Arthur Jafa Quotes

To me, not every black filmmaker who is making black films is trying to make black cinema.

I don’t see race. I don’t see color.

I’m always making things, and I have this ongoing practice of compelling stuff that strikes me. Over the course of my life doing this, I’ve trained myself to do the opposite of what’s human nature, and that is to recoil from things I don’t like.

I’ve pushed myself to push toward things that disturb me. I’ve developed a habit of recording these things because these things often disappear.

Most of what we see are white people.

I have a very simple mantra and it’s this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That’s my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.

It’s a muscle that everybody needs to develop: the ability to see themselves in someone else’s circumstances without having to paint that person white, make that person straight, or a man.

I’ll try to record the spiritual quality of the things that strike me.

I remember when someone told me phones were going to have cameras on them, and I thought that was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard. Why would you want a camera on your phone? But as we see the impact of it, it has allowed for a mass verification of what black people have been saying.

The problem with black cinema in its current form is on the one hand it is the only game in town; it’s a very structured set-up and it’s not conducive to get at the kinds of things I’m trying to portray using the cinematic apparatus to show black sociality and how it functions.