The MIRL presents Death Grips: Notes on Film Blackness and 2016, a talk with CUNY film professor Michael Gillespie. The talk will consider some of the significant arguments and themes of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Film with attention to visual historiography, the black absurd, film form, and how the proposition of addressing the idea of black film through the critical lens of black visual and expressive culture is particularly consequential for understanding the critical richness of contemporary enactments of film blackness.