Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death
2016 · 7m · USA
Directed by Arthur Jafa
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A visceral seven-minute montage set to Kanye West's 'Ultralight Beam,' juxtaposing found footage of Black joy, achievement, culture, and suffering—from civil rights leaders and Obama singing 'Amazing Grace' to viral videos of police violence—into a searing meditation on the African American experience.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Jafa edits a century of Black image-life to 'Ultralight Beam' and the seven minutes do what entire documentaries cannot. Black Visual Intonation as cutting principle — actually new, not just relabeled.
Jafa's Ultralight Beam montage is the most important found-footage work of the last decade and probably the defining short of the post-2016 American moment. The Vimeo upload is an exhibition view rather than the work itself, which is worth flagging.
Jafa's 'Black Visual Intonation' cutting strategy - sequencing by affective resonance rather than narrative - is what makes the Ultralight Beam needle-drop hit so hard at 7 minutes. The Vimeo page is an exhibition view excerpt, not the full work, but the principle is intact.
Reviews
Arthur Jafa took me to church, and he left me a shaken convert.
Jafa's great achievement is to create a structure that cradles these connections between black life and black culture, and that opens to their beauty and suffering, bursting like flares from a roiling sun.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2017