‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’ Review: Kahlil Joseph’s Kinetic Debut

Before his death in 1963, the scholar W.E.B. DuBois spent decades trying to publish an encyclopedia about the histories and cultures of people of African descent. He enlisted friends, petitioned colleagues and sought funding for the multi-volume project from government agencies and private donors. Despite his best efforts, DuBois’ vision wouldn’t be realized until 1999, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, with the help of Wole Soyinka and a global community of artists and scholars, published Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.

The mission of DuBois’ project — to offer a new generation access to information about Black people rivaling Encyclopedia Britannica — infuses Kahlil Joseph’s hypnotic debut feature BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, a kinetic blend of a fictional Afro-futurist narrative, archival research on decades of Black visual and multimedia work, and personal history. 

Expanding on his 2019 art installation of the same name, Joseph intersperses the story of a journalist reporting on a popular Transatlantic Biennale with footage of and excerpts from the work of Black artists like Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Garrett Bradley, Raven Jackson, Ja’Tovia Gary and Alex Bell. The theories in BLKNWS are bolstered by Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand’s scholarship, and the film’s formal experiments are inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, Arthur Jafa and Julie Dash. Joseph also uses BLKNWS to honor his late brother Noah Davis, a visual artist and co-founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. 

Ironically, like DuBois’ encyclopedia, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions had a winding path to its public debut at Sundance. The film was initially withdrawn from the festival by Joseph’s financier, the now-shuttered Participant Media, who alleged that the director screened a secret cut to critics. But in an 11th-hour save, The Apprentice producer James Shani acquired the film, which premiered on Monday in the festival’s sidebar NEXT. 

And how lucky we are for that. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions functions as a compendium of Black thought and culture for former Tumblr kids. Joseph, who is best known for his work on the companion film to Beyonce’s Lemonade, presents songs, memes, videos and photographs at the speed of a scroll. But unlike our increasingly warped and rage-baited algorithms, BLKNWS is an informative encounter. The director, who edited the film with help from Luke Lynch and Paul Rogers (Everything Everywhere All At Once), offers a site of discovery and an invigorating tribute to Black experimental work. 

Joseph pulls inspiration from everywhere, but BLKNWS is most influenced by the radiant spontaneity of jazz and Jafa’s film essays Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and Dreams are Colder than Death. Like the last of those, BLKNWS grounds its meditations on Black futures in pioneering research: Jafa drew from Hortense Spillers, while Joseph calls on Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Dionne Brand’s poetry, the work of the late Nigerian curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor, and many others. 

Their studies ground Joseph’s narrative about Sarah, a journalist (Shaunette Renée Wilson) reporting on the Transatlantic Biennale, a fictional art showcase that takes place aboard a sleek cruise ship called The Nautica. Sarah is desperate to get in touch with Funmilayo Akachukwu (Kaneza Schaal), the curator at the helm of this ambitious project. Their story spans roughly three centuries, connecting Funmilayo and Sarah throughout history in a sweeping style that recalls Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost.

Although some of the world building in Joseph’s screenplay can be iffy, the director thoughtfully considers a future shaped by even more serious engagement with art from the African diaspora. Here you can see and hear Enwezor’s influence: The director incorporates various interviews done by the late curator who spent his career insisting that African art rivaled and often superseded its European counterparts. This dreamy timeline is rendered quite beautifully by Bradford Young, who serves as cinematographer. 

There are several threads in BLKNWS, some stronger than others. Joseph includes an unconvincing docudrama that imagines DuBois’ final days, and although the director inserts a cheeky disclaimer that his film is not a documentary, those elements are consistently the strongest. Joseph intersperses real stories like that of Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian investigative journalist who masks his identity with a curtain of beads affixed to a bucket hat — as if he were a character in a Yinka Shonibare sculpture — with Sarah and Funmilayo’s narrative. The titular program, BLKNWS, is another highlight. The director imagines a station manned by real anchors that features investigations, in-depth reporting and podcast interviews. 

Connecting all these threads is Joseph’s own story about his relationship with DuBois’ project. Before the director humorously adds the disclaimer that BLKNWS is not a documentary, he shares a story, through open captions, about how his father gifted his brother, who died of cancer in 2015, an edition of Africana. That inspired Joseph, who cites the text throughout BLKNWS. Almost every historical fact or cultural work is captioned with its corresponding page number in the encyclopedia. This reinforces BLKNWS as a kind of present-day index, connecting Joseph’s work with DuBois’ project. There’s also a sentimental element to these citations and the way they allow Joseph to return to his family history.

To this fan of Davis and his work at the Underground Museum, BLKNWS feels as much like a tribute to Black culture as it does to Joseph and his brother’s experimental spirits.