Total Action: A Conversation with Darol Olu Kae

The formal inventiveness of Keeping Time can be found in its dreamy scenes of reimagined reminiscence, and in moments where Session is caught up in an ecstatic vortex of performance, drumming at an alternately slow and frenetic speed as the image swirls with scatters of color. With a warm sense of ease, Kae synthesizes a celebration of musicianship with candidly banal documentation of bickering, teasing, and disagreements within the group. Collaboration is foundational to Kae’s own artistic constitution, and he follows the same mandate cited many times in both I Ran from It and Was Still in It and Keeping Time: learn from those who came before, foster intergenerational dialogues, and pass everything on. Kae is something of a perpetual student—not in the sense of being an inexperienced or unpracticed novice, but as an always curious inheritor of artistic traditions. He is a knowledgeable caretaker of an expansive cultural history, which he translates into richly intermingled storylines, recomposed images, and superimposed voices. His films are the result of deep listening, a skill he uses to reorganize sonic and spatial narratives with a contemplative touch. Importantly, Keeping Time draws on the trust and insights Kae shared with the musicians, whom he got to know over many years, as neighbors first and on-screen subjects second. As it considers the ethics and participatory possibilities of documentation, the film reveals Kae’s prioritization of rehearsal, backstage and background, by continually returning to the luminescent limbo of the open garage where the band practices.

The personal touchstones of I Ran from It and Was Still in It find another form in Blur, which allusively retells the story of Kae’s mother as well as the life and untimely death of her brother. A sensitive tribute to these familial bonds, Blur accentuates the loss and grief that course through much of Kae’s art-making. The film shows his own approach to rethinking visibility, a common theme among Black experimental artists. Without pretending to uncover a single, absolute truth from what the family experienced when his uncle became ill and Kae’s mother carried forward in her brother’s absence, Blur delicately offers a space for remembering and mourning. Across all of his works, Kae creates a generous aesthetic world that prioritizes collectivity, relationality, and a sense of belonging that does not erase differences. This approach is summed up in the opening minutes of I Ran from It and Was Still in It, when James Baldwin’s narrative voice-over, paired with slowed-down footage of San Francisco in Take This Hammer (1964), refers to the movements and consciousness of Black life as a “kind of total action”—an apt description of Kae’s filmmaking.

Your films suggest that you are an artist who has a clear answer to the question Who are your people? How do kinships, familial or otherwise, ground your work?

I immediately think of this Tarkovsky quote, from Sculpting in Time, where he talks about how important it is “to establish one’s belongingness to a tradition, culture, range of people or ideas.” One of the ideas I hold close is that I can arrive at something larger by starting with the particular. With the things I’m curious about, like loss or absence, the closest way I can get to them is through the personal. Then I move toward questions about the broader condition of Black life. Whenever I make something, I’m actively having conversations with people I admire and respect: Dionne Brand, Ja’Tovia Gary, AJ [Arthur Jafa]. So, for sure, my films often begin on the scale of the personal and the familial, but I’m also thinking about kinship in a much broader way, through shared ideas and preoccupations. That might be because my own family history is so ruptured and fragmented. I often sit with subjects like tradition or musical collectivities precisely because I haven’t experienced them in the same way as others have, and I’m curious about how they work, how they persist.

It sounds like the familial, the intimate, and the personal are a portal, your entrance into other things. You now do all sorts of different things with those questions. What was your portal into filmmaking?

I had wanted to make films for a long time. I was writing scripts at seventeen or eighteen, but when I was growing up in South Central, even though I was in the heart of the film industry, filmmaking never really felt like a possibility. So I put it down.

 

Years later, when I was in grad school at UC Irvine, I encountered M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and an interview she did called “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive.” Her insistence on claiming the dead and telling “the story that cannot be told but must be told” stayed with me. It didn’t lead me directly to filmmaking, but it gave me an ethic for storytelling. She was asking how you approach a history structured by erasure without pretending that you can recover or represent it whole. What I absorbed was that absence, rupture, and fragmentation aren’t necessarily problems a work has to resolve. They can become structuring principles. In other words, you don’t have to force what has been broken or withheld into a seamless narrative. That became part of how I think about images, archives, and the responsibility of representing other people’s lives and histories.

 

One key portal was Instagram. I didn’t have a computer at the time, so I started editing images and making these short videos, mining interviews with people like Assata Shakur or August Wilson and creating weird juxtapositions. That practice was very much inspired by John Akomfrah’s idea of “affective proximity.” I randomly met AJ at Irvine, before Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death [2016] came out, and seeing how he was using IG opened something up for me.

 

Another filmmaker, Nicole Otero, was working with Kahlil [Joseph] at the time. I think she saw what I was doing on IG and recommended me for the art-project iteration of BLKNWS around 2018 or 2019. That experience, along with the films I was making with friends at USC, became my bridge into a broader filmmaking practice.