“That was a weird time,” Jafa said. “ ‘Daughters’ was the toast of the New York film community, but we’d given away a large part of our financial interests, and knew we weren’t going to make any money on it. Plus, Julie’s and my relationship at that point was not in the best place.” By 1991, they had separated. “I was struggling with some personal stuff, psychological stuff, and Julie, what with the child and the movie, couldn’t help me,” he said. “I was just very immature.” He also said, “I didn’t want to become Mr. Dash.”
Talking on Skype, as Jafa and I were obliged to do because of the pandemic, has unexpected limitations. I was on the East Coast, and Jafa was in Los Angeles, and it took me three sessions to realize that Jafa’s brother Boston was sitting across the desk from him, working quietly while we talked. I finally “met” him when he got up and walked into view and waved. The brothers don’t look alike, but they sound very much like brothers, with Deep South accents. A.J., who is interested in clothes and gets invited to openings at Gucci, wears a small diamond stud on his right eyebrow, and another one just under his lower lip. “I’ve had the studs for more than twenty years,” he told me. “People used to think the one below my lip was a crumb—before Covid, they’d try to brush it off.”
Jafa usually sat with his back to a window, so on bright days he was in shadow, and only gradually did I become aware of his tattoos. They were more or less everywhere: a black panther on his neck; a drawing of an early work by Zaha Hadid, “The Peak,” which was never built, on his left arm; “FRODO,” from “The Lord of the Rings,” in capital letters and also on his left arm; Krazy Kat on the back of one hand. There were a lot more of them, he said, and a story to go with each. So, Krazy Kat? “People have pointed out to me that it’s ironic, because I don’t like cats,” Jafa said. “They don’t respect your personal space. But Krazy Kat at one point was the biggest thing in American popular culture, and the artist who drew him, George Herriman, is such an interesting figure to me—his own kids never knew their father was Black.”
When Jafa tells stories, the words come slowly at first, in a baritone drawl, but as he gets going the pitch rises and the tempo accelerates. “The cat loves the mouse, the mouse hates the cat,” he said. “The dog, Officer Pupp, loves the cat, but the cat can’t see him because the cat loves the mouse. And what makes it worse is that the mouse keeps throwing a brick at Krazy Kat’s head, which is an act of violence, but the cat sees the violence as an act of love, and so the circle continues. The absurdity of it strikes me as being as good a model of Black love and hate in white society as we’ve ever seen, a profound and absurd meditation on the thin line between love and hate.”
Jafa was born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. “My mom was born in Tupelo, and so were my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents grew up there,” Jafa told me. His aunt Nettie has served on the Tupelo City Council since 2001. Jafa’s full name is Arthur Jafa Fielder; he dropped Fielder (as his grandfather, another Arthur Jafa, had done) when he was in his early twenties, but his family ties have never weakened. Arthur and Rowena, his parents, were teachers, and his siblings—three younger brothers—have all found arts-related careers: Boston, the second oldest, is a musician and a filmmaker. (Named for their father’s cousin, Ralph Boston, he was called Ralph until he got to high school, where everyone started calling him Boston.) Jim teaches film production in New York City high schools, and his twin brother, Tim, writes graphic novels.
Jafa’s school integrated the year he entered first grade, and he was one of a handful of African-Americans in his class. Two years earlier, the family had moved to Russellville, Alabama, but Jafa was sent back to Tupelo to live with his grandparents so that he could go to school there. When the Ku Klux Klan burned down their house in Russellville (Arthur had been named football coach of the recently combined white and Black high schools), they returned to Tupelo. The whole family moved again, less than a year later, to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Arthur and Rowena had been offered positions at Coahoma Junior College, an innovative school for Black students. Arthur taught physical education and coached football and basketball; Rowena, who taught business administration, became the school’s financial director.
Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta, which Jafa describes as a Black Jurassic Park. “I grew up in a region where some of the more horrific acts in the century occurred,” Jafa said. “Emmett Till was killed, the three civil-rights workers were killed, people were tortured and murdered and nobody was brought to trial.” Unlike Tupelo, Clarksdale had held on to hard-core segregation long after it became illegal. And yet, growing up in a supportive family and on a college campus, the Fielder children felt protected and encouraged. For the first few years, the family lived on the campus in a blue-and-white trailer with three bedrooms. “Art and I shared a room,” Boston recalled. “It was filled with Marvel and DC comic books, and boxes of the magazines that Art cut pictures out of and pasted in notebooks. He slept in the top bunk, and I was on the bottom. We’d tell each other stories and make drawings—he’d draw something and hand it down to me, and I’d hand one up to him.”
“The move from Tupelo to Clarksdale was mainly a change in soundtrack,” Jafa said. “In Tupelo, the radio was dominated by Elvis Presley. I remember my grandmother telling stories about Elvis. They knew him in the Black part of town—that’s how poor he was. When Elvis was a kid, he would sit on the porch of a nearby house and play guitar.” Jafa was never a Presley fan. In Clarksdale, where the soundtrack was Memphis soul, all four Fielder boys went to Catholic school, because their non-Catholic parents thought they would get a better education that way. (Their father eventually converted to Catholicism.) Jafa was an altar boy and a straight-A student, and in high school he became a National Merit Scholar. “I was just elated to know that I had one student, just one, who could have gotten into M.I.T.,” Olenza McBride, his social-studies teacher, recalled.
Jafa read all the time—first comics, then science fiction, the World Book (his parents bought the series, and later they added the Encyclopædia Britannica), history, sociology, and world literature. “Our neighbor was head librarian at the college,” he said. “She would let me stay there after hours—I’d fall asleep in the stacks, and my dad would come to pick me up at two in the morning.” Jafa and Boston saw every movie they could get to. One Saturday afternoon, when Jafa was ten, their parents dropped them off at the white people’s theatre on the other side of town to see Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The theatre was empty except for a few white couples, who left before the intermission. “The lights go down, the movie begins, and it’s like being buried alive,” Jafa wrote, in a 2015 essay called “My Black Death.” “Even now, I’m still searching for an art experience capable of matching the effect this film had on me.” When it ended, he and Boston walked out in a daze to the empty lobby, where the white theatre manager sat in the ticket booth reading a newspaper. “At this point in my life I didn’t have un-chaperoned interactions with white people, young or old,” Jafa wrote. “He was sitting in the ticket booth with the door open, so I walked over to him and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’ve just come out of the movie, could you tell me what it was about?’ He looked at me over his paper, paused a moment, and said, ‘Son, I’ve been looking at it all week and I haven’t got a clue.’ ”
There was a coda to the experience. In the mid-nineties, when Jafa was working as a cinematographer, Kubrick hired him to be a second-unit cameraman for “Eyes Wide Shut.” Kubrick shot most of the film in England, but it was set in New York, and Jafa spent a lot of time filming locations there. “We were constantly shooting things over and over, because Kubrick kept sending notes saying would we try it again three degrees to the left, or three degrees to the right,” Jafa recalled. “He called many times a day, and occasionally the assistant director would say, ‘Stanley’s on the phone, he wants to say hi,’ and I would say, ‘Not now, I’m shooting.’ ” In 1999, returning from Europe to attend the film’s New York première, Jafa saw a newspaper headline: “STANLEY KUBRICK DIES AT 70.” “Stanley Kubrick was one of my heroes,” he said. “There was so much I wanted to say to him, and I’d had this fantasy that when we finished shooting we’d be able to have a proper conversation. I went to the première and got very depressed, trying to figure out why I had never spoken to him.”
Shooting other people’s films was always, for Jafa, a stepping stone to shooting his own. “I love cinematography, but once I’d mastered the craft it was never fulfilling on its own,” he told me. “Daughters of the Dust” had brought no directing offers, though, and until recently neither Dash nor Jafa could get funding for a second feature. Hollywood producers had financed and profited from nineteen-seventies blaxploitation films, some of which had Black directors, but the first Black filmmaker of Jafa’s generation to break into the Hollywood system and establish a career on his own terms was Spike Lee. Lee went to a screening of “Daughters” and as he was leaving the theatre he introduced himself and asked if Jafa would like to work on a film about Malcolm X. Jafa said yes, and his skill as a cameraman on the movie led to his becoming the cinematographer for Lee’s next feature, “Crooklyn.” “Spike changed my life,” Jafa said. “He put me on the path to being a legitimate entity in the film universe.” The two of them didn’t get along, though, and they haven’t worked together since. Lee had no interest in Jafa’s urge to experiment on “Crooklyn” with lenses and film speeds, cinematic rhythms, and nonlinear storytelling. “We had a rocky collaboration, but we’ve finally reached a rapprochement, and I want to keep it that way,” Jafa told me.
I asked him to name the filmmakers he most admired. “I like films more than filmmakers,” he said. “But, anything Andrei Tarkovsky ever did, especially ‘The Mirror’ and ‘The Sacrifice,’ his last. Tarkovsky’s films are philosophical meditations on life, time, aging, things like that.” Yasujirō Ozu, he said, was “right up there, not quite as high as Tarkovsky. Ozu will sit with things.” The Italians? “I love Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni. Antonioni is a great filmmaker, but to me that really does come down to ‘L’Avventura,’ the film where he plays with dimensions of dramatic time and space. There’s a scene with Monica Vitti in a hotel corridor. She walks into the frame, and then out of the frame, and in a Hollywood film you would cut, but the camera just stays on that long, empty hallway.”
Jafa respects Ingmar Bergman, but, he said, “I don’t know if his films have aged so well, even ‘Persona,’ which is clearly a great film.” He likes Godard more than Truffaut, and, he said, “Bresson is above anybody we’ve mentioned, except Tarkovsky—Bresson is the Beethoven and Bach of cinema.” He also paid homage to Oscar Micheaux, whom he called “the godfather of Black American cinema.” I asked him about Andy Warhol. “Neck and neck with Bresson,” he said, to my surprise. “Every moment in a Warhol film is an extended moment. You think of Miles Davis, the speed at which he improvises. His notes sit in the air like they’re unfurling in slow motion. They always feel introspective, considered, not in the moment.” Jafa puts “The Godfather: Part II” in his top ten films, “but Coppola is not in my top ten directors.”
From the early nineties to 2000, living in New York, Jafa shot documentaries (on Audre Lorde and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others), music videos, and television commercials. “The early nineties was when you started to see more Blacks in Hollywood movies,” he said. “I wanted to direct music videos, and I was very unsuccessful. I could never crack it. I guess I could have moved to Hollywood and done what everybody else does, but I didn’t see that.” Ideas for films proliferated in his head. The schoolboy notebooks in which he’d pasted images from comic books and magazines when he was ten had been succeeded by three-ring binders filled with movie stills, advertisements, news photographs, and reproductions from art books and countless other sources—images that he liked to show to people. He often had binders with him. “A.J. was always a great storyteller of his own film ideas,” the writer and critic Greg Tate recalled. “He would act out all the parts.” Tate and Jafa connected when they were both returning books to the Founders Library at Howard. They talked for six hours on the library steps, and the conversation has been going on ever since.
Jafa also spent time in art galleries and museums, and immersed himself in art history and theory. His fascination with Marcel Duchamp kept surfacing in our conversations. “My whole understanding of Duchamp has to do with African artifacts, aesthetic artifacts, and their profound effect on Western art,” Jafa said. Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other artists in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century had discovered African sculpture at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and it had changed the way they saw the world. “All those people used African artifacts to make paintings, because they had certain spatial and formal implications, and the massing of those implications produced Cubism,” Jafa said. “Duchamp made paintings in that modality—‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ where you see the figure multiple times at the same moment and from different vantage points. But Duchamp was smarter than anybody around. I think he realized that a lot of the energy produced by African objects came not from their formal and spatial qualities but from their being what I would call radically alienated. It was contextual. An African artifact in a white museum space, with all this baggage of ideas about painting and contemplation, was deeply alien.”
Jafa believes that Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal from a plumbing-supply store, turned upside down and signed “R. Mutt,” was directly influenced by African sculpture and drew its undeniable power from the same sort of radical alienation. “What Duchamp did better than any other artist was to take something that existed and turn it into another thing,” Jafa said. “He didn’t make it—he turned it into something else. It’s like what I say about Black people and basketball. We didn’t invent basketball, but we created it. One of the more telling things about Black people is that we do things that don’t make our job easier. Why do a three-sixty before you land a basketball? You don’t get more points—it just raises your level of difficulty. What is that about?” (His voice went up about an octave.) “Folks argue that it’s entertainment, but it’s central to who we are. It’s refusing the structures that want to turn the game into a business. We know it’s a business—winning—but we refuse to acquiesce in the elimination of play. And I don’t think it’s a big leap to say that’s central to Duchamp’s entire practice. For all the intellectualism around Duchamp, what did he always insist on? That it was playful. His tongue was definitely in his cheek.”
So was Jafa’s when he revealed his “secret theory” that Jeff Koons is “a very light-skinned Black guy passing for white.” He argued, “Look at the works that made his reputation. The vacuum cleaners refer to Black women, domestic workers. The two basketballs floating in vitrines, I insist, are testicles, connoting everything from castration to Black sexual prowess. The bunny rabbit, which most people say is his masterpiece, is clearly Brer Rabbit.” Jafa went on in this vein for quite a while before returning to Duchamp.
“He is one of the non-musicians I would put in the company of John Coltrane and Miles Davis,” he said. “There were occasionally white people at our family reunions, in-laws and white friends of my parents. Duchamp is one of the people we will always reserve a seat for.”
In 1999, Jafa decided to quit the film world. He wasn’t getting any closer to directing his own films, and it seemed to him that the art world offered more opportunities to realize the ideas swarming in his head. He’d been interested in art since his second year at Howard, when one of his architecture teachers sent the class to see I. M. Pei’s new East Building, at the National Gallery of Art. “There was an exhibition of Mark Rothko, eight brownish paintings that all looked the same to my untrained eye, and they infuriated me,” Jafa recalled. “I told the instructor it was bullshit. I was irate. I went back to that show ten times, kept going back, couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was obsessed. He’s still my favorite painter.”
Twenty years later, when Jafa decided to do “this art thing,” success came almost immediately. A group of his short videos appeared in the 2000 Whitney Biennial—one of the curators, Valerie Cassel Oliver, described them in ARTnews as “very subtle, very poetic.” Jafa’s “Tree” was included in the Whitney’s “BitStreams” exhibition a year later; it’s an eight-minute video of a blurry, constantly moving tree that looks like it’s escaped from a Monet painting and gone off on its own. Other art works by Jafa appeared in group shows in this country and abroad: a metal bench he had found on a visit to Bamako, Mali; a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, resting on a frame that gave it the appearance of floating; a video of a man in a yellow jacket lying on a sidewalk with people walking past. By 2005, though, the overbearing whiteness of the art world had driven him back to filmmaking. “I was invited to parties where I was the only Black person,” he recalled. “It just didn’t feel right, so I walked away from the art world.”
In 2002, at a New Year’s Eve party in New York, he met Suné Woods, a young woman on her way to becoming an artist. “It was almost like a force turned me around, and I said to Greg Tate, ‘Hey, man, who is that? I’m going to marry her.’ ” Woods and Jafa never married, but in 2004 they had a son, Ayler. “Then we just fell apart,” Jafa said. “Suné said she was going to graduate school in San Francisco and taking Ayler with her, and that was terrifying to me, because I’d had the same experience when I split up with Julie.” Jafa commuted between New York and San Francisco for two years, before moving to Los Angeles in 2010. He wanted to be closer to Ayler, and also to N’Zinga, who was living with her mother in L.A. Dash had built an impressive reputation as a director of film biographies (she’s currently doing one on Angela Davis), and she and Jafa had never been out of touch. (“We’re still best friends,” Dash told me recently. Their first grandchild, Adrian Julian Arana, born to N’Zinga in 2017, brought them even closer.) When Jafa moved to Los Angeles, his self-confidence was at a low ebb. The film industry seemed less and less interested in hiring him. He was approaching fifty, and he felt as though he hadn’t achieved any of his goals. His friends were worried. “He was like a falling star,” John Akomfrah said. “He’d always been a figure of such promise. All of us expected something great to happen, and as the years went by some people were thinking maybe it wasn’t going to come.”
In 2011, he hit rock bottom. Depressed and suicidal, he went to stay with his parents, in Atlanta. (“You can always come home,” they had told their children.) After the breakup with Dash, Jafa had dealt with his depression by going into therapy. This time, the film world intervened. Sitting in his parents’ living room, wondering what to do with his broken life, he got a telephone call from Paul Garnes, a Hollywood producer who worked with the showrunner Salim Akil. “Paul said I was like a mythical beast, because everybody out there had heard of me but nobody knew me,” Jafa told me. He had called to see if Jafa was available to shoot the pilot for a new TV series, a comedy-drama like “Entourage,” about Black people, that Akil was directing. “Available? I was broke and out of work. The producers must have liked the pilot, because they asked me to shoot the series—for a shitful of money. I thought, Well, maybe just grow the fuck up and take the money.”
Jafa used the forty-five thousand dollars he’d been paid for the pilot to buy a new Prius and to rent a small apartment in L.A. The series wasn’t picked up, though, and he had to find something to do right away—he was determined not to sink back into despair. Kahlil Joseph, a filmmaker and a close friend, called to say that ZDF, a German public-television network, had commissioned him to make a documentary about the March on Washington, whose fiftieth anniversary was coming up in 2013. Joseph had scheduling conflicts. Would Jafa be interested in directing it? Jafa said he would—and he had ideas about how. “I wasn’t interested in looking back,” Jafa told me. “I was interested in where Black people are now. I wrote a really insane, crazy treatment that had very little to do with the March on Washington, and they gave me the money and I went off and did it. And that was the beginning of the work I’m doing now.”
Jafa’s film, called “Dreams Are Colder Than Death,” is a fifty-two-minute collage of brief and not so brief interviews with African-American artists, writers, filmmakers, academics, and friends, alternating or coinciding with images of houses and back yards, waves breaking over rocks, Civil War photographs, extreme closeups of eyes, mouths, and faces, photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin. The speakers pull no punches, and what comes through is an orchestrated assault of incendiary thinking about racism. There were financial disagreements with a producer, and “Dreams” wasn’t televised in the U.S. But it was shown in 2014 at the BlackStar Film Festival, in Philadelphia, and at the New York Film Festival. By then, Jafa had started working on a project that he called “APEX.”
Close to eight hundred separate images flash by in “APEX” ’s eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, against a pounding techno beat: a man’s deeply scarred back, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, the fiery surface of the sun, a cartoon shark, lynchings, Sojourner Truth, Aretha Franklin, a cross-legged monk on fire, movie stills of white actors in blackface, Black people being fire-hosed, a 1920 Harlem street parade beneath a sign that reads “The New Negro Has No Fear.” Jafa worked on “Apex” for four years, off and on, without knowing what it was. “I didn’t understand it as a film, or as art,” he told me. “I assumed it was an internal document that I showed to my friends.”
Early in 2016, working again as a cinematographer and staying in a New York hotel room between jobs, Jafa put together the basic elements of “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” There was no concept and no script. “It was a response to the influx of footage of Black people being assaulted, which I had just been throwing in a file.” A week later, he heard Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” performed on “Saturday Night Live” and decided to use it as the soundtrack—without notifying West or getting permission. (West’s reaction, when he and Jafa met, in 2020, was to say that Jafa’s film had brought him “back to life,” and to hire him to direct a music video for the song “Wash Us in the Blood.”) Jafa showed an early version of “Love Is the Message” to Greg Tate, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, the cinematographer Bradford Young, and other friends. Tate said, “There’s something about the construction of it, the flow and the velocity, that’s very much the way young people experience the Internet. It resonates with this generation’s hip-hop culture.”
Jafa wanted to post the film on YouTube, but Kahlil Joseph urged him not to give it away. Joseph screened it several times on film nights at the Underground Museum, in Los Angeles, as an unannounced opener for the main feature. Soon afterward, in June, Joseph showed it to a small, private audience in Switzerland during Art Basel, the international art fair. Gavin Brown, a British-born artist who had become a New York art dealer, and who had a long history of finding and nurturing new talent, saw it there. “I remember being stuck to my chair, eyes wide, trying to keep up with it, and then as it ended I felt the air being expelled from my body,” he said.
