Arthur Jafa, *****, 2024, color, sound, 73 minutes.

the spirit of '76

It was not easy to find a description of Arthur Jafa’s ***** at Gladstone Gallery before watching it. Even after the experience, I feel challenged to reach a succinct summary. Many of Jafa’s videos use archival video in montage. The footage is scaled up or slowed down, resolution and watermarks be damned! In The White Album (2018) or akingdoncomethas (2018) Jafa’s technique produces not unsubtle remixes of how Blackness and Whiteness are transmitted through film, social media, music, church. These are immersive in their digital authenticity and yet despite a viewer’s ability to recognize a video’s origin, the artist’s message is illusive. You might be moved to tears from the sheer spectacle without understanding what brought you there. I often experience Jafa’s videos with the adolescent curiosity of a high school friend showing me NSFW videos on the internet. I mean that in the most intimate way possible. They’re not always violent but their digital wrinkles often produces a sense of the pirated or taboo.

For better or worse, YouTube allows anyone to upload movie clips, producing a culture of reliving famous cinema moments out of narrative context. It’s a cheap perk of social media that I’m not immune to (I have a private video playlist of scenes that I find myself randomly quoting to myself throughout the day). There are versions of this which idolize a film's details. Go read the comments for “sicario border scene” and spot how many users are excited to analyze the specific rifles and tactics used by the characters. Meanwhile, the comments for “big lebowski peed on my rug scene” are a dogpile of users typing their favorite lines from the above scene. It's the best version of the communal experience promised by the social in social media.

Arthur Jafa did not discover Taxi Driver (1976) from YouTube movie clips. He and I both first experienced it in theaters, give or take a few decades. ***** was projected on a screen large enough to be in a cineplex but instead of theater seats, gallery patrons had to stand or sit on a long slanted platform. ***** is a remix of Taxi Driver with a focus on the climactic scene of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) shooting his way through pimps and johns before attempting suicide only to find all the guns empty. Blood drained from bullet wounds, Travis collapses next to Iris (Jodie Foster). Moments later, police enter, guns drawn, surveilling a room with two dead bodies, Iris curled up in a corner, and Travis, grinning as he pantomimes putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. The camera hovers above this tableau and slowly leaves the room, tracing the blood-splattered staircase, discarded pistols, and the lifeless body of Sport (Harvey Keitel). Outside, the cops try to keep neighbors from rushing into the crime scene. The camera pans over the crowd as the Bernard Herrmann soundtrack swells.

I’ll admit, the film’s provocative title, *****, made me bristle at thought of the most notorious five-letter words in American culture. It took a while for me to settle into the video’s technical achievement. The biggest example of Jafa’s intervention is recasting Sport, the johns, and the police with Black actors. There is some very clever tracking and digital manipulation at play that is mostly seamless. A few frames of Sport’s body from the original film are conspicuously left in. Arthur Jafa’s ******* is not a loop, that would imply viewing the same version of the scene over and over. Jafa cycles the scene with various setups and edits of the same actions. Sometimes different audio tracks are removed. Sometimes the scene begins earlier or later. After several repetitions, my brain no longer saw the visual effects as out of place. The violence became just as jarring as watching the film for the first time. I began to lose track of how long I’d spent watching a white man slaughter three Black men. The central action is always shown to completion, except for one bold variation in which Travis succeeds in finding one last bullet in a revolver, committing suicide. Much like the rest of Scorsese’s unflinching camera, this suicide is integrated into the frame with realistic visual effects. I hadn’t conceived of Jafa making an intervention that would change the course of Travis’ fate. I didn’t have long to react to this moment before the scene was starting from the top again.

If you did discover Taxi Driver through the internet, you might have seen the clip of Tarantino introducing the film for a Sky Movies broadcast. Tarantino says explicitly that the film is not racist, but it is a first-person study of a racist. The film’s immersion in Travis Bickle’s environment is only threatened, according to Tarantino, by the racial distinction between the people Bickle finds repellent and those he physically harms. In other words, Bickle’s worldview is racist, yet when he takes up arms against the world, he only kills white people. Let’s ignore the fact that Travis actually does shoot a Black man sticking up a bodega (see “taxi driver store robbery fight scene” uploaded by Ultimate Badass Channel). A brutal scene that is strangely absent from *****. Anyway, Tarantino and Jafa both see a compromise in the original film’s decision to cast Iris’ pimp and clientele as white men. More on this later.

A more investigative critic would have approached people leaving the gallery to ask if they had seen the original film. With no context for Travis’ worldview, would a first-time viewer diagnose his actions as a symptom of Whiteness alone? Late into ***** Jafa does include an earlier scene of Travis visiting other cabbies at a diner. In this scene, Travis barely says a word, but eyeballs a row of pimps sitting a few tables over. If ***** is a study on Whiteness, I’m surprised Jafa excluded any of Travis’ monologues or Scorsese’s cameo as a disgruntled husband who vocally ideates killing his wife who’s having an affair with a Black man. Instead, the film is stripped to a sadistic declaration. I pity the viewer who might avoid watching Taxi Driver based on seeing Jafa’s remix. But that’s the thing about effective films, a certain line and scene can occupy one’s memory, becoming synecdoche. Taxi Driver is a film about societal alienation, Vietnam War veterans, political paranoia. It is a film tied to the assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan. Travis Bickle haunts contemporary meme culture and appeals to sincerity (see Joker (2019)). Whiteness encompasses all those subjects.

If a gallery visitor makes it through the cycles of violence in *****, they’ll view several new scenes of Sport, played by Jerrel O’Neal. Shot in close-up, O’Neal reflects on shit he’s seen that Travis “wouldn’t believe.” In another cycle, Stevie Wonder’s As plays from a speaker offscreen. Sport sings along while pulling from a cigarette, his eyes fluttering, intoxicated by the music or some narcotic. O’Neal’s scenes are the only moments of inhabiting a perspective outside of Travis Bickle. Jafa’s specificity in choosing a song released the same year as Taxi Driver’s suddenly makes the world feel less claustrophobic. There was beauty and struggle beyond the lonely psychopathy of Bickle in 1976. O’Neal creates his own charm unique from the legacy of Keitel. Perhaps it's the contrast of a pimp singing Wonder’s words about love’s resilience that softens the surrounding violence. The film’s driving question might be whether the audience’s shock and outrage change when Travis’ victims are recast?

In another reality, this question would already be answered. In a 2006 interview with The Guardian, Paul Schrader explained that the original casting of the pimp was for a Black character. The final shoot-out was “just a racist slaughter.” Pressure from the producers to avoid a riot led to the re-castings. “It would have been socially and morally irresponsible if we had incited that kind of violence,” Schrader claimed.

Alongside the installation of *****, Gladstone Gallery produced a conversation on the film between Arthur Jafa & Jeremy O. Harris. Jafa admits that the film’s action sequence is masterfully made. It’s shocking but thrilling. It’s a testament to Scorsese’s directing that the scene holds its intensity fifty years later. An illustration of cinema’s unique ability to make violence into a spectacle. Jafa acknowledges the screenplay’s original shootout containing Black actors. Jafa views the film as a reaction to Blaxploitation (said with as much love as possible). “It’s a Dylann Roof moment,” concludes Jafa about the film’s final massacre. While I think the association has merit, I’m ambivalent about using contemporary evils to diagnose past characters. (I’m curious what Jafa thinks of Paul Schrader’s The Master Gardener(2022), a film that reckons with a white supremacist’s repentance.)

I left Gladstone with Stevie Wonder stuck in my head. There was no riot. Nobody stormed out in protest from what I could tell. The most hostile behavior I witnessed was a woman taking photos of the film on her phone with the flash on. I marveled at Jafa’s ability to burn in my mind a new version of a film I felt familiar with. Schrader has described Taxi Driver as a young man’s film. I am now the age of Travis Bickle. To sit with ***** for 73 minutes felt like criticism through overexposure. You can only watch this perverse vigilante justice for so long before it becomes exhausting or worse, boring. Fortunately, ***** is neither. The artist had yanked me out of the film bro canon and sat me at his computer, teasing, “You thought that was cool? Watch this…”