MEDICINE
FROM MANY
PSYCHES
Terence Nance on un-disciplining, genre-curiosity, and making films through spirit.
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
After working in Brooklyn for two decades, Dallas-born Nance found himself in Maryland’s port city thanks, largely, to his tribe of close friends and collaborators (fellow filmmakers like Bradford Young, Shawn Peters, and Elissa Blount-Moorhead), who had already set up shop there in the 2010s. Nance has since been working across television, film, and music, continuing to explore the Black American experience through experimental projects. Now, as more of their people establish an unofficial creative commune in Baltimore, the group is readying itself to open Lalibela, a space that’s intended to be a sanctuary for producing films, leading workshops, and providing space for Baltimore’s homegrown talent—a labor of love that, when out in the city’s arts scene, you hear whispers about constantly.
To Nance, it’s the right move at the right time in his life. On that sunny, late-summer afternoon, Nance spoke with Burney about storytelling, Black multidisciplinarity, and creative partnership.
The film was well made, but that wasn’t really what I connected with. What affected me was seeing a scenario on-screen that paralleled the discomfort I felt as a child with a stepfather and, now, as a father whose kid has a stepfather. And how the film offers some cautionary tales of how not to navigate difficult familial situations. Films, and all forms of storytelling, have the potential to change people's lives.
Terence Nance: And that’s the point of stories, you know? To unsettle energy that needs to be unsettled so it can be released, understood. It can teach whatever it’s going to teach. And if nobody does the work of making the symbols unsettle people, then it’s not going to work. To me, the mark of a great piece of cinema is the extent to which it provokes self-reflection. One mode of self-reflection is that unsettling, hallelujah, ouch feeling. And it can happen anywhere.
Also, I don’t think it’s so much about a direct or didactic relationship between what is going on onscreen and what might be happening in your life. Sometimes you’ll be watching something that takes place in outer space and nobody’s human, but the symbols are so strong. Mythology is such an evocative and electrifying medium when it interacts with your subconscious or your unconscious self. And as a filmmaker, it’s even more difficult to hit that part of yourself and the audience where you don’t even know that what’s onscreen has transformed you. I read a quote from Carl Jung about the unconscious being disobedient. It cannot be controlled. You try all you want, but your dreams are the voice of your unconscious. All you can do is just see what it’s doing.
What are some pieces of cultural production that led you to transformative experiences? Things that woke something up in you, that gave you a moment of upheaval?
That’s a good question. One thing that’s coming to mind is AJ’s [Arthur Jafa’s] recent film called ***** [2024, pronounced “redacted”]. He repurposes the climax of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [1976], reshoots parts of it, re-edits it, re-scores it, dismembers it in a lot of different ways to make another thing. It’s called “redacted,” I believe, because in the original script for Taxi Driver, at the end when Travis Bickle saves the child sex worker, he saves her from Black pimps and a Black mafia situation, but they couldn’t get that through to the studio. So they changed it to all the white characters. AJ reshot all those characters as Black and the scene plays out more or less as it plays out in the movie, but with a totally different effect because what was, at one point, redacted, is now revealed: that Bickle went ballistic on Black people because they are Black and he is white. It is what it was always intended to be. It says what was always being said about a very wounded white man’s psyche in America. It says it more explicitly than the film we have all lived with for fifty years.
So there’s that, right? And then there’s the mythological reframing of the Travis Bickle archetype. The expressed destructive energy of the white man in America. It’s going to come out. You see it all the time in all the movies. The white devil: he’s going to come out, it’s going to be bad, but he’s sexy. He’s a vibe. And he’s operating explicitly in a sort of psychosexual relationship with Black men and saving white women from Black men. So you’re watching the scene repeat and you’re like, Whoa, AJ really understands myth and symbols and repetition and editing. Now the editing tools have changed. The idea of a final edit doesn’t exist. The motion picture is always already raw material for mythmaking but what does it mean for that manipulation to be Black? I think it's inspiring more than it’s unsettling for those reasons.
It’s more about the social response. It’s not the movie, it’s who you meet outside the theater. Same with music: it’s not the music, it’s who you dance with.
Do you think you’re actively attempting to try your hand at different forms and different types of storytelling when you’re making work?
I read an amazing essay by [artist, writer, and theorist] Greg [Angaza] Pitts in which he framed Black creative practice as inherently multimodal, multidisciplinary. And that really resonated with me because I think that—and he talked about this in his writing—one effect of the industries of art, music, film, and other types of creative production is that they discipline Black people into a genre: “You’re a filmmaker. You work with these tools to make this, so you’re that.” It’s anti-Black creative practice, because Black creative practice inherently stretches into all modes. And you see that if you just look at any seminal Black artist.
Definitely.
I think one thing my parents, and everybody around me, set me up to do was be explicitly undisciplined, and to tell people before I get there that I’m not going to be disciplined. I’m not going to be in a medium or lane in that sense.
I think disciplining oneself can be a very high-level skill, it should be said, but that’s also a translation skill that a lot of people have mastered. It’s the best way to get economic resources, so you can’t really diss it, but it is translating Blackness into a more industrialized, white-economics-centric mode.
It’s all characteristic of just how pervasive economics is in our minds, in different forms. Folks are always saying, “I thought you had that job,” or, “How you going to get paid to do that other job?” You got to have lunch at some point and pay for it. However, when I think of what the divine is, I think Black people understand it as being concerned with mastery of your spirit. It’s not concerned with the earthly manifestation of the things you physically do to get to mastery. It doesn’t matter if you pick up a drum one day and then pick up another thing another day, as long as both are part of a commitment to developing your spirit and character. I think you have to be in a Black modality to be infinitely curious about what on earth is going to help me get this message through—even at a more elemental level: Is it going to be the earth, the fire? Is it going to be the guitar? Is it going to be the book? And I think Black people, particularly, have had to make it work with a bunch of whatever is around. So the work you produce is going to end up having this tonality of, “If it’s here, I’m going to pick it up.”
How do you consider your audience, or the response to your work?
I think it’s more about the social response. It’s not the movie, it’s who you meet outside the theater. Same with music: it’s not the music, it’s who you dance with. A body of work is medicine produced by multiple psyches. It’s always more than one person making the work anyway; whoever it is, it’s always kind of a band. So I’m figuring out how to think of these things as a game I’m playing and not get so sentimental about what the medicine could be or how it could or should operate [for an audience].
On another level, we’re in a particular era right now: [cultural theorist] Sylvia Wynter talks about this idea that capitalism is our spiritual practice, and in this spiritual practice, one of the sacraments is the commodity. To make a film or a song into a commodity is on some level the least imaginative thing you could do to it. But on another level, it’s the most accessible, useful thing you could do to it. So it’s both deeply vulgar and deeply kind of fun.
Capitalism really is a religion just like the religions of the last 2000 years, though. People are going to stop believing in it. We’re going to make another story.
I read an amazing essay by [artist, writer, and theorist] Greg [Angaza] Pitts in which he framed Black creative practice as inherently multimodal, multidisciplinary. And that really resonated with me because I think that—and he talked about this in his writing—one effect of the industries of art, music, film, and other types of creative production is that they discipline Black people into a genre: “You’re a filmmaker. You work with these tools to make this, so you’re that.” It’s anti-Black creative practice, because Black creative practice inherently stretches into all modes. And you see that if you just look at any seminal Black artist.
Definitely.
I think one thing my parents, and everybody around me, set me up to do was be explicitly undisciplined, and to tell people before I get there that I’m not going to be disciplined. I’m not going to be in a medium or lane in that sense.
I think disciplining oneself can be a very high-level skill, it should be said, but that’s also a translation skill that a lot of people have mastered. It’s the best way to get economic resources, so you can’t really diss it, but it is translating Blackness into a more industrialized, white-economics-centric mode.
It’s all characteristic of just how pervasive economics is in our minds, in different forms. Folks are always saying, “I thought you had that job,” or, “How you going to get paid to do that other job?” You got to have lunch at some point and pay for it. However, when I think of what the divine is, I think Black people understand it as being concerned with mastery of your spirit. It’s not concerned with the earthly manifestation of the things you physically do to get to mastery. It doesn’t matter if you pick up a drum one day and then pick up another thing another day, as long as both are part of a commitment to developing your spirit and character. I think you have to be in a Black modality to be infinitely curious about what on earth is going to help me get this message through—even at a more elemental level: Is it going to be the earth, the fire? Is it going to be the guitar? Is it going to be the book? And I think Black people, particularly, have had to make it work with a bunch of whatever is around. So the work you produce is going to end up having this tonality of, “If it’s here, I’m going to pick it up.”
How do you consider your audience, or the response to your work?
I think it’s more about the social response. It’s not the movie, it’s who you meet outside the theater. Same with music: it’s not the music, it’s who you dance with. A body of work is medicine produced by multiple psyches. It’s always more than one person making the work anyway; whoever it is, it’s always kind of a band. So I’m figuring out how to think of these things as a game I’m playing and not get so sentimental about what the medicine could be or how it could or should operate [for an audience].
On another level, we’re in a particular era right now: [cultural theorist] Sylvia Wynter talks about this idea that capitalism is our spiritual practice, and in this spiritual practice, one of the sacraments is the commodity. To make a film or a song into a commodity is on some level the least imaginative thing you could do to it. But on another level, it’s the most accessible, useful thing you could do to it. So it’s both deeply vulgar and deeply kind of fun.
Capitalism really is a religion just like the religions of the last 2000 years, though. People are going to stop believing in it. We’re going to make another story.
It started unofficially around 2016 out of a desire to have a collective directing practice where we’re all making cinema together, because the practice tends to get hierarchical and anti-collaborative. But, in a Black creative mode, it’s usually a band vibe. It’s how do you listen to each other for something that’s greater? Bradford Young and I had been talking about forming a collective for some time. There were a lot of music artists who’d call directors to make collaborative projects that the artists conceptualized or saw the value in. Like, how could we direct together as a team?
The first thing we did together was [jazz saxophonist] Kamasi Washington’s 2019 short As Told To G/D Thyself. [Artist and director] Jenn Nkiru did a section of the project in the UK. Brad, Jenn, and I each had our wider creative families too. After that first project, we partnered with [producers] Mishka Brown and Nanette Nelms to officially create the collective. We directed Rage Against the Machine’s short Killing In Thy Name [2021] and a piece with Oprah that never came out. The mandate is that we’re led to make films through spirit and nothing else. I think on some level, our thing is how do we reconnect with our ancestors who understood filmmaking as a collective practice.
What has it been like for you to be living and creating in Baltimore?
Before I moved to Baltimore, I’d been here a few times just passing through for miscellaneous reasons. Then by the time we were making As Told To G/D Thyself in Baltimore, Brad was living here already; so was Shawn, and Elissa. So I was here for a good amount of time just working and interacting with people, going to different parts of the city, and I got a real sense of what it’s like. I don’t think it had been on my mind as a possibility to move here until that experience making the film, but then it went from zero to a hundred. It was like, Oh, this is what making things needs to feel like as much as humanly possible: being with your people in a place where you aren’t being surveilled so intensely. We’re not operating in a theater that needs to be carefully constructed; we’re in a play space, ritual space, with our family. That’s how it’s got to be.
Talk to me about Lalibela, the collective and soon-to-be space that’ll serve as a hub for film production and so forth in Baltimore. What function would you all like it to serve?
Cinema, as I’ve experienced it, is a pretty unsustainable material practice. A lot of my work has been figuring out how to feed the soil of it, doing the generational work to get things to a seedling level. What’s clear to me about what we’re doing is related to what we’ve been talking about: Black creative practices as necessarily and foundationally multidisciplinary and undisciplined. They’re opaque. They refuse to be commodified for obvious reasons because we have trauma around being commodified. You know what I mean? These are shared principles.
And cinema is such a new medium that all the tools are constantly being reimagined, but one thing you can’t get past is that you need space to do it, which may no longer be true in the near future. But, to borrow another idea from Greg Pitts, the closest thing to a physical geographic place we could imagine to house the vibe of a multifaceted Black creative practice is a church—a sacred space. And so my prayer for it is that when I’m making a movie, it could feel like choir practice, like we’re doing God’s work, which is not always clean. You know what I mean?
And this inspires us to do away with some overly binary concept of art production and spirituality—what we’re making space for is more unknown. Cinema is not inherently just one medium. And it’s sustained by so many necessary modalities, specifically food: You gotta eat right when you’re working. You got to be around plants. It’s all sustained by people who do many different types of things. So what if those people and the things that their people do are all invited into one place that supports this multidisciplinary care of Black creativity?