In Townshend, Arthur Jafa transforms a still photograph of Pete Townshend, originally taken by celebrated music photographer Michael Putland, into a disquieting moving portrait. Using an AI programme to reanimate the static image, Jafa produces a face that blinks, twitches, and turns almost imperceptibly. The film oscillates between the mechanical and the human; Townshend’s eyes widen and drift, his mouth trembles as if about to speak, his expression slipping between melancholy, vacancy, and faint amusement. The soundtrack, at times swelling, at times vanishing into silence, shapes a hypnotic rhythm of presence and absence. As the camera inches closer, the viewer is caught in the uneasy intimacy of the stare, a meditation on performance, projection, and the unstable boundary between the living and the digital.

Departing from his rapid-fire editing and archival montage, Jafa here manipulates what he calls ‘the space between the images. The flow.’ In Townshend, that flow becomes temporal and psychological. The tiny tremors of a face resurrected from stillness, a study of the medium’s power to animate and deceive. The song, Eminence Front from The Who’s 1982 album It’s Hard is significant as the fulcrum around which these uneasy inflections occur. Taking an uncharacteristically ‘funk’ approach, critics noted that this white band of rock royalty arrived at funk a little late. The song discusses the excesses of the wealthy and leans into the Miami Beach aesthetic where the band were spending time and where Townsend was using cocaine. Miami is a melting pot of Black, Latin and Caribbean cultures, but historically it is a city built for the excesses of the super-rich.

Townshend himself, as a guitarist, songwriter, and founder of The Who, but also in recent years a contested cultural figure, embodies a cultural hinge between spiritual longing, self-destruction, sonic reinventions and also problematic pursuits leading to criminal investigations. His complex history, from devotion to Meher Baba to struggles with addiction and questionable research into his own traumas of child abuse, echoes through the film’s shifting register of faith, exhaustion, and endurance. It looks at these excesses, appropriations, vulnerabilities with an uneasy ambiguity,. Not passing judgement but holding the complexity of a cultural moment in an animated stillness that speaks loudly.

Jafa’s work layers these histories of music, race, image, and technology into a single flickering portrait, where music’s cross-racial genealogies meet the spectral ethics of digital resurrection. The result is an image both intimate and unsettling: a study in the persistence of aura, and in the fragile circuitry of seeing, feeling, and remembering.