporary cargo ships, then the scientific facts of the decomposition of human bodies within the deep ocean. A reference is a reference, and how can a thought or a work of art be honest if we hold prejudice upon it in the first place?

During the Q&A, Joseph also mentions how he is trying to play the role of a trickster, like one of the African museum artifacts introduced during the film. For instance, the page numbers of the Africana Encyclopedia onscreen are actually all fabricated. Whereas Godard often introduces a free zone of discourses, Joseph also welcomes a sonically cohesive, but obfuscated chain of information that requires the audience to validate for themselves.

This is also quite a personal film, where Joseph inserts his own presence as interstitial subtitles. I feel like it is important for him to only exist as texts and lend the voices to historical figures and interviews, because the personal, at the end of the day, like everything else, is just a reference point for a further proliferation of references and citations. Everything is personal, so the personal can relate to everything; that’s how curiosities manage to carry on traditions, histories, and memories for future generations.