Arthur Jafa revisited

The cinematography has to serve the director’s vision, which means in some ways you have to function as a tool. Ideally I like to function as a cinematographer who has his own issues and concerns, and when a director hires me, hopefully – ideally – they want me to bring those concerns to that particular project.

How that works out, in some sense, depends on who I work with. Some jobs are just jobs; you just shoot them. But films like Daughters of the Dust [1991] and Seven Songs [for Malcolm X, 1993] are more collaborative: what those directors require of me is to function in a more extended kind of way. In pre-production, I’ll bombard the director with images, I’ll provoke the director, I’ll write my own notes, I’ll conceptualise around what we’re trying to do. In Daughters, the film is about Black Americans coming into being. In a way it’s about when Africans ceased to be Africans and became Americans. So as a cinematographer, I started to think about how we translate that into some kind of structural filmic concern. To suggest some of the indeterminacy of who Black people were at that point in the Americas, we ended up using what I call ‘declensions’ – playing around with speed, which is the sort of thing you see Scorsese utilise in Raging Bull [1980], for example, but to different ends.

When I was at Howard [University in Washington DC, studying film and archiecture], the very notion of ‘Black film’ was a somewhat radical one. In time I started to become somewhat dissatisfied with definitions because there’s a way in which the response ‘Black Film is against Hollywood’ has its limitations. What it does is set you up in a binary opposition to Hollywood, which is limiting, because it means that if Hollywood has narrative then you have to be anti-narrative. It’s kind of absurd. Films that were being given to me as examples of Black film would use a classical Hollywood spatial continuity, which in itself is not wrong, but I began to feel like the rules around spatial continuity are intrinsically tied to the cultural systems that generated those rules. The relationship between camera placements is tied to eurocentrism, which is really egocentrism. That logic system is very much tied into Renaissance perspective, vanishing points and a way of looking at the world which says, “I am at the centre of the universe and everything proceeds from me.” So what I started to ask myself was: if spatial continuity was tied to a cultural logic, then since there are other cultural logics, there should be other spatial systems.

At the time I was looking at the works of Oscar Micheaux, an African American filmmaker and producer of over 38 feature films. The first film I saw was God’s Step Children [1938]. After that I saw Ten Minutes to Live [1932], which I think is an amazing piece of work. The work was being described to me as ‘bad cinema’ – an example of what not to do primarily because of his use of light-skinned people, and because they understood his control of spatial continuity and screen direction as being deficient, quite frankly.

The point I’m making is that some of the ‘accidents’ he made are in fact not accidents per se, but have been dictated by some deep cultural logic… What I came to believe is that what Black people do is not arbitrary. It is tied to a deeply situated cultural system that dictates how we approach various things. The question of African retention is linked to something I like to call ‘cultural stabilities’ – core things which really have to do with who we are on a neurological level. If you look at the Middle Passage [the forced voyage of enslaved Africans to the New World]as a clear example of this, what you see is that African American artforms tend to be particularly developed in music, rhythm, dance, orature – the things you can carry in your head. You’re not going to carry architecture or sculpture with you.

The reason I talk about music as a jump-off point for Black cinema is that there’s some consensual agreement… We’ve got a consensus around achievement and if we start thinking about Black music’s relationship to African philosophical tradition and understand Western music’s relationship to these philosophical traditions, then we can start positing in a very speculative kind of way certain possibilities for Black cinema. Music is less about sound: it’s really about how our minds work, how we see and understand the world and not just what we see in the world, but actually how we see the world. What you can see in music is the polyrhythmic – towards double, triple, quadruple entendre.

Polyventiality [a term Jafa coined and defined as “multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives, multiple meanings – multiplicity”] is central to understanding Black expression because what it’s about is a different kind of relationship to the world – much less hierarchical. In Black music this plays itself out in a tendency to treat tonality not as a fixed sonic phenomenon, but as an inherently unstable phenomenon that’s always moving. That sense of dynamic instability is really part and parcel of a Black way of looking at the world. A musicologist at the turn of the century studying African music said the most difficult thing about studying music of the Negro is his tendency to “worry” the note… My whole thing is about opening up possibilities and then we can decide which are best.

I’m very much a product of the American Black independent film scene. My ideas have been shaped by it and by much of the discourse of these filmmakers I’ve been privy to. The school of UCLA filmmakers [comprising] the ‘LA Rebellion’, from the mid-1970s up to the mid-80s – Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Ben Caldwell, Haile Gerima, Barbara McCullough – was the first sustained attempt by a group of African American filmmakers to create films that reflected who we were at a multiplicity of levels, in terms of subject position, not subject matter.

At the same time I always felt there was something of a generational difference. I always felt like they were operating inside a certain pre-1960s notion: for example, I can’t remember a time before colour TV. I think that’s the main critical difference.

When the Black British workshop scene started, I had a very intense engagement with it because here was another example of Black filmmakers articulating some of the same kinds of issues: what does ‘Black cinema’ mean and is it something that’s desirable? This whole question of Black cinema came up in a [1988 issue of] Screen journal titled ‘The Last “Special Issue” on Race?’. The critique of essentialism came up and I didn’t agree with what the anti-essentialists were saying because they went in the face of everything I knew. I just assumed at that point that I was an essentialist and eventually realised that in fact I was not an essentialist, and I jokingly started referring to myself as an anti-anti-essentialist. I understood the political necessity of critiquing essentialist notions of who Black people are, which are used to bang us over the head, but I felt that throwing out the notion that there is anything specific to the Black experience was incredibly problematic and aesthetically limiting at the very least.

Later on, I had an opportunity to see some Black British films and meet some of the filmmakers – John Akomfrah at the Flaherty Film Seminar, where he was showing Testament [1988]; Isaac Julien after that, and then Maureen Blackwood actually came down to the location when we were shooting Daughters. Over the years, it turned to friendship and trying to create different kinds of communities based around different aesthetic considerations.

We haven’t achieved Black cinema yet… Black cinema is the orgasm that you can talk about but can’t really describe to people until they experience one. Filmmakers who have done things that I think have been successful – like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep [1978], like Daughters of the Dust, like Larry Clark’s Passing Through [1977] – haven’t been picked up and developed… Consequently, these people have been erased to a certain degree. The generation of filmmakers that preceded Spike Lee had a lot of anxieties about success and they couldn’t really conceptualise a moment where they could be both radically Black and successful – how to get around that bind of ‘selling out’.

What Spike did was change the stakes overnight. It wasn’t just enough to be a Black filmmaker who had Black issues. You basically had to get out and engage with the real world. Spike’s success with She’s Gotta Have It [1986] put people on notice. If they were to be relevant, they were going to have to work out theoretical issues in a mainstream context.