Icons of Catastrophe: Diagramming Blackness in Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes

Kahlil Joseph’s “Until the Quiet Comes” is a short film about a series of miraculous and catastrophic events. The camera moves gracefully through a dreamy Los Angeles sunset as black children play and, as if it were predestined, die. Then, without warning, bodies begin to move gracefully in reverse while the world around them continues to move forward. Finally, in the dramatic conclusion of the film, a man bleeding from bullet wounds on the ground miraculously rises and begins to dance. He removes his bloodstained shirt and, evidently, the finality of death. Then, he enters a car and drives off into the night. The film moves effortlessly between different settings and times, without giving viewers a sense of direction, but this stunning possibility for change (and even reanimation) does not feel like a traditional happy ending. In fact, as the dancer rides away in a lowrider playfully leaning to the right, the camera pans to an ambulance parked on the street. It is possible the emergency vehicle arrived in response to the dancer’s wounds, but now its red flashing lights illuminate the entire neighborhood with a warning signal. Even as the film fades to black—the editing transition and color that has become cinema’s definitive last word—this discontinuous narrative about black bodies remains incomplete and in suspension.