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  • Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (Arthur Jafa, 2017)

    Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death

    Arthur Jafa, USA, 2017, 8’

    Accompanied by Kanye West’s anthem “Ultralight Beam” (2016), Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death consists of footage shot by Arthur Jafa, a visual artist with a long career as a cinematographer and film director, as well as clips sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos, much of it downloaded from the Internet. These images traverse the twentieth century, focusing on the lives of Black people set against the backdrop of systemic racism and White supremacism. 

    The artist’s protagonists exist along a spectrum of fame, status, and notoriety: some are well-known, others anonymous, with a few belonging to his immediate family as well as his larger personal, creative, and intellectual community. Taken as a whole, Jafa’s montage comprises a poignant, visceral meditation on African American life, identity, and history. Scenes of trauma, racism, and grief, such as routine police violence, are joined by those of joy, defiance, and creativity, such as the performances by a range of exceptional Black athletes, dancers, and musicians.

    The Met

    Bio Arthur Jafa

    American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa (1960) makes films, artifacts, and happenings that question universal and also specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media transmit the power, beauty, and alienation embedded in American culture through Black music?

    La Jetée
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    “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025

    02.02.2026

    As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

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    473
    • This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025
      voted by Andréa Picard, Farah Hasanbegović, Tendai Mutambu, Jessica McGoff, Ilinca Vânău, Moritz Maul
    essay politics history

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    Cyclepaths

    Anton Cla, Belgium, 2023, 12’

    On the outskirts of the city, the new modern buildings are silent, and the motorway bridge drones. Birds are circling in the sky, and a young man, concealed by his hoodie, is riding his e-scooter along a park path. The only irritating element is the rifle over his shoulder. Cyclepaths conveys a mood of high alert, even though the disaster has, in fact, already happened.

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    Yarokamena

    Andrés Jurado, Colombia, Portugal, 2022, 21’

    In 20th-century Colombia, resistance fighter Yarokamena, a member of the indigenous Uitoto tribe, called for rebellion against violent exploitation of the rubber mining industry in the Amazone and invoked the spiritual powers of war.

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    Devotion

    Cynthia Madansky, Turkey, 2003, 34’

    A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of rituals.

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    D’un château l’autre

    Emmanuel Marre, Belgium, 2018, 40’

    Pierre, 25 years old and on a scholarship for a prestigious Parisian university, is lodged by Francine, who is 75, disabled, and confined to her wheelchair. Both puzzled and disoriented, they witness the French presidential elections of 2017 play out.

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    Water and Salt

    Luisa Mello, Belgium, Brazil, 2019, 10’

    A journey through the consciousness of a woman whose country is under threat from a fascist government.

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    Snow Edge

    Juan Francisco Rodríguez, Colombia, 2021, 15’

    The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.

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    Scum Mutation

    Ov, France, 2020, 10’

    In this cyberpunk animation, four creatures wobble like marionettes in a black void. An alien power tries to subdue them; police voices strike as if they were truncheons, but these vulnerable bodies start to fight back.

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    The White Elephant

    Shuruq Harb, Palestine, 2018, 12’

    Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada, and trance music gatherings, Shuruq Harb paints the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s. In the midst of Israeli pop culture and the political climate of the Oslo Accords, she comes to grips with her anxiety.

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