On Collective Correctives to Mainstream Black Representation in Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message the Message is Death (2016)

By Matthew Chan, Edited by Micah Slater and Charlotte Haas

To Gen Z viewers, perhaps one of the most memorable moments in Arthur Jafa’s dense, kaleidoscopic visual portrait of Black life in America Love is the Message the Message is Death (2016) is the appearance of infamous viral sensation and vocalist IceJJFish. IceJJFish gained notoriety through the music video for his song On the Floor (2014), where he expresses his love for a girl with a voice that goes beyond being tone deaf, approaching complete unintelligibility (Courtney, Karlis, and Nowlin 2014.) The song lent itself to endless iterative possibilities within the Black community, proving to be prime meme-material, circulating through the channels of Twitter and—at the time—Vine user-led social media platforms that continue to be more influential in shaping popular culture than the industrial machine of the mainstream media. It is quite likely that in 2014 more people in the US had seen IceJJFish than they did the highest grossing film of that year Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014.) A figure like IceJJFish pierces the cultural consciousness through non-traditional means, and in Jafa’s film he appears juxtaposed against a clip of Martin Luther King Jr. In a moment of natural synergy, IceJJFish sings “I’ve been dreaming,” framing the clear association between this statement and King Jr’s famous “I have a dream” speech [00:02:41-00:02:49]. In its essence, the contrast between a figure of alternative, non-mainstream “low” culture and one of the most famous Black men in US history forms the crux of Jafa’s film. This topples what Chantal Akerman would refer to as a “hierarchy of images”, to lend equal weight to images of historical importance and those that otherwise seem frivolous (Bergstrom 2021.) The film answers to an age where all images, whether from film, history, or social media, have been flattened into consumable content, all holding equal value to a desensitized, detached viewer bombarded by the moving image at all points of the day. Set to Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam, Jafa presents an avalanche of Black images both high and low, public and personal, collapsing history and visual mediums: contrasting film images with digital, from cameras used to film professional sporting events with car dash-cams and so on. To further contextualize what Jafa’s film points towards, we can consider Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples’ theory of the “Public Screen”, which suggests that Western society has moved beyond mainstream film and television as a key source of representation and has folded in user-generated digital media, such as social media, in a capacity that allows counternarratives to form against hegemonic ones. (DeLuca and Peeples 125) As such, within Jafa’s indiscriminate presentation of images, there is the suggestion that we have entered an age of democratization for the moving image: one where the self-directed exploits of Black men on Vine can be as resonant as the images of Black celebrities broadcast on television. In Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” she outlines the differences between older styles of interpretation where “it erected another meaning on top of the literal one” and newer styles where “It digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one” (Sontag 4.) Jafa’s film lends itself to the former: when taken at face value, each clip he chooses is presented sans context. However, he cuts together the images formally in a manner that openly invites a personal interpretation from the viewer rather than a definitive one from the artist, partially achieved through the use of Soviet dialectical montage. The generated meaning comes from the viewer themselves through witnessing the contrast between two different images, what Sergei Eisenstein writes as “a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction” (Eisenstein 62.) David Bordwell states that this prompts “the spectator to search for implicit meanings” (Bordwell and Thompson 259.) In the case of IceJJFish and Martin Luther King Jr, the absurd disparity between the perceived importance of the figures, and the literal contrast in image quality and resolution between a digital image and one captured on film, leads one to ponder the gulf of history and respectability that exists between them. Thus, through the contrast a dialectical effect is generated with both images synthesizing in the viewer's mind to form a unique thesis: a new thought of their own. This is the model Jafa’s film primarily operates on and it is through the constant contrast of images that he raises ideas surrounding mainstream representation of Black life. He questions whether the Black images that typically circulate within mainstream media—which predominantly focus on celebrity, respectability and historic oppression, can ever provide an accurate depiction of the complexity of Black life, and if viral videos created by the masses are enough to fill in these notable gaps in representation. 

Throughout Jafa’s film there is the constant contrast between images of Black unrest from the past and present, specifically between images from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s with modern images of police brutality. The differences between the creation of these images and how they were circulated point towards how modes of representation have changed over time. This contrast is apparent in a sequence where a modern clip is shown of a Black man running from an armed white police officer and collapsing, then cutting a civil rights march. [00:00:33-00:00:40] A literal reading of this juxtaposition may be that by moving from the present to the past, Jafa underscores how little has changed, or perhaps more accurately, how the gains of the civil rights movement did not immediately solve every problem regarding racial discrimination in America. This suggests that institutional racism persists at the heart of the American empire through the historically prejudiced system of policing. Another point of contrast is the medium through which the images are captured: The man being chased by the police officer is a digital image that appears to be from a smartphone, the person filming covertly tucked behind a tree to avoid being seen by the officer. Meanwhile, the civil rights march is shot on black and white film stock, featuring an extreme wide shot capturing hundreds of protestors from what is presumably a camera handled by a media professional given the static angle in which the scene is shot with. We can then consider how each of these images were circulated. The modern clip seems to lack intentionality as a smartphone video filmed in the spur of the moment: It has no artistic purpose, instead serving the function of filming the truth in order to hold the officer accountable. The clip also likely reached Jafa through social media, with the person filming posting it online to expose an instance of police brutality. On the other hand, the older clip appears to be professionally made, maybe circulated through a television broadcast to raise awareness to the civil rights movement. The stakeholders in each clip are inherently different: a call to action and awareness from an individual versus one from an institution or a formal group. As such, Jafa foregrounds how the barrier to entry for image creation and political activism has evaporated between time periods, with anyone being able to expose injustice from a camera in their pocket. It can thus be perceived that within the digital age of the “Public Screen”, modern Black representation can be created by the individual rather than institutions or media conglomerates. 

Moreover, Jafa employs modern images of police brutality and violence to intentionally disrupt the tone of a sequence, often to profound effect. Throughout the film Jafa times his cuts according to the pace of the music. Bordwell states that “many non narrative films have emphasized editing rhythm over the images themselves” (Bordwell and Thompson 253.) In the case of Jafa’s film, both gain the same sense of importance, though the duration of a shot is typically timed to a specific music cue. As such, when a tonally discordant image is introduced, we are not always given the space to sit with it before the film moves onto the next. A specific example comes during a sequence timed to each bar in Chance the Rapper’s verse on Ultralight Beam. It holds on clip of a man riding a bicycle during the line “I mean I fuck with your friends but damn Gina”, cutting to footage of couples dancing in a club, and then to a clip of a man being brutally assaulted by police officers set to the line “Now they wanna hit me with the woo wap, the bam” before cutting back to a group of young girls dancing [00:05:00-00:05:09]. The line over the footage of police brutality is not long, making its inclusion within a string of otherwise innocuous images all the more jarring. Perhaps what Jafa is suggesting is that because of the unfortunate American reality of frequent police brutality, they have become subsumed into everyday life and treated with the same degree of normalcy as the other images. Moreover, the choice of line to sync it with (“hit me with the woo wap, the bam”) is as ironic as it is literal, which creates an even greater sense of discomfort for the viewer, who has to reconcile how injustice has become so tragically normalized. What also becomes apparent in the footage of police brutality is the perspective from where it was taken and who took the video. All the other clips mentioned in the sequence seem to be taken by an actual person with the faces of the subjects legible to the viewer. However, the footage of the assault comes from the dash cam of the car, with the police officers turned away from the camera and the victim barely visible under them.  [00:05:40-00:05:47] There is something distinctly cold and clinical about the machine-made clip, which makes it all the more standout in a sequence that otherwise consists of images of unity and warmth. It further expands upon the idea of the public screen, suggesting how the mass of cameras available in the world not only allow individuals to film, but also permits them to be filmed within the surveillance state. In the case of the dash cam footage a web of contradictions arise: it simultaneously allows the public to bear witness to a crime while also violating the privacy of its subjects. One's autonomy is traded for accountability and truth. Non-mainstream representation can thus just as easily feed into institutions of oppression as much as it can offer counternarratives. As such, through this footage, Jafa highlights a distinction between non-mainstream representation directed by individuals and those directed by systems and institutions. 

Furthermore, in one of the film’s few instances of diegetic sound, Jafa cuts to a clip of actress Amandla Stenberg directly addressing the camera, her speech layered on top of the music as she asks: “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we loved Black culture?” [00:04:10-00:04:13] It is through this dichotomy, between manicured media-approved images of Black culture and the seemingly unembellished view of Black life delivered via viral images that Jafa raises questions about proper and improper representation and notions of respectability. Intercut throughout the film are images of recognizable political figures such as Barack Obama, the aforementioned Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X; Black artists such as Michael Jackson, Earl Sweatshirt and Aretha Franklin; Black athletes such as Serena Williams, Michael Jordan and Muhammed Ali. As public figures of a certain stature they occupy the most visible platform within mainstream American culture as representatives for the Black community, and, especially for the politicians and athletes, are required to carry themselves with a sense of respectability in and outside of professional settings. In contrast, the various clips of everyday Black life in Love is the Message prominently include footage of couples dancing at the club in an overtly sexual manner, grinding and twerking on each other, in a way that may seem crude to a non-Black viewer, shirking traditional respectability politics. As opposed to a mainstream media outlet or production studio, Jafa gives equal screen time to both celebrities and regular people. He again suggests an equality within the images underscored by rhythmic editing: no image is more important than the other, both at the mercy of the song. Most of the footage taken at the club appears to have been recorded by other individuals while those dancing seem unaware, absorbed in the act, suggesting they are not performing for the camera, opposed to the celebrities who are made to constantly stay on their best behavior. Within Jafa’s film viral images circulated throughout the Black community are hence perceived to hold a greater degree of authenticity, being less performative than those circulated through mainstream media. 

Moreover, there is a notable difference in image quality between the professional images of celebrities and the footage of regular people in the club. For example, footage of basketball player Steph Curry making a pass is shot in crisp HD with a cinematic camera that pans around to capture the movement from multiple angles [00:06:25-00:06:26.] On the other hand, the video of a man being aggressively twerked on  is of a much lower quality with visible digital artifacts, filmed on someone’s phone. [00:00:41-00:00:46]. In her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image”, artist Hito Steyrel suggests how the modern hierarchy of images are “not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution,” with cinema and television regarded as mediums that produce the most respectable images ( pageless.) Meanwhile, for images circulated online, their poor quality “speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, re-edit, or upload them” (Steyerl pageless..) Poor images are considered as lesser, with the club footage likely degraded through constant resharing on social media or popular websites like World Star Hip Hop. However, Steyrel seeks to shift the perception of poor images to those of “popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many”, ones that “present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction” (Steyerl pageless.) Poor images, such as the videos of people dancing in the club, thus become collective images, ones that express the honest reality and concerns of a community and ones that have been lovingly degraded by being shared from one person to another. These images are ones that are “heavily compressed and travel quickly”, conditions necessary for their virality, which ultimately helps to establish an alternative economy of images (Steyerl pageless.) It is also notable that Jafa himself shirks a similar sense of cinematic respectability by leaving in watermarks and timecodes from outlets within various pieces of footage. In mainstream productions, this would appear unprofessional or unsightly, but in the context of his film it suggests a greater authenticity and acknowledgment of an image’s history by not tampering with how others have tampered with it. Therefore, within Jafa’s film there is a difference between images passed down from a conglomerate to the masses and an image shared within communities, marked by resolution. The pristine image quality of mainstream Black respectability and celebrity can thus connote a manufactured quality, one that does not fully account for the complexity of Black life. The viral image, no matter how crass, can ultimately fill this gap, where visual degradation is perceived as a mark of authenticity and extensive community engagement. The deficiencies of mainstream Black representation in Jafa’s film are, as such, supplemented through the viral, self-directed image. 

Within Jafa’s presentation of an alternative ecosystem of Black images, he also takes aim at Hollywood, which for most of America’s history had hegemonic control over mainstream Black representation. In Patricia White’s “Reading the Codes”, she states “Hollywood studio product was the nation’s most significant mass cultural discourse for the first half of this century; at the height of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony in 1946, ninety million Americans attended the movies weekly”, while also stating that America was a “patriarchal, white-dominant, culturally imperialist nation” (White 3.) As such the images circulated by Hollywood typically reinforced the dominant ideology of White supremacy. In a clear nod to this history, Jafa presents a shot from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) of a white man in blackface captured by the Klu Klux Klan, before cutting to modern footage of a Black man walking alone. [00:02:04-00:02:07] In this single instance, a stark contrast is shown between the historically fabricated and materially harmful representation of Black men within Hollywood and the unadorned reality in which Black men exist. Throughout the film similar contrasts recur, such as a shot of Barack Obama standing at a podium singing Amazing Grace cutting to footage of an old Hollywood film containing a white judge presiding over the court case of a young Black child. [00:00:51-00:00:59] Here what Bordwell refers to as a “graphic match” occurs between Obama and the white judge, both in a similar position, standing while those around them sit (Bordwell and Thompson 220.) Both men are figures of power and respectability, however, an “abrupt contrast” is perceived between their historical context and their races (Bordwell and Thompson  220.) What Jafa suggests in this moment is how, with time, progress has been achieved with more Black people in notable positions of power. Moreover, in a later sequence, Jafa cuts from footage of a white minstrel performer in blackface to  Michael Jackson 1:18-00:01:24]. The same notions of progress are suggested though they are complicated by the details of Jackson’s life, suggesting despite the enhanced visibility and position of Black people within mainstream culture, they are still exploited by predominantly white industries which have moved from exploiting the image of Black people to Black performers themselves. In spite of this, the larger idea Jafa is communicating is simple: Black images have evolved throughout popular culture and history, from those primarily created by the hegemonic system of Hollywood to those that originate within the Black community. Despite the present deficiencies in mainstream Black representation, Jafa shows that in the modern age Black culture has evolved beyond Hollywood. As discussed prior, this evolution of Black images is part of a larger process, where these organic images have the potential to be re-subsumed into the Hollywood machine. As such, the modern endpoint would be an evolution beyond the concept of a representative mainstream itself. 

The final images within Jafa’s film are those of Black individuals captured in solitude. In a rare moment of pause, Jafa holds on footage taken by a woman through the front facing camera of her smartphone. She is in a car with only the right side of her face visible. Over the footage, Chance The Rapper sings “This is my part nobody else speak”, emphasizing how she commands the frame. [00:05:31-00:05:34] With no one else visible, the viewer is sucked into her orbit in a brief moment of stillness and peace, a feeling frequently evoked by similar shots of people walking across the screen alone. [00:05:39-00:05:40] Within Jafa’s maze of footage, these moments feel like a respite, as if to pull the viewer out of their mental consideration of the complex history of representation and force them to see Black people just as they are without the burden of categorization. Amidst images of violence, particularly of police brutality—which seem unavoidable between their circulation on social media and broadcast news—Jafa also centers images of collective joy. During a brief interlude Ultralight Beam is replaced by Cali Swag District’s Teach Me How To Dougie, cutting from footage of people dancing in a club to black and white footage of Black performers dancing on a variety show to footage of people dancing to the song during a wedding [00:02:21-00:02:31]. A clear throughline is drawn through different historical contexts as Black joy is foregrounded, a feeling that exists in opposition to the images of historic oppression typically circulated through the mainstream and which, in the case of the film, are predominantly user-generated. By featuring these moments, Jafa further shows the complexity of the Black American experience, suggesting that communities are not purely defined by tragedy, while also illustrating how an alternative economy of Black images can be circulated. 

As Spike Lee and Julie Dash’s cinematographer, Arthur Jafa exists within a lineage of modern Black filmmakers, though his efforts to counter Hollywood’s hegemony and challenge traditional cinematic language distinguishes him from his peers through his embrace of experimental non-narrative styles. His contributions to this space perhaps resonate more strongly with younger Black filmmakers like Khalik Allah and Terrence Nance, who have also invested their careers in conceiving counter narratives (da Costa pageless.) By working with found footage, Jafa seeks not to contribute to the mass of extant Black representation but to refashion pre-existing images to hold a mirror to the modern world. Through his assembly of images, Jafa shows that Black life is not a monolith, neither definitively represented by the mainstream nor people through social media. Only by considering both sources with the same level of importance does he show the Black experience as one of deep complexity and contradiction. Therefore, Jafa demonstrates that counter narratives can balance out the mainstream, as well as how user-generated images have offered corrections to historic deficiencies in Black representation. Jafa’s film has its gaze focused on the future of image creation: Perhaps what he is ultimately interested in is not how people are represented, but how they can represent themselves, offering a vision of a time where the poor image is treated with as much reverence as the cinematic one. On a closing note, it is perhaps important to mention that within its online circulation Love is the Message the Message is Death only presently exists as a poor image. At the time of writing it is only available as a YouTube camrip. 

Works Cited  

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https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/keeping-distance-chantal-akerman-jeanne-dielma n. 

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2013. Film Art: An Introduction. N.p.: McGraw-Hill Education.

Courtney, James, Michael Karlis, and Sanford Nowlin. 2014. “The True, SA-Based Story Behind IceJJFish's Viral “On the Floor” Video.” San Antonio Current. 

https://www.sacurrent.com/music/the-true-sa-based-story-behind-icejjfishs-viral-on-the-floor-vide o-2257207. 

da Costa, Cassie. 2020. “Video artists and the music video.” Apollo Magazine. 

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/where-video-art-meets-the-music-video/. 

DeLuca, Kevin M., and Jennifer Peeples. 2002. “From public sphere to public screen: democracy, activism, and the "violence" of Seattle.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2): 125-151. 

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1977. Film form : essays in film theory. N.p.: Harcourt. 

Griffith, D.W., dir. 1915. The Birth of a Nation. David W. Griffith Corp. 

Jafa, Arthur, dir. 2016. Love is the Message, the Message is Death. 

Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. N.p.: Penguin Books. Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10.” e-flux. 

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. 

“2014 Worldwide Box Office.” n.d. Box Office Mojo. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2014/. 

West, Kanye, “Ultralight Beam”, Track 1 on The Life of Pablo, GOOD Music, Def Jam, 2016 White, Patricia. 1999. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. N.p.: Indiana University Press. 

This paper was dedicated to David Bordwell.