Review by Andrew Swafford
In the opening stretch of DJ Shadow’s seminal sample-based album Endtroducing, he features two key audio snippets of the jazz drummer George Marsh talking about his craft. In the second clip, which plays after the song has reached a dizzying peak of chopped up drum blasts and choral harmonies, Marsh calmly states:
“I would like to be able to continue to let what is inside of me – which comes from all the music that I hear – you know, I’d like for that to come out. And it’s like, it’s not really me that’s coming; the music’s coming through me.”
The sentiment clearly doubles as an explanation for DJ Shadow’s pioneering approach to what is now known as plunderphonics, but it could just as easily describe much of the video collage work coming out of contemporary avant-garde cinema: the work of Michael Robinson, the work of Arthur Jafa, as well as the work of Ja’Tovia Gary. Her new short film Quiet as It’s Kept is a brilliant piece of sample-based cinema that borrows freely from the worlds of literature, film, music, academia, and social media.
Quiet as It’s Kept, which takes its title from the late, great Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye, feels like Gary’s own personal manifesto as a black artist working in a white supremacist media landscape. Gary’s “voice” is most clearly heard through the voice of Toni Morrison, whose 1988 interview with Mavis Nicholson undergirds much of the film. Among other things, the always profound Morrison speaks about writing The Bluest Eye as a reader who was inspired to write a book she herself wanted to read in a literary world that so rarely centered the perspective of black women.
Whenever the concept of “the white gaze” is suggested throughout Gary’s film, it is often paired with a tiny Brakhage-esque flicker animation placed over the eyes of whatever figure is being depicted. What’s more, the color of this animation is meant to evoke the “Nazar,” the blue eye recognized as a symbol of envy the world over. In the English speaking world, envy is perhaps most commonly associated with “the green-eyed monster” of Shakespeare’s Othello, but Gary insists that blue is the more appropriate signifier, especially in a montage sequence made up of white teens consciously or unconsciously attempting to look/sound “black” for social media clout.
Gary’s film motions towards the rise of “blackfishing,” or “digital blackface” (two distinct but overlapping phenomena in the increasingly bizarre social media waters we swim in), as an interesting development in the evolution of popular culture. It is both a continuation of the ways in which white culture has continually plundered the cultural capital generated by black artists throughout history and a reversal of the dynamic Morisson was addressing in The Bluest Eye, in which people of color often attempt to appease or appeal to the racism of the white gaze. Nowadays, it is somewhat less common for black girls to desire blue eyes and more common for white girls to desire darker skin (but not too dark, of course, as highlighted by one clip Gary includes regarding colorism in Hollywood casting). Gary also acknowledges the unstated Eurocentric beauty standards of “Beauty YouTube,” as we see a black woman apply a full face of makeup, deep-blue eyeshadow, and a straight-haired wig before winking at the camera in a wickedly sharp piece of performance art. The evil eye of envy cuts both ways, Gary suggests, and it perhaps inescapable in a culture predicated upon such an obscenely hateful racial history.
All of the moving images repurposed and cleverly arranged in Gary’s film are too numerous to catalog here, but one in particular worth highlighting is an early Instagram story of now-famous rapper Azelia Banks begging Beyoncé to let her do a remix of “Brown Skin Girl” without Beyoncé’s lawyers wiping Banks’s work from the internet for copyright infringement. The legal dubiousness of sample-based art is as old as the genre of hip-hop, and still plagues artists working in various mediums to this day. DJ Shadow’s Entroducing has had a pretty easy go of it as far as legal challenges go, while plunderphonics masterpieces like Since I Left You by The Avalanches, The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, and Feed the Animals by Girl Talk can still be difficult to track down in their intended forms. This predicament feels especially dire for sample-based works of avant-garde cinema like Arthur Jafa’s masterful Love is the Message the Message is Death, which is entirely built upon Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” and isn’t available thorough any official streaming channels. Avant-garde cinema generally has very little in the way of established distribution channels in the best of circumstances, but I really hope the work of Ja’Tovia Gary is readily available for interested viewers in the future. Her perspective is an invaluable one.