There is a biblical proverb, “Iron sharpens iron,” but when the film-maker Kahlil Joseph relays it down the phone, he gives it an update: “Steel sharpens steel.” Joseph is talking about what happens when you put talent in a room together, specifically “black talent”. “Black talent is exponentially propelled by other black talent – it’s a theory that a friend of mine and I have. Whether you’re LeBron James and Steph Curry or Miles Davis and Charlie Parker – any talent meeting other talent – there’s an inborn, healthy competitive nature. But black talent has a cultural specificity. We have a particular genius for improvisation, from preachers in the pulpit to pianists.”
This theory became part of the thinking behind Black Mary, a short film Joseph produced for Tate Modern this year as part of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Billed as having been inspired by the photography of Roy DeCarava, who shot portraits of jazz musicians in the 40s, 50s and 60s, Joseph’s film is a five-minute-long cut of a jam session he put together mostly in Harlem this year. And like any jam session, he says, it was casual; he texted Lauryn Hill inviting her and Kelsey Lu (a friend and a “musical genius”). He also asked his wife, the producer Onye Anyanwu, to call their friend, the singer Alice Smith, whom he has seen live and been blown away by.
Joseph captured the whole thing on film and cut it into two films sharing what he describes as “one narrative universe”: the first was Black Mary’s haunting reworking of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You for the Tate; the second was Fly Paper, a 20-minute installation that features as part of Joseph’s recently opened exhibition Shadow Play at the New Museum on the Bowery in New York. Hill’s part has been cut down to about 15 seconds in Fly Paper, showing how uninterested Joseph is with the idea of celebrity. When he was contacted by Beyoncé, for example, he wasn’t really interested. “It wasn’t until she really came at me and said: ‘I wanna collaborate with you, versus you work for me,’ then I was, like, let’s talk.”
At the time, Beyoncé’s 2016 concept album Lemonade was still in the works, but she believed it was going to be “more profound” than some of her other work. Joseph agreed to collaborate on what became the 60-minute, 11-chapter film that accompanied the album. “The whole thing was my idea,” he says. “I helped her think through how to present it as a visual project and the people to cast, such as Trayvon Martin’s mom and Serena Williams.” But ask him what he thinks of the result and he is indifferent: “I don’t even know what she ended up doing. By the time it came out, I was working on something else,” he shrugs.
Joseph was born in Seattle in 1981, but now lives in California. He got his start working as an intern for a post-production house in Los Angeles. “I was 18 or 19 and really inspired by music videos, big time. I never forget someone higher up asked, ‘Who do you wanna work for?’ And, because I was black, they were like, ‘Spike Lee?’” Joseph replied that who he really wanted to work for was Hype Williams, the director of some of Missy Elliott, Kanye West and Beyoncé’s most memorable videos. Not long after, Joseph landed a spot as an assistant on one of Williams’ shoots; “PA-ing is like being a gopher – you pick up the garbage. It’s a high turnover rate because no one wants to do it for ever, but that’s how I started and it’s the best thing I ever did.”
When Joseph began producing his own work, it earned him industry respect (although not from Williams, whom he bumped into recently and who didn’t know he had directed Lemonade). Back in 2012, a powerful film with Flying Lotus called Until the Quiet Comes set his visual tone: a flickering and ethereal portrait of young, black LA kids drenched in sunlight, which then takes a sinister turn as a simulated shooting. The New Yorker critic Hilton Als wrote about how it restored his faith in the music video. Joseph has since directed videos for FKA Twigs’ 2014 Video Girl, had a short film inspired by Kendrick Lamar exhibit at the Infinite Mix in London, and more recently collaborated with Sampha on the experimental film Process, shot between Freetown, Sierra Leone and south London, to accompany the artist’s Mercury award-winning album of the same name.
Pegging Joseph as a music video director doesn’t sit well with him, however. He identifies more with visual artists, bringing up Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and Twombly in quick succession. Joseph’s journey into the art world, like Basquiat’s, didn’t happen right away, he points out. Both were untrained, both came through other mediums: “Basquiat was a graffiti artist, [but] that doesn’t mean his artworks were glorified graffiti.” It was Joseph’s late younger brother, the fine artist and curator Noah Davis, who was a catalyst in helping him realise his potential as an artist. “He saw something I was working on that was, in my mind, nowhere near art, and he said: ‘You should make this into an installation.’ I responded with such apathy, it almost felt disappointing that’s what it would have to become, like it wasn’t working as what I was trying to do.”
The project in question comprised two films, a video installation Joseph was working on with Lamar for his support on Kanye’s Yeezy tour, and the film, m.A.A.d, which includes eerie footage of Compton. m.A.A.d is a two-channel short film that was first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2015. It was a turning point for Joseph, who was able to recognise that the boundary between different forms of video was only ever self-imposed: “I was, like: ‘Wow, I feel way more full as a creative person in this space than all these other spaces I was trying to fit myself into.’ Those boxes are small. Even feature film, it has to be a certain length. But in the art space it can be 25 seconds or five hours, and that makes sense to me.” Rather than “this is a music video, this is a fashion film, this is a documentary”, Joseph says, making films for the gallery space has allowed him to see that “anything is possible now – it’s about ideas and I’m really excited by that”.
Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern ends on 22 October
• This article was amended on 27 October 2017 to clarify several points of detail.
