Faust meets Super Fly in 17 minutes of pure cinematic chaos.
Jamaa Fanaka’s first project plays off the Blaxploitation’s genre conventions, an adaption of Goethe’s “Faust” presented with a non-synchronous soundtrack and superimposed over a remake of Super Fly (1972). Often out of focus with an overactive camera, the film immediately exudes nervous energy, but unlike Priest’s elegant cocaine consumption in Super Fly, Willie’s arm gushes blood as he injects heroin. A morality tale in two reels. —Jan-Christopher Horak
Direction
Fanaka's deliberately unwatchable camerawork as aesthetic weapon.
Editing
Non-sync sound that refuses to comfort you for a single second.
Director
Jamaa Fanaka
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Fanaka made this as his UCLA thesis film, weaponizing student-film pretension against the commercial Black cinema Hollywood was selling.
The 'death on the installment plan' title nods to Céline's novel—Fanaka's film school references were aggressively, almost hostilely European.
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