Artist Talk: Arthur Jafa

so let's talk about our two guests today first of all we have Arthur J faux Arthur is a Los Angeles based filmmaker cinematographer and visual artist who has produced in a wide array of disciplines from his cinematic work on films such as Julie Dash's daughters of the dust Spike Lee's Crooklyn and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut to his recent untitled exhibition of collective images at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles his groundbreaking video collage the stunning love is the message the message is death is a collection of iconic images set to the soundtrack of music by Kanye West depicting a visualization of modern black life that is both beautiful and haunting the video is currently showing here in Detroit courtesy of MOCAD at 1086 Bellevue until October 22nd the screening room is open today until 5:00 p.m. and also we have a catalogue of Arthur's stuff also available right now in our store so please be sure to check that out Greg Tate is a writer musician and cultural provocateur who lives on Harlem in Sugar Hill and whose book in books include flyboy in the buttermilk from 1992 everything but the burden what white people are taking from black culture from 2004 his most recent is fly boy to the Greg Tate reader released the Duke University Press in 2016 Tate has also led to command led the conducted improv big band burnt sugar the artist rechamber since 1999 and is a proud member of Howard University's bison nation he has formerly taught at Yale Columbia Brown and Williams colleges and universities this fall he will begin teaching a class at Princeton called the loud and proud musicology of amiri baraka ladies and gentlemen Arthur J feh and Greg Tate [Applause] welcome Detroit thanks for having us it's good to be back at a moke at the bandits played hear my band burn sugar is played here about four four times and you know always we always feel embraced in the space and in the city there's a lot of personal interpersonal connection to Detroit some good friends some actually the first friend I made in New York when I moved from DC is here Sharon Pryor and I mom tell Pryor you know and and then a lot of Detroiters came through New York you know in the 80s and 90s just became real tight personal friends and kind of brought us into the loop of black Detroit in this you know so yeah we feel like deputized defenders of the D in New York City and ours and I have known each other since man I can't even remember when we didn't know each other yeah but yeah we met at Howard and as you can imagine you know we've been in conversation ever since publicly privately formally informally and you know we've had a few occasions to talk about his current work and we always try to mix it up try to take to have the conversation going places that we haven't gone before just so we're not regurgitating some of the same rigmarole so I told him last night I said you know what why don't we talk about Detroit in Detroit talk about and specifically in relationship to his work why it's been important you know to your own development you know to your development why phenomena has submerged from Detroit musically artistically you know as mattered so much to the projects you're involved in can you guys hear me hello okay well we've already gone somewhere we've never gone before because I don't think I've ever heard you refer to me as Arthur I mean I've been influenced by outside yes the Gators I'm happy to be here as my Gregg said we have a long history with Detroit a good friend of mine I don't know if you see a Chris Chris Alexander probably sure but he always says like I have superpowers yeah I'm glad to be here really really happy you know that love is the message and particularly showing here when uh when Gavin first mentioned the whole possibility of showing it here maybe wow those back in February I was like yeah let's do it I was really happy with the turnout the other night you know people came out to see it it's gonna be up for a month so definitely tell people to go and check it out my experience with it has been that people do reparent we know return return viewings of it so hopefully folks will go see it tell other people to come see it and you know and create their own relationship with it but um so having said that I want to just can I just I'm gonna start off just with a video okay just to get us started I'm almost leaking it as it is I'm like real close like I'm afraid I'm gonna get something what about getting it close the real deal in this room the room is booming yeah but the real deal is like for it to be audible y'all have to sweat so they had they'd have to kill they gotta kill they'd had to kill the fans yeah we'd be more audible if there was less fan but y'all have to be ready to just be dripping by the time you yeah you know because I'm Lehrer I'm afraid I'm gonna get some if I get any closer to it I'm outside I'm showing something I mean one of my big things is uh we'll see how we tie this with Detroit I mean they think about Detroit it's like yeah our friends from Detroit and some cuts up David like don't do that I'm from Detroit everybody said that experience and uh it's just something about the idea of Detroit as being real I think that's complicated like what is the real mean I have a increasingly super ambivalent relationship to this whole idea of the real I mean I'm one of the few people who can say I come from somewhere there's even realer than Detroit and that's like the Mississippi Delta you know uber real proto real but Detroit a closed course is a very special environment I mean it's like the only place like if you just start making a list of people who come out of here is just inexplicable I told somebody I'm sure like several hundred years from now they're gonna dig up Detroit there's gonna be a comment or something you know Barrett Baird beneath the city as a explanation for all the mutant creativity and expressivity that's come out of this you know one footprint like it's kind of you know one thing I was thinking about was just that you know there's the culture that developed here but then there are people who definitely they had the deepest impact I would say in the culture first here some Chicago you know I mean but that's what I'm saying like you know it's it's also it's not just my incubator for like just mutant creativity it's also been a repository for it as well because you know I've just heard so many crazy stories by Prince I mean Detroit is an early adopter you can make a movie just by Prince in Detroit and not even Prince just a that happened around prints coming destroyed I've heard like incredible stories of Prince performing and young boys incorporated rolling in they just seemed mythic and epic you know so yeah so this is a very very unique place I'm really partial to it like I said because I feel like as we get into the 21st century and we started to you know start seeing like what's happening with culture stuff it's increasingly difficult to find places where the black aesthetic or the black vibe is still strong and still not like static and that's the thing about it's not static but it's like really really strong I got took conversation with some people the other day about magic city in Atlanta and they were very like kinda it's a strip joint you know and they were very kind of maze or something that I was into Magic City and I was like well yeah because Magic City is a repository of black values you know for better for worse they said yeah but what about the kinda you know misogyny or patriarchy or sexism now just like where we they know where that that stuff doesn't saturate everything and we saw it crossing off the list you know things that are worthy of inquiry and consideration the presence of sexism 99% of everything out here is gonna be scratched off the list you know so it's not to say not to be cognitive or critical of it or anything like that it's but but but but by the same time I think it's a space where there's so much rich complex you know like I said evolving black cultural expression going on and I like to think that Detroit is a very particular place in that respect too I mean the first person who ever said I was their favorite filmmaker is here in Detroit I was just thinking about the other day I won't mention their name cuz I don't wanna somebody some ocean say age is my favorite filmmaking nobody's ever said that this is like maybe six or seven years ago I wouldn't even sure I was a film anyway no but you know I've heard you talk in terms of black cinema as a project you know as a kind of uber project you've been involved with all your life in a meta meta project you know but I've heard you talk a lot about you know it being in a kind of constant state of under development relative to these other places other disciplines in the culture and I know that you talk about needing the need for when you know what you called sustainable models of development well I know there's a few things that happen here oh very strong reference for you mean like you know most people who know you know who were followed are familiar with my thinking around these things this knows that along with a really good partner - and the more recent partner - Malik Sayid and at least a lot more head we formed a film entity it goes back and forth sometimes people call it a collective I don't really think of it as a collective my say just because I myself just cuz I have some problems with some baggage around that he being called a collective I think of it as a company but the way I've always described it is like you know it's a film company model on Motown you know because everything everybody I think can get the genius of what Motown did because I do think the primary problem with black cinema well two primary problems one is like a problem of aesthetics like what is that people are actually actively trying to do or accomplish but the primary problem pragmatic problem of course is infrastructure you know just support a structure that allows people to actually create films film is a complicated medium because it involves a lot of different parts it's not you know I mean I think like one of the genius moves a techno is that the equipment got to a point where person filled litter is sitting on the side of their bed and make the thing well film here due for this moment that really was impossible you know you really needed a kind of complex infrastructure to get it done with a lot of people did a lot of different things working in conjunction which is why film typically is really capital intensive or form but the thing that I thought that was really great about understanding what berry gordy deal with Motown was like people take for granted that R&B was an industry the way it's an industry now as opposed to R&B which is the art form but it wasn't necessarily an industry nobody really turned it into an industry and what Barry Gordy did was a simple move in hindsight you look back at and you know it's super-simple say oh yeah that's obvious like he basically took the henry ford model and applied it to the production of R&D and that really does simplify it because you know it's like it's like Jackson Pollock or something oh yeah I'm just gonna swing painting on a canvas while I'm listening to jazz records over and over simple after you do it but it's not really simple that leap that conceptually to do it so I recognized prettier alone that Motel in terms of like in terms of black culture one of the only non secular I mean secular institutions that we have they were in point two enough that we can study it and debate it and talk about you know it's not a perfect model but in terms of what is about black cinema that I think needs to be addressed Motown was a perfect model meaning like basically you want to set up a situation where you have house bands and you have technical support and you have a internal culture you know that's putting for us a particular vision of excellence and they have certain you know internal mechanisms to ensure and to force that excellence to come to the top you know you know anybody everybody knows about old Motown things like you would do a record and then everybody had to review the record and they voted on it you know internally or the having not just a house band which was like jazz guys who really were way overqualified they were virtuoso overqualified to actually play the music they would it has to play but then you have the combination of that virtuosity technical excellence from the house bands but then you have people coming from neighborhoods with these melodic ideas with these lyrical ideas that weren't per se trained and I always think a big part of like when you hear any classic Motown to a big part of why it even sounds exciting now is that combination or order and chaos you know like refinement and just loose wildness you know so which goes back to New Orleans goes back today yeah so so my thing is like really has been like how do we formulate structures that allow us to get at these things and so like teenagers the part that's really trying to think about what that would look like structurally and then on the other hand like most people know me I'm like I've been very much you know an evangelist for this whole idea that black cinema you know has to be aware of Hollywood as a point of reference but it's got to adopt and embrace a more complicated range of models of things that it could be both cinematic and on cinematic you know ideally first with the music you know how that's hot that's my mantra or our mantra like how do you make cinema with the Beauty alienation and complexity of black music so that's one thing but also like inside a cinema like what other cassadines can we look at as a point of reference you know cuz there's nothing that ending of itself is dope I don't think so things are dope in relationship to culture and how people read those things so you know so a lot of the work that I've been doing in particular recently and loving as a message really has a lot to do with going to source material that's my professional source material per se it's not you know citizen videos of you know police malevolence and just all kinds of other things too so I mean maybe maybe can I show something I just want yes she came I was thinking um you know Toni Morrison says she writes novels that she wants to read but can I find and I know that this particular sequence of images has a relationship to a particular epic story film you want to make but um but I also know when I look at that that that assemblage of avatars and terrors and horrors and anti-heroes that it also speaks to a black cinema you want to see but can I find - you know and what is well just talk about your collection the way you collect images and how it relates to trying to compensate you know the under development you see and what we call black cinema now or black filmmaking now or historically black moviemaking right well you know I think you know David Hickey you said it best to me he said like you know music was a dominant cultural form of the 20th century but the only other form that you could maybe debate debate that would be cinema you know in a sense and but like for some of the reason I was pointing out early is like cinema is just a really expensive medium even though black people engage in cinema from the very beginning you know like the Louis Armstrong of cinema asking my shoulders making films his first film is like 1918 so black folks have been in the game of cinema for a long time but it's just a particularly of the the form itself and like I said a capital intensive nature means that even though people are in the game there hasn't been a whole lot of space to play and like I've pointed out before it's like if you look at to certain degree once you get past Oscar Micheaux who made films from 1918 to 1948 I think and made over 36 feature films and Spencer Williams and a few other people once you get past them to a certain degree cinema is a history of like one-offs like great one-offs I would say I mean it's just a litany of people you could just say like their first film was the greatest film and they never really kind of came within striking distance and why that was great you know I would put on that list everybody from melvin van peebles who did sweet sweetback's badass song - Charles Burnett who did killer chic who's made a lot of you know interesting films but most people would say killer she is by far his masterpiece I would include Julianne and of course daughters that it doesn't but Roger it's just a whole bunch of instances where people clearly displayed genius but they weren't able to actually follow it up and so that question of following it up is the question like how come it's one offs I used to sometimes say about Julie she was like Toni Morrison if she published the blue is I was never able to publish another book you know so if daughters of the dust which is quite an achievement you know it's her first feature family that's her blue is I like what would her song of solomon are beloved we have no idea what they would look like if she got to make four five six films not just making films were making the films that she wanted to make right so the space in which I think that I've operated in has always been a space that has acknowledged a certain kind of if not deprivation and so you know under development it's just seems like it's a fundamental part of what we've done it may be to a certain degree it's also true of the music but it just looks very different in that medium you know this under development and how it shapes our aesthetic in highest shapes our values on what's worth pursuing what's not worth pursuing so a big part of one of the things that I've always done is I've just always collected images since I was a kid as you know right and it's very OCD you yesterday you drop something that I heard about - kung fu Oh - come yeah because I have this film called our dreams of colds and death and I was doing a Q&A with a meat Altman that after the screening and uh she said oh yeah most people know you know that you've been doing these books for forever you had these picture books forever and then uh in those books you know people used to wonder well how's this gonna translate and how would this particular vision like translate the famine she thought in that film you saw it and my dad stood up and said he said well yo he's been doing a version of these since he was like a kid like it is true like and I was saying last night that when I was in the seventh grade I had a book that was like literally thousands of confu ads you know it was Bruce Lee you know five things of death I was really caught up in that at the moment so I just had all these images are just found through ads right so and a lot of that was really driven also by this whole again this whole a sense of lack because I can remember the first confu ad I ever saw like trailer I mean it has such an indelible impact on me that I can I can remember where I was spatially it was it shows Saturday morning after American Bandstand and before the local like horror film that would come on Saturdays it was in my my aunt Lilian's house that Saturday and I was just sitting in her living room and this five fingers of death came on and I had never seen anything like that because it was like I mean I guess it was the effect that people have when they first saw the matrix we like the bullet time yeah people fight and run around it with flying over I mean outside of comic books I just had never experienced anything like that so I went on a Jack you know what I mean like a lot of people in America like five fingers of the Deaf sort of proceeded like Chinese connection and fists of fear and these kinds of things to the state like that was the beginning of where everybody was going cuz Bruce Lee I mean a really central figure I mean he's up there with like Muhammad I leave in a lot of ways like iconic Lee the way people deal with I mean black folks recognize that Bruce Lee was a brother right from the beginning just the terms of his style his way cuz I can remember like I'm gonna tell you the other thing about its living from going on crazy tangent now but like by Bruce Lee that's really deep like like anybody's my age like I was born in 1960 it was like 66 67 Batman was on their two television show what you don't like anybody kid American kid who grew up on comic books and stuff I was in a Batman I was like young enough what I didn't see this or the camp you know that's how sarcastic it was but I was just in the Batman and then because Batman was so successful they came out of course with the Green Hornet and this is thing about the Green Hornet nobody cared about the Green Hornet everybody was like who the hell is that dude was driving the car Kato who the hell is Kato I mean it was just his swag his charisma like everything was like who is that so like where I was from everybody was like the Green Hornet man Kaito Kaito is one he wore black his style everything and then he just disappeared the show got canceled and there was no more Kato and that's like 67 then 71 72 fists of fury damn that is Kato I mean he made a move that was very similar to Jimi Hendrix's move like Hendrix had to leave here he had to leave here he went to London to get his thing off well you know what's interesting too because you know that show kung foo he he auditioned for it and they told him that uh he wasn't Chinese enough for I think but when you think about it see that relates to what you're saying about see they saw all that brother up in him - totally totally I mean Bruce Lee's last families with death with Kareem abdul-jabbar like even for me like I mean I didn't too much like the fact that he kicked Jabbar's ass but I still appreciate it that Jabbar Connick dislike like even now just recently you know this fashion line fear God it's Jerry Lorenzo like his whole new thing he's come out fashion while it's totally based on Bruce Lee's that getup like he had this jumpsuit on and in Game of Death the yellow jumpsuit with their black stripes and that's what Jared Lorenzo just sounded like Kendrick Lamar just wore it you know it's just like super super iconic well you know we also know that Bruce Lee partly grew up in the same neighborhood to Jimi Hendrix just for the yes astrologically minded in the audience Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee are the same birthday which in the book of days and astrology astrology is known as the day of electrifying excitement so anybody to questions you know like the the accuracy of astrology deal with it I mean look I had to post the game with their poster and the posters still wanna I mean honestly I'm just gonna blow it up I'm gonna blow it up and put it in an art gallery because it's gonna be this is a great piece it's just Kareem abdul-jabbar like the character he played he had this powder blue kind of a caftan or somebody who's like too short he came to his waist and he had these underwear on he's bright underwear right and he had to say somebody was like totally a black panther right yeah it was straight up like Eldridge Cleaver black ray-bans afro seven-foot - right and and it is shot he's kicking at Bruce Lee he's on one side friend this leg extends to the whole other side of the frame and Bruce Lee is unders lately some bad [Laughter] you know when I started moving like I said oh he be Bruce Lee the way they explained it was like he has some kind of eye condition so you know Bruce Lee pulled all the curtains off he couldn't see dope stuff what I mean is like so much of it for me really just comes down to I mean I thought it went off the tangent of a picture collector but it just comes down to like energy man just like energy like what it's like what is that energy what is that charisma and how come like you know you've heard me say this before like even if you look at the history of cinema Hollywood cinema the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema like Hollywood does not had our energy anymore no they don't this is dead is this ain't no ain't no question and that's why they make in comic book movies I mean nothing's wrong with comic book I like the Avengers I grew up on it like everybody that Kirby Jack curved exactly the great genius of comic books but they're mining that now because they're just like out of ideas but if you look at classic Hollywood cinema moves we look at it now even the movie stars the Marilyn Monroe's the James Dean's the Jimmy Stewart's those people has so much charisma like in a way you can see it and a lot of that I think you know there's this really incredible book about Neal gobbler called how the Jews created Hollywood it's a really really amazing book because all the original like Hollywood studio executives were Jewish entrepreneurs most of them were Jewish entrepreneurs you're coming out you just in New York came out they had this money with them they brought this money that because I anti-semitism they wouldn't let him invest in all the older it was more established industries right so they ended up putting a lot of money into the movie thing but I always said like Neal gobbler he has a very interesting when he talks about certain things about it he saw that he pushes right up on it like this sort of insight that I think it's critical to understand about Hollywood basically he's saying like all the producers many of the actors and stuff were Jewish most of the writers a lot of the writers most of them would you the intensity of whiteness like the vision that they created for whiteness in Hollywood cinema and the reason they had so much power in the world in charisma is because the people who were making their vision were not white themselves so their relationship to whiteness it was almost like a drag Kings relationship to femininity like it's a hyperbolic steroid it super version of black female you know femininity in the same way that whiteness that got constructed in Hollywood was created by people who were themselves outside of it Joe Simon Joe Shuster over and over again so whatever that is that charisma that power and stuff whatever the equation that made that possible seems not to be you know not generating that anymore I mean it's really interesting like so many of the most successful directors in the history of cinema are Jewish right but like they don't make films about Jewish people like the most arguably the most successful filmmaker ever Steven Spielberg I mean if if you do some kind of equation of combination of ticket sales and some sort of critical true acknowledgement I mean like he made so many films where you ever made a film about Jewish people that was scheana's list and in the hero of the film is the German guy you know like I think that's very telling about how complicated the whole relationship is so that's also another reason why people say well how come black people just don't go to Hollywood right how come you know we proven we can make great films we prove that we can make money the whole blaxploitation period arguably saved Hollywood you know economically saved Hollywood entirely seventies so how come black people haven't been able to find a foothold in Hollywood and I fundamentally think it's because of this because that core tacit agreement between large and white society and Jewish people says you can make movies but you gotta make movies about us it's a very delicate balance that's in place right and when black people show up no they're not trying to have us they like you know we don't we don't for better for worse we do not operate inside of the rules we want to break the rules so it's so it's so it means that it's like trying to jump through a hoop but the hoop you jump it through is it's a hoop behind it it's like two hoops going like so you're trying to serve in the sense multiple masters I think that's why socially it's been so difficult for black people to actually find some actual you know ground in Hollywood which is why I think the future black cinemas definitely is independent even though you may int you may land in Hollywood as a marketplace the only future for us going forward is to create structures that allow us to dictate the narratives we want to tell and how we want to tell them and that's only gonna happen outside which is up I can't why Detroit becomes interesting not in terms not only turns to Motown but it turns to techno the red people just operate it outside of like some kind of you know the mainstream I guess in a sense they still have changed altered world culture music culture data so there's something else you want to show got to have bass yeah I mean that was an interesting seeing apex like that it was all trebly I guess it was a little like you know David boy produced raw power like Stooges record and there's been a lot of debate about that record for years because the way boy it mixed it it's like super thin you know in like 30 years later I think eggy remakes it as somebody said it was never opposed to sound like that but everybody just rejected that because everybody got so used to hearing some of the treble enos attributed to the you know the the manic intensity of that that particular record but uh so that was interesting simulate that aura it had a long time to become a classic and accumulate the well let me talk about the soundtrack was for that piece was a Robert hood yeah Robert I know you said something yesterday about how you really felt about about television to jazz oh yeah what I was saying was like I was I was saying increasingly I find myself when I go to a soundtrack I feel like I'm cheating a little bit but I go to the techno as a soundtrack and I think the reason why that is increasingly is because if you look at black instrumental music I think a lot of the virtuoso of what they did virtuosity of what that is it's in that space of techno or house or this kind of club music I mean not that the voice is not present but you know what I mean it's not like pop music where lyrics really do Drive everything everything is falling the lyrics like even when me goes or something like that it's like the virtuosity is in the word play and how it activates those fairly you know loopy kind of structures or so but like when you hear techno or some you really are hearing like I think the most advanced construction of purely instrumental music that's going on I think and if you go back to is you know you know like get up with it like you hear techno won't get up like miles miles that's like techno this to me that's the earliest versions of techno as we understand it now so increasingly that's the music that I've been gravitating to us as the appropriate competent for because those you put lyrics in anything or voice even in anything it starts to shape how you understanding what you're seeing and so that's you know some not coming well I mean we're also the toe boy just talked about maybe the relationship between the kind of rhythmic probably rhythmic play you're hearing techno and the way you had it the way you sequence and kind of tweak sequence of sequences of imagery well I think I am to a certain degree interested in things being in syncing things being out of sync I mean it's like it really it all comes down to a play that like with Apex that you guys just saw like a lot of times they experience people experience the images is moving around in certain kind of way out there so are you altering the sound but it's not it's like most of what's happening is the image is on a very rigid it's like super rigid like the timing on the images but because the music is moving around in certain ways especially with that pulse it creates this tension it's like the same it's like the classic thing they say like Giorgio Moroder that's great but it's like the disco thing and why fatigue people's ears because it would just on the beat but we know from jazz all black music James Jamerson all that it's like it's never right on the beat other slippage it's got to slip and you see the little ahead a little laughter and that creates on a neurological level all these kinds of undertones and stuff so basically what I've attempted to do is they extend that relationship between a consistent pause and another kind of sonic thing I would try to extend that kind of relationship between the pitcher and the sound yeah and something like love is a message you have that happening in conjunction with the lyrics I operate on multiple planes because there's a certain sonic part it's just about the song and relationship to hide a music track because love is a message you know it's got a lot of clips in it it's not that fast that's what people people think is rapid-fire but it's not really rapid-fire so it's just you know it's just another thing that I wanna I mean I think in terms of like last night we were up in Pittsburgh and we were talking and I got kind of interrogated by some people about my sense of time and and I kind of resistant to have certain kinds of conversations about time because I do feel like people's eyes glaze over when I go there you know it seemed like it was like people were saying last night they thought I was avoiding being specific or something but I just felt like I was sparing people you know going up the rabbit hole with me man like I just assured a shortest version of it go something like this it's like in the equation of what is black cinema when I talk about the aesthetic part of it which is different from all of this sort of structural part of it that has to be addressed in the aesthetic part of it if you use music as a model then the first thing you got to say is like the unifying strand in African music if not black musics in the world is a certain acute sensitivity to rhythmic complexity and I even think most people will acknowledge black people in particular neurologically displayed an acute sensitivity to rhythm and complexity flow yeah flow now you can see that like I worked on music videos for a long time and it's just it's like an undeniable phenomena that you would see like if you're going to hip hop music video and you know everything is like you know a pre-recorded track and everybody sort of dancing to it so you have extras you got the leaves but you got extras infallibly if you play that music everybody's on the one like immediately immediately if you go to a rock show it's like crazy like I mean I don't even know how people are boys ruined like if you were actively trying to avoid being on the beat I was always amazed by people's capacity to find a place where the beat wasn't it's like an amazing it's something to be study any other songs I think that's kind of fascinating to me so that kind of most people would acknowledge that black folks black America's having acute sensitivity to rhythm it's something it's like anecdotally and just is this observable you can see on the in at YouTube you can put like babies on YouTube they can't even stand can't hold the head up you play music maybe like you know to the beam so but the thing that the other part of that equation that I think people aren't as aware of because I think it's harder to parse in a way is an acute sensitivity to spatial range like figures in space because people haven't figured out how to commodify like an assist I think like if black people have been able to fool a whole hog go into cinema it would be something that you would be able to look at a screen and just be observable right but you can see it in basketball say for example you can see it when people talk about Pele in soccer and he's bringing like they cut the Ginga or something which is really just yeah yeah it's angolan thing it's a capo everything bringing that to play what that is is like a person moving through space right and being able to orient themselves their body in relationship to a fixed goal in the be able to manipulate an object that's independent on ball and to do things with it so you know that's like in basketball that's Julius Erving that's dr. J there Stephen Curry that's Durant I mean you could see that that all the time like what that is so the relationship between that and certain kinds of things that seem obvious to me like as potentialities in cinema are also a place that I'm very kind of interested kind of in exploring I think it's a space that our cultural predispositions and other things mutant things that shape the suppression all these other kinds of things you know come to bear and could have some real impact yeah well you know yesterday to you just talking about how you know silent films made with hand-cranked camera yeah but you you said that if black folks had been given the opportunity to enter into cinema when hand-cranked Kevin cameras were still the norm that when kind of locked frame cameras came in that they probably still would have held on to yeah I mean I think I was just basically yeah I was saying that the other day that because I was explaining I was I was responding to our aids question about rhythm and stuff and cinema and I was saying like the way that cinema is normally taught the history of it which has very little to do with actually looking at things it's like they told you how you supposed to look at the things and one thing that most if you go to a film course they'll say about silent films oh the reason they were so visual is because they didn't have they didn't have sound and that's what they kind of say they had to be more visual because they didn't have sound and what they mostly mean there is that they didn't have dialogue right they didn't have dialogue he wasn't dialogue driven and uh you know and that but first of all there was no silent like we should look at the silent movie now there was no silent films without music they always had musical accompaniment you can go see a movie and there wasn't somebody playing along with it so they always had musical accompaniment but the way that yeah yeah in ragtime in particular is the music's I even think that's you know I was saying that's something I think that's worth exploring how come ragtime became the dominant musical accompaniment two Cylons knew exactly like black people kind of pushing up in it even when they weren't allowed to participate but what I was saying the thing I was getting at it was like on a technical level like what's happening in silent films and why silent films are mostly mesmerizing because they use irregular exposure intervals and all that means is that basically if you go to see a movie now the way the cameras set up it functions metronomic Lee it exposes the images on a regular pulse even if it's slow motion is still a regular pulse even if you shoot at 48 frames per second the space between each of those exposures is even and that's the kind of equivalent of the diatonic scale and music it's balanced it's a balanced scale right whereas in hand cranked cameras just by necessity when you crank a thing is not gonna be regular you know it's gonna have so if you put like a DW Griffith film down on a board or something you look at it you can actually see that the space in between each of those exposures is different so they knew that it was a pasta it has certain expressive possibilities so like Billy Bitzer who was the Griffons cameraman his nickname was an Iron Horse because he was known for being able to keep a regular crank that was his whole thing that's a certain culture logic like keep the as regular as metronomic as possible he's famous for whistling like Marcy a why you know about that keep its pulse right but then on the other hand if you look at Charlie Charlie Chaplin's cameraman like Rolly Tata rod you can it's in the notes you can see it's all there the way Chaplin moves in the film it's completely bound up with his cameraman over and under cranking the thing like system they had a system and like even like this is incredible documentary had nine parts called the unknown Chaplin and it shows because they got all the outtakes and everything it showed like some of my go rush movie he basically improvised those films he would have an idea and he would just shoot it over and over like he was successful enough that so like some classic scenes they're like 90 tapes of that scene and what Chaplin would do is in front of the camera he would try different things he would try it this way try it that way try to when you were refining it in front of the camera in the main person that he looked to because he couldn't see it into afterwards was his cameraman and so they had it worked out so if Chaplin was making a movement where he wanted to be agitated of course he would under crank so if your projection constant is 24 frames per second and you crank under that and you play it back it's gonna like anybody who's seen in the whole movie looks jittery right and if you over cranked it looks slowed down so Chaplin's moving and cinema has this combination of acceleration and you know undertow fluidity innovation syncopation bass but the only reason people think that hand-cranked cameras people cranking those cameras oh I'm so tired of cranking these cameras and then somebody came up with a camera will you know you could push a button and it will run and it was so happy they put them shits inside and that's not how it happened it was like 20 it took over 20 years for from the early 18th to the 30s for basically the motorized camera to displace the hand-crank cam they had motorized cameras way way way earlier it was just that was too much artistry they had been built into hand crank cameras and the only reason to ever have when sound came in the engineers took over and they said in order to achieve perfect sync right the cameras have to be driven by machines so that they be there be metronomic and the sink would be perfect right that's the only reason hand crank cameras were moved out right but as we as I said yesterday as we know nobody really cares about things don't nobody care about saying well somebody's lips are in perfect sync with what they're saying in the whole history of Italian film was posed up up into the 90s I mean Fellini films of fluid mostly because it's all post up you know why you know sync sound like it you know neurological level it Flags images in a certain kind of way the camera wouldn't slave to the boom operator exactly totally that's why even when the whole first motorized cameras came in because they were loud for one thing they were you can see the pictures up they have a camera and there'd be like a room built around the camera to insulate the sound and all of a sudden similar went from like super fluid visual to all sudden all the moves or people sitting around a coffee table having a conversation because they put the mic in the flower pot you know so but I just think black people like we always do like really resisted that even though it would have been a kind of like illogical like my favorite film about asking my show is a film called 10 minutes to live right and what's interesting about that film he Charlotte when silent films were you know still the norm but in between him shooting it and editing it sound came in so he posted up all the sounds poster Latino to me and a lot of attention and beauty and the torquing of him I think has to do with that because you see later in his films also some of the same things happening as sounds start to dictate the immune system yeah got you got kind of that got a little bit more static compared to those films well what you know while we can we go we can track yeah yeah but we you know we could you know we'll show this and then we'll open it up to you guys do you have questions Hioki listen okay that's all in their defense that file may be corrupted Manus I have I have come to that conclusion so let me see I'm on Travis gotta come up with the volume [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah anyway but you got a sense of the vibe of it I guess mm yeah so we want to open up the floor we have a mic right here if you have any questions please come over here and stand in line right back here thank you for the first video you showed Arthur yeah who is the artist who did the music for that Robin Hood that was Robin Hood obviously Detroit native genius you know work with Jeff Mills they have a history I think they both had a relationship he lives in Alabama now preacher yep hello my name is Marsha Philpott I'm also known as Martian music I'm a writer here I met you briefly at the reception for you mr. jefra earlier this week yesterday I think and I express my thanks to you for the gathering of these images I feel very very moved seeing those images and I thank you so much for your all-encompassing of our experience without the judgment that is often rendered by the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and the classist type of elimination of personhood for those black people who do not fit within the confines of acceptability for larger society so I thank you so much for all of those images that's just by way of a statement I enjoyed your whole presentation and mr. Tate as well it is a pleasure to see you in person I would like to know a very crass kind of thing - what do you attribute the snafu that surrounded the Oscar in the mix up in the Oscar handout for the movie moon what's the name of that movie that one moon lighting and the other movie that that's just a just a plain kind of question I'm just curious about what you think about that and that that's it for the moment thank you [Music] I mean my takeaway from it in the sense was like I was both happy that moonlight won because I do think there's some real black cinema and moonlighting like I don't I think a lot of films are black people make I don't think there's very much black cinema you know I don't think just cause you black and you make a movie that is black cinema I mean you know I mean I mean Leah teen price Jesse Norman they're great at what they do genius maybe even know what they do but it's opera it's not it's not it's not black music I mean even if they're singing about gypsies it's still about black music you know it's like that musical form that's a great musical form opera but it evolved in response to a lot a set of existential and cultural desires you know pressure to express certain things that evolved to do that well and it does that well and it's that's why it's great but it's very different from like the early a-team price even though she may be individually excellent that's very different from Aretha Franklin you know any number of other people where you get both their individual genius but you get the fact that that form that they're working inside of evolved in response to the circumstances that black people find themselves in and they were attempted to express so I like so I was happening for moonlight for that reason because I do think there's a lot of movies that come out with black directors that I wouldn't personally classify as black cinema no no I'm saying in reference to moonlighting like what is the like cinema in it so you buy the film it's like the way I mean it's the presence the presence the way the bodies occupy space the way the structure is put together I mean I'm not a big fan of the end of the film like it's people upset and I'm like super critical of the way the film ended I think it's very chicken the way it ended it's like you try things sometimes they work sometimes they don't work but I really have a hard time with things where people don't try like I don't think you can build a whole movie about a guy who basically struggling with his sexuality and you come to the culmination of the movie when he basically finally says to this other brother in this room who he's had a long-standing thing with he says in him I had nobody touched me since you touched me I don't know it's hard to tell him to move with his ten years earlier what whatever nobody's touched me and he's standing on one side of the room and other brothers standing on the other side room and didn't a jump cut or dissolve to them sitting on the couch that to me is little like if you saw Star Wars was it Return of the Jedi forget which ever one woman when Luke Skywalker finds out that darh vader is his dad if the whole movies bills to that and Luke at the sky you know he has a lightsaber and Darth Vader has a license and they standing on different sides of room you crossed his off to Luke flying away in the Millennium Falcon like a go crazy like the hell was that you know so to me like it's like that you can't build the whole movie to a cat who's trying to negotiate his sexuality without showing me how he got across the room to the other guy you cannot cross me that's chicken but haven't see it that I really enjoy what's a movie because it because the vibe of it the vibe and the flow of it was really beautiful I mean I think it was beautiful not no accident I know like for sure like we know that they what they looked at and they looked at things that my associates and our circle of people were doing they studied these things and said how can we do that so it's not an accident and I appreciate that they did a good job but I just didn't like the end so you get back to original ask a question so I was glad that they won that was one takeaway the other takeaway is I thought the producers of lala land we're incredibly graceful like I'm like like for real a super graceful I don't think very many people would have managed it with as much grace as they did but beyond and I don't know I I think it's I think I get it on the structure level why the Academy Awards matter but like they kept but they didn't nominate killer sheep they didn't nominate daughters of the dust they didn't nominate guns in here Steve nominate it's like dating them they enter of our masterpieces so why would I even I don't at the end of the day I don't really care what they think so why don't you know hi um Thank You Mia I really enjoyed this conversation the last time I saw the two of you in this kind of forum was at Duke University where I was a grad student many moons ago where's Duke Dean at the National Museum yeah so um I had a question about television as a medium because you mentioned early on the talk about the Golden Age of film and your many references to this era of television the medium of television is the golden era of TV and so I wanted to know your take on there seems to be an increase in the you know different narratives of the black experience being convened on television as well as on you know opportunities online look on YouTube you know it's a read for example it started on youtubes I just wanted to know your take on that as an alternative to the on the medium of film television is a medium like in the sense of Marshall McLuhan talking about being a medium we're just talking about media at this point the platform there's so many different platforms where people receive cinema I mean a large part of what people see on television are movies speaking to how television shows seem to have all of a sudden with things like Atlanta or insecure it almost seems like you got a richer more complex series of characters than you see in movies I mean that's just more evidence is what I was saying or how Hollywood and I say Holly I mean Holly movies a kind of dead because in a way the economics of how they make decisions about what's gonna get made and what's not getting me really don't allow for nuance and things like that that's all superheroes and stuff like that or horror films I guess at this point now I guess we're gonna see a wave of film since it is so well horror films but uh well I don't have a problem and so do you think nine theatrical exhibition a visual storytelling year's cinema or cinema something else that maybe a definition is tied up with definition to cinemas arcade maybe it's this one I think everything you just say it was right I agree with that I think that cinema is a very specific thing I think that you know in terms of just the engine that the history of audio-visual art let's say with moving images and sounds it's come through cinema but it's come through all kinds of other things that aren't cinema like you know looking at basketball games like Monday Night Football where they go to slow motion and all these kinds of things that's not cinema but I still think in some ways it's interesting audio visual phenomena you know so I don't really you know me I'm not a I don't care I don't care about what platform I saw it on I like YouTube I think YouTube is some much more interesting than almost anything on TV in terms of black folks I think Atlanta's fresh super super fresh a lot of wise fresh is because I think they really are like tap into why YouTube is interesting it's really just by access like who gets access and who gets to tell the story like Donald Glover Donald Glover right he took a particular route like in a sense he started in parks and recreation like that brother is so community yeah you know he's come up through the Hollywood ranks and been able to retain his desire to create certain kinds of representation and he was able to accrue enough power not only NBC or ABC but on you know like FX which is like FX is not you know I mean it's like these new platforms these new spaces where things get greenlit so he was able to accrue enough power and I think the price the price point what he was able to do the fact that they didn't have no movie stars and all this kind of stuff the economic service said hey let's take a chance on this guy and it was a big big hit and it surprised everybody but I've never seen the trailers like the six months before I was sitting a trailer which I saw on YouTube they're incredible these trailers were it's like they took they took the video where they filmed everybody moving back pages so it made all the movements trains in the trailers they did that and these two trailers their masterpiece TV trailers like really and if I had any critique of our Lance and it's not really a critique it's like a desire I hope they are able to bring to bear some of that that they did in the trailers in the actual series you know but I know a lot of us econometrician visual play yeah I wish they what I haven't said that I think is better than any black movie in the last 10 years the series is way better in terms of the nuance the complexity of the characters the fact that they move like living entities they don't feel over determined and how they move but yeah I think Atlanta's dope I even think insecure is not that bad I think you got better I I hate it in the beginning the first couple of episodes I thought like this pales compared to all the black girl you know which is where she kind of came from and it seemed like when they stopped trying to be funny in a way and just got on with telling his story he got better and it was really clear that Miley it was more interesting than he's like more interesting so it's sort of start to take his own shape you know it's funny I was telling some people the other day by jeffrey wright who is the was the greatest black actor of his generative his generation i think male actor of his generation but like if you look at his output his most genius work is all in theater everybody knows that like he just didn't what he was capable of you just didn't get to see it in the movies like if you asked a lot of folks like what's his best performance they'll say shaft well he played a Dominican drug lord and it's like a look it's not even a big part it's a little part but it was so amazing but you want to say just go and let's just stick with this person right here I want to know who that person is that that's how powerful his character was right and he'd be character he told me when he was in a hundred 25th Street now people yell out the name of the character that's how you know it really struck a chord like it really struck a chord so insecure is like that at mean you know what I mean it's like what's dope and what they decide is though are not the same things like for example my brother Andre Harlem in the Nick anybody who saw the Nick which is great TV the first year out of the blue supposedly by closely by Clyde on Andre Rock that as the black surgeon for Paris it was like it turned into the Andre Holland show but doing the offseason they fix that they fixed it next year you came back he couldn't see he was blind and he sat in the room for the whole season seemed like they would like we're not gonna have that repeat itself it's not supposed to be an Andre Harlan show so it's the same thing like Cato they shut the down rather than just let it turn into what it should've been the Kato you know anyway yeah hey first of all I want to thank you both for the conversation I've seen you talk in a number of times now it's always illuminating AJ I wanted to ask you about the medium for which love is the message the message is death was made within the context of you just saying that YouTube is one of your favorite platforms and hearing you previously say that you are kind of an accidental art gallery person you know so when you were making it when you were first cutting it together putting it together with the music where did you think you would leave it for people to see YouTube YouTube just straight up all my friends urged me not to put it on YouTube that's the only reason didn't end up on YouTube cuz everybody I knew was saying don't put it on YouTube don't put it on YouTube just hang on to it and one of the main people who was vociferous Lee saying don't put it on YouTube was Khalil Joseph who did the Flying Lotus videos and stuff Khalil was that eyeballs all night this past year than the year before he had a screening he took it unbeknownst to me he took it himself because he was a little obsessed with it and I think that's all he liked it a lot he took it with him and so when he had a screening of his work he started off with love as a message and that's how Gavin Brown my dealer actually saw it in Switzerland and got in touch with me so I have a sort of stumbled into kind of art career sense I didn't even know I don't know what you call is that generosity some beyond you know he was advocating I guess for me but I hadn't really envisioned it in the you know in the art context anything it's sort of changed my life you know the last ten months because not only that I since had a show at the serpentine which love as a message wasn't a part of I've since shown apex at Art Basel where it was a really really big success and I'm a sort of art world something that I don't know but uh and as a consequence like I said something the other night that it was the kind of provocation but I think it's true I was just looking at it thing was thinking about jay-z and thinking about not rock nation a reasonable does not rock oh yeah Rockefeller like in reasonable doubt and I just say that one of the reasons that jay-z got to the place that he got to be on like you know talent or drive or something like that is because he made his money in a whole different of the spirit and he was operating in artistically so when he came to do his first record he was always a rich guy from the drug game right and he had made no apologies about that so they weren't they didn't have to take no deal in the beginning like people were trying to sign them to different contracts or something there's like no him and damn - it like we don't we don't need your money you know if you're not gonna actually make give us access to your platform your distribution platform in the way that we want and give us a deal that we can accept we're not gonna take it so reasonable doubt they did that themselves that's an independent that was independently released even the video which was was it the video was no reason without hoses like Street trees are watching yes Teresa watch the exact compilation yeah even the video they did themselves so I said to somebody I'm trying to have to be everybody didn't you know I told somebody I'm treating the art game as my drug you know it's like I'm just it's the drug game for me it's like I make some money over here now I'm now starting to talk to Hollywood yet again you know again people want to have conversations with me but I don't have to take a deal I'm not gonna do anything if it's not gonna allow me to have final cut and do what I want to do because I know that's that dare and lies disaster you know you try like I'd like to say black folks never get to be the Wright brothers right we never get to build some throw it off the cliff and the glass a little bit and people say wow look at the implications of that that thing didn't just go down like a rock it went a little bit maybe we invest in them it could go even further right we always are the wrong brothers and sisters right we never are given the benefit of the doubt so like even for me love is the message I was just saw it as a demo like cuz I I think I was stand up and say you could Blake black cinema like the music that does what the music does and it was like just you know it was like a proof of concept I didn't I had a vision it was people gonna like react to it the way that they did so but I still feel like it's like with daughters I've been through this as a co-producer daughters they tell you there's no audience for your film there's no commercial possibility for it a film about black women you know at the turn of the century and dresses it's like now who wants to see that alright nobody wants to see that told her people told us that year after year after year after year and when we made the film and it was a hit and it was a hit like it made a lot of people rich she didn't make us rich it already made some people rich and it demonstrated that there was a market for that particular vision and people said it was a fluke they said it was a fluke so I put you right back to square one again like you got it mortgage your house ruin your credit all this just can't do it with so many times you know so that's what I mean by we're always always the wrong brothers and sisters we're never given the benefit of a doubt of what we do I just I feel very blessed now cuz like I'm gonna keep doing what I do you know and when I get the right situation for a feature film I'm gonna do that but I want to do it you know with a certain kind of force it may not be a hit but a lot of great things or not hits you know Raging Bull that's clearly Scorsese's best film it was the out-and-out flop so I can't guarantee it's gonna be a hit but it's gonna be a thing let me tell you it's gonna be a thing so we take one more question thanks for speaking here today and also thanks for getting us a peek at your iTunes selection there I've saw love is the message on Thursday and I wanted to ask with that and like the 444 with these kind of disruptive breaks that you put in your work or the more recent work you know is that kind of speaking to attention-deficit of you know culture today or is it like is it a jazz thing is a dhatus thing could you speak to that probably a little of both honestly but I'm not doing it because I attention-deficit that's real so it's probably a little that but it's just it's more just in the tradition of the break you know in music and by the music is just the break huh you mean it turns the audience you know again I didn't make it for an audio specific audience I just made the thing that I was trying to make I was just trying to embody something I made it and then I after I made it I looked at it said hey this is interesting I want to share it with people I felt very compelled to share with people because it seemed in hindsight you know after they actually put it together that it was my attempt to you know struggled with this wave of evidence we have video evidence of what black people have been saying since time immemorial that people don't treat us nice you know what I mean and that we say it they say we're tripping or something like in the 80s it was all Eleanor bumpers the whole series of cases of disputing accounts of violence and acting on black people and I was suddenly got Rodney King it was really just close to the video that it became a thing because it was there for everybody to see you know and just because of I mean I told Greg I remember the first time somebody told me they're gonna put a movie camera in a cell phone this is the dumbest idea I was like this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard you know but I could never have anticipated how was gonna empower people to actually just document the everyday going on of this structure and his system so and so like you know from Trayvon Martin oh and I was starting to see you know it was something like there was some critical mass got reached in terms of people having iPhones or video phones in their hands and the platform's been available to people whether it be youtuber were star hiphop or whatever it reached a critical Facebook it reached a critical mass where people became comfortable with not only shooting these things or posting these things and like everybody else I was just in Brawl and throttle or transfixed or horrified by the wave of things the after you know the confirmation to what we already knew to be true because you know there's a kind of necessary compartmentalization that you have to be practicing as a black person to get anything done or you'll never go out the door of your house so that compartmentalization got cracked by this visually sway of tsunami of evidence of what was happening there black folks and that was just in some ways my way of processing it and it's funny because you know I mean not to be all dramatic anything but you know girl Mississippi is a strange place to grow up violent place in a lot of ways for Delta you know economic deprivation it creates that so I grew up around a lot of kind of aberrant kind of behavior you know and stuff and so I've seen a lot of crazy you know and so I wasn't really there tripped out by images of black men mostly being killed it's like that's what I it's been a given most of my life it was the video of the sister backing out of the car with her hands and you know I'm just saying like at a certain point I guess she realized they weren't on killer kids it was unlikely they were gonna shoot her kids but she was in that space of like y'all are terrorizing my kids she was worried about the psychic well-being and her kids and that just broke me I just remember sobbing when I saw it on Facebook it really broke me I'm saying I was like and I remember thinking like why are you crying at this you've been looking at all these videos of people being murdered and nobody's being murdered here but it was just I don't know it just I was just like I mean I don't think I'm a naive person but it just really me up you know so I think love is the message was compiled unconsciously in some response to that will take you on your patience it make you everyone thank you for coming Thank You mocha Thank You Monty you

Channel: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - MOCAD

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Id: Fp5W9xUEtxI

Length: 81min 4sec (4864 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2017