A Moving-Image History of Parkwood Entertainment, Vol. III — The Second Half

This is the third of a four-chapter series on Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment and its extensive film output.

In this chapter, which has been split into two halves for a nicer reading experience (you have the second half open; here’s the first), we dive into the BEYONCÉ and Lemonade eras and their respective innovations. You’ll likely get the most out of it if you’ve read the previous pieces—my introduction, where I explained how this series came to be; the first chapter, where I traced the years leading up to Parkwood’s founding; and the second chapter, where I summarized the company’s early filmmaking adventures.

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Behind the scenes of On the Run and its IV drip of gossip, the Carters had discreetly started making music together, apparently considering a joint album about their marital problems.

“We were using our art almost like a therapy session,” Jay-Z would eventually say. “The best place is right in the middle of the pain … And that’s where we were sitting.” It’s worth keeping this detail in mind as we move through the next year or so of this chapter, since it casts a lot of Beyoncé’s late-2014 and 2015 work in a different light.

In the midst of this, the couple was hit with a sticky headline unrelated to their marriage—on the surface, at least. As BuzzFeed broke the story in the first week of July (two days before I saw On the Run in Toronto), a 30-year-old woman named TaQoya Branscomb had recently filed a second paternity suit against Mathew Knowles, claiming he’d fathered her four-year-old daughter, Koi. If this had weight, it would be made especially shocking by a spare detail: Koi was born in July of 2010, just five months after Alexsandra Wright’s son, Nixon—and, well, nine since Mathew was served by Wright.

“I come from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust,” Beyoncé will write in Vol. IV’s timeframe. “Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful.”

In early August, it was announced that Beyoncé was set to receive MTV’s Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs later that month, ideal timing given the five-week break before On the Run moved over to Paris.

Unlike your average Vanguard performance, which is typically a greatest-hits showcase, the star took her 15 minutes to perform almost all of BEYONCÉ, translating its videos into live concepts. There she was recreating her own Pietà nod from “Mine,” and playing as a Crazy Girl the way she had in “Partition,” and standing silhouetted in front of a massive “FEMINIST”—in what would arguably become the performance’s most-circulated image. A little differently, “Blue” had Beyoncé backed by mostly never-before-seen footage of her daughter, leaving everyone in the crowd visibly moved.  

MTV’s newest Vanguard was then presented with her award by Jay-Z, who not only declared her the “greatest living entertainer” but had brought their two-year-old up there with him. The moment was both a meaningful professional milestone—Beyoncé had officially been anointed a torch-carrier of Jackson’s by the very network he’d harnessed to become a global icon—and a televised display of domestic bliss. And for a star who’ll be remembered, among other things, for her singular self-restraint, it’s one of only a handful of occasions on which she’s appeared barely able to keep it together.

The whole thing was also highly effective PR, disabusing the public of the notion that the Carters were pre-divorce. As Billboard wrote, “If there was any lingering suspicion about the health of [their] seven-year-old marriage, the couple put it to bed.”

In the days after the VMAs, a making-of short was uploaded to Beyoncé’s YouTube account, revealing what had actually been a stressful lead-up to that glorious quarter of an hour.

The footage presented Parkwood as having its own ducks in a row. We see the team filming the background visuals on the Sony Pictures lot, and rehearsing the show’s “vignettes” (as dancer Kim Gingras puts it), and marrying the lighting design to the choreography. Compared to, say, “Ring the Alarm” at the 2006 VMAs, this is clearly a bigger and more sophisticated production.

Just like that older performance, though, MTV has allotted Beyoncé a lone run-through for camera blocking, and it does not go well. “It’s unbelievable,” she tells Ed Burke onscreen, both of them visibly nervous. “I’m trying to, like, really compose myself.” Live director Hamish Hamilton, who’d also helmed the 2006 VMAs—I can’t trust them, they don’t know what they doing—not to mention the star’s 2013 halftime show—no equivalent quote that time around—tries to comfort her by suggesting that he’s seen his share of bad run-throughs and hers was in fact “a very good rodeo.”

At four minutes long, the short synthesizes the Beyoncé documentary, from the prayer at the beginning to the time-related stress throughout. In the hours before the VMAs, the star insists that all Pietà dancers have their bodies painted white. “The only thing is, we only have one person to do that,” Melissa Vargas says—at which point we cut, hilariously, to the brand manager herself painting dancers’ legs.

Everything goes great, of course, and we get our post-performance shot of Beyoncé and her loved ones cheersing out of solo cups. But as with all the making-of shorts she’s churned out, this one clarified that none of what we’d seen at the VMAs came easy.

On the Run concluded with two shows at the Stade de France in September, which Jonas Åkerlund led a team of videographers in capturing—apparently operating 52 cameras over both nights—for On the Run Tour: Beyoncé and Jay-Z (2014). The concert film aired as another HBO special running for 155 minutes, and is unique in this story a couple of ways.

For one, neither artist is credited as a director, both having simply co-produced via their companies. (In a decade and a half, this is the lone concert film of Beyoncé’s that she hasn’t co-directed.) But the reason for that may have had something to do with the second unique thing, which is that there was a week between the second Stade de France show and the special’s broadcast date. “I’ve never seen a person as stressed as the HBO guy,” Åkerlund told scholar Carol Vernallis in 2019. “His eyes were coming out of his head, and we worked until the very, very last minute.”

On the Run Tour doesn’t come off this rushed—if anything, it’s overedited—but less casual fans may notice that Beyoncé’s dancing isn’t always cut on the usual beat. Nevertheless, it feels totally of a piece with her other concert films, putting certain sequences in vibrant colour and others in black-and-white, and playing around the same way with speed; Åkerlund’s frenetic cutting is sometimes interrupted by indulgent slow-motion shots that seem to come out of nowhere.

There’s a more general feeling, in some ways, that Mr. Carter had essentially been slotted into his wife’s artistic vision. Aside from the film being spearheaded by Beyoncé’s frequent collaborator and resembling Beyoncé’s maximalist filmmaking style, the show itself had been creative directed by Parkwood’s Todd Tourso and Ed Burke. And because Mrs. Carter was also the only half of the couple who brought things like dancers to the table—to say nothing of the more than a decade of iconic choreo, staging, and vocal runs we see and hear—a lot of it felt carried over from her past shows rather than Jay-Z’s.

What I’ve been calling the “Big Spender” bar, for example, first appears during “Crazy in Love,” only to return for “Naughty Girl,” where everyone’s cheeks-out costumes seem inspired by those worn during Crazy Horse’s “Baby Buns” number.

The tour told roughly the same story that Melina Matsoukas’s “Run” trailer had teased: Beyoncé and Jay-Z have returned as their “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” characters a decade-plus later, too busy drowning in cash to care that no one’s really rooting for their romance. The show began with a disclaimer that THIS IS NOT REAL LIFE, affording them more than a little creative license.

Mostly, they’d use it to translate their star personas to the world of desert-set road movies and romantic crime-thrillers, especially those with some connection to Quentin Tarantino. This was evident somewhat in the costuming—when Mr. and Mrs. Carter first appear onstage, they’re wearing a Stars and Stripes-printed tee (if a black-and-white version) and mesh balaclava, respectively—but mostly in the interludes, which edited various of their videos together with Matsoukas’s work from the “Run” shoots and Dikayl Rimmasch’s shorts from the same period.  

(There seems to have been a plan to release Rimmasch’s work separately to promote the HBO special, but it didn’t entirely pan out for reasons unknown. You can nevertheless watch his three shorts in their combined iteration—titled Bang Bang [2014]—online, though I’ll mention that this material is soundtracked differently from in the concert film, whose sound design I’ll get to shortly. Bang Bang uses slices of the scores from films like War and Peace [1956]—hello again, Audrey Hepburn—and For a Few Dollars More [1965]—hello again, Clint Eastwood.)

“On the Run is a cinematic adventure of art and fantasy,” the Carters wrote in the tour book 18-year-old me picked up at my show (echoing the phrasing that I quoted Lee Anne Callahan-Longo using earlier):

It’s a story of love that endures against the odds
We in no way condone or support gun violence
In 2014 violence and hatred continue to plague the earth
We believe in love and acceptance
“We must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness” — Reinhold Niebuhr

It’s hard to say whether the couple had any specific violence in mind when the book was printed, but the rest of 2014 would be largely remembered by high-profile slayings of Black men and boys by American police, especially during those same months of the tour. The two losses most relevant to this story were Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six whose last words in July—“I can’t breathe”—became an international rallying cry, and 18-year-old Michael Brown, whose August murder precipitated what would come to be known as the Ferguson unrest.

By the end of the summer, the #BlackLivesMatter movement—the hashtag first came into use after George Zimmerman’s acquittal the year prior—had gone mainstream, and filmmaker dream hampton would later suggest that the Carters quietly wired five figures to Ferguson, Missouri to help bail protestors out of jail. I want to underline that this was another thing happening in the background of On the Run, when they were already in the midst of their music-as-therapy sessions and a new round of awkward Mathew press. Somewhat astonishingly, all of it would be threaded into Beyoncé’s next album.   

Reinhold Niebuhr, by the way, was a theologian who’d been a huge influence on Martin Luther King, Jr., declining a personal invite to one of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches only because of what he called a “severe stroke.” Barack Obama would encounter Niebuhr’s writings as an undergrad a decade and a half later, and eventually cite him as “one of [his] favorite philosophers.” The Niebuhr quote that the Carters had latched onto—“We must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness”—stemmed from his own book, The Irony of American History (1952), and turned out to be paraphrased (and perhaps internalized) by their show.       

Way back in the winter, a DJ and producer named MeLo-X had been especially taken with Beyoncé’s self-titled album, remixing several tracks for a “passion project” he called YONCÉ-X.

The two artists had apparently met once at a Solange-hosted New Year’s party, but that didn’t mean he was off the IP hook. There was some back-and-forth where Parkwood continually had his project taken down anywhere he uploaded it—in time, Beyoncé would release her own BEYONCÉ remixes—but the company reached out in due course with a cool consolation prize: did he want to score the interludes for the Carters’ forthcoming tour?

MeLo-X accepted, and On the Run would mark the first of several collabs between him and Beyoncé, most taking place in this chapter. (The second was producing the transitions for her Vanguard set.) “[The Carters] already had the story and the outline for the tour,” he’d explain. “The whole story is like you’re watching a film and it’s narrated by the music that they created together and separately.” His score would mix snippets of the couple’s work with dialogue from the “Run” shoots and samples of others’ music. For one interlude where Beyoncé and Jay-Z flee down the highway, for instance, MeLo-X took Kanye West’s “Hell of a Life” and “chopped it up and turned it into other sounds.”

In that same interlude, which begins with the couple chuckling at a diner as they spot their mugshots on someone’s newspaper—a detail evocative of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), whose original screenplay was written by Tarantino—we watch them pull over to make a call. From there, they recreate the phonebooth sex scene from True Romance (1993), just as they had in “’03 Bonnie & Clyde.” While the nod leaves less to the imagination this time around—this is now pop culture’s First Couple, not two stars in a maybe-relationship bypassing network censors—it again made Beyoncé the half of the couple to crash the other’s call in a fit of horniness, flipping the original gender dynamic from Tony Scott’s film.

The tour’s movie references mostly came through in Dikayl Rimmasch-directed sequences like this one, as opposed to onstage or in the other interludes (though some have seen possible Robert Rodriguez and David Lynch nods in Matsoukas’s work). When we first meet the Carters, they’re carrying out an homage to Jean-Luc Godard that most obviously pulls from Breathless: Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed to resemble Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s characters, respectively, and we hear a bit of Martial Solal’s score from the 1960 film as they recreate certain shots.

“The whole idea is to get out of the way and set up a scenario where the humanity can simply come through,” Rimmasch explained of his work. “I was able to give them a rational argument from the French New Wave and its resistance to the typical film-production structure. They wanted that vibe.”

In a later Rimmasch interlude, Beyoncé covers “Bang Bang”—not the original Cher version, but the better-known Nancy Sinatra redo that opens Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)—while her husband looks on through a cloud of smoke. (Sinatra’s voice eventually issues from the star’s mouth instead, explicitly tying the two blondes together for just the first time.) Elsewhere is a grislier nod to Kill Bill, plus a proper callback to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1967), but we’ll get to those in a moment.

To say the obvious thing, each of these films revolves around a criminal (or half-criminal) couple, with everything spiritually reminiscent of Penn’s as the seminal entry in that genre. (Missing this time is Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise [1991], a film Beyoncé whips out for occasional gay thought experiments, as we saw happen with Lady Gaga in Vol. II and will sort of see again in Vol IV.)

These films are also inherently linked—not just because Tarantino conceptualized a few, but there’s also that. Bonnie and Clyde was at one point offered to Jean-Luc Godard to direct, since the film’s team (as with that of On the Run) was consciously drawing on the French New Wave. But that detail is tied up in something I find more interesting about these titles, which is that they’re all to some extent movies about movies—watching movies, and loving movies, and maybe even being urged into violence by movies. To help me with this bit of Vol. III, I sent a couple questions my friend Dan Simpson’s way; he’s a thoughtful movie-lover in general, but also one whose recent PhD dissertation was heavy on Bonnie and Clyde.

In True Romance, Clarence and Alabama meet during a screening of the Japanese martial-arts film The Street Fighter (1974). Tony Scott’s 1993 crime romance then forces the instantly-smitten couple on the run with a bag of cocaine, and as Dan put it, is “very much the daydream of a juvenile movie nerd, made into an implausible hero.” (Multiple characters also work in the film industry proper.) In Breathless, which contains various references to classic films noir, Michel (Belmondo) is particularly obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, at one point gazing admiringly at promo material for The Harder They Fall (1956). Tarantino’s Kill Bill films similarly recreate and remix a wealth of film references, including from the director’s own oeuvre.

With On the Run Tour, the Carters had declared themselves part of this extensive canon of cinephilic outlaw lovers. To borrow Dan’s phrasing, here were two more movie nerds made into implausible heroes, in an escalation of the two brands they’d been shaping since the late-’90s. But he also reminded me that Bonnie and Clyde has a scene where the titular couple hide out in a theatre playing Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), the Depression-era musical co-directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley, just after they’ve robbed a bank and committed their first murder.

“Clyde, who pulled the trigger on the teller, is nervous and clearly shaken by the killing,” Dan summarized:

while Bonnie sits coolly unaffected, gazing at the screen as the chorus line sings about being “in the money.” In the next scene, Bonnie is trying on jewelry in front of a mirror while humming the same song to herself. The sequence communicates how movies sell a kind of aspirational lifestyle, but also how they distort reality. Anyone who’s actually seen “Gold Diggers of 1933” will know that the chorus performers are not, in fact, “in the money,” but are actually poor themselves, struggling to pay for the rent and food.

This reading feels aligned with the Carters’ reach for a cinematic adventure of art and fantasy. “Some of these films are more invested in the fantasy,” Dan clarified of these lovers-on-the-lam classics, “and in some the fantasy at hand is more innately cinematic, but all are grappling with the trope’s nature as a fantasy for both the viewer and the characters.” Beyoncé and Jay-Z had chosen to play around in a genre that allowed them to both have fun and poke fun—at their dreams, at their delusions, at themselves.  

A less obvious thing uniting most of these titles is a pregnancy of some kind; the prospect of a baby on the way heightens the stakes for these couples existing in such close proximity to danger.

Clarence and Alabama ultimately wind up in Mexico, where we see them raising their son, Elvis, by the ocean. Seberg’s Breathless character, Patricia, believes that she’s pregnant with Michel’s child when he dies by police gunfire—the result of her having sold him out. Kill Bill is the darkest example, with Uma Thurman’s Bride losing her unborn child in the duology’s inciting act of violence.

In Vol. I, I argued that nodding to Bonnie and Clyde and True Romance at once, as the Carters had in their 2002 collab, in some ways “kept both doors open as a way to pre-empt whatever was actually about to happen” with their fledgling relationship. Maybe they’d go up in figurative flames the way Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow do at the end of Penn’s film, but maybe they’d find a way to live happily ever after more like Clarence and Alabama in Tony Scott’s. It would be cinematically legendary no matter what.

One of the things that had made Bonnie and Clyde such an interesting reference for the maybe-couple, after all, was how that film had shaken up its industry 35 years prior; it was like Beyoncé and Jay-Z were promising an analogous pop-culture disruption. “Beyond the literal bloodshed and sexuality,” Dan told me of how the 1967 film broke ground:

“Bonnie and Clyde” also demonstrated an attitude of defiance, both to institutions within the film like the police and the banks, but also to the conventional rules of Hollywood filmmaking … This disruption was very much by design.

But the addition of films like Breathless and Kill Bill lent some complexity to how the Carters were telegraphing the trials of their relationship in 2014. How much were we meant to make of these two titles spotlighting a betrayal of some kind? What of the fact that said betrayals go in opposite directions, giving us a His and a Hers? And what about all of these babies in the background upping the emotional ante?

If there was one aspect of On the Run that hadn’t been teased in the trailer, it was infidelity. There are insinuations throughout the show that Beyoncé’s character isn’t tracking to get hurt simply because she’s with bad boy Jay-Z, but also because he’s deceiving her all the while, the specifics left vague.

The setlist included plenty of longstanding music that could be repurposed nicely for such a narrative, whether it was Beyoncé putting her foot down in the form of “Ring the Alarm,” or Jay-Z repenting through “Song Cry.” When Mrs. Carter chose to emotionally perform “Resentment” in a wedding veil, journalists were quick to report that she’d changed “Been ridin’ with you for six years”—a lyric not autobiographical at the time of the song’s 2006 recording—to “12 years”—which was now uncomfortably precise.

The interludes also included voicemails that her character was leaving for his, which began as hot and bothered (“I need some gangsta shit”) and evolved into coolly double-crossed (“It’s nothing open at three in the morning but legs”). In all, the couple had decided not to deflect from the recent rumour mill, but actively play into it.

Years later, Beyoncé would write that she “died and was reborn in [her] relationship,” and it hit me working on Vol. III that the Carters’ show had essentially depicted this. Rather than choosing between the endings of Bonnie and Clyde and True Romance, they seem to have tried as best as they could for both.

Before that happens, though, we get the demise of Beyoncé and Beyoncé alone. While Jay-Z performs “Song Cry”—a track recorded in the spring of 2001, and apparently inspired by a trio of relationships he’d messed up before Beyoncé was really in the picture—the big screen shows us her character arriving at a church in the middle of the desert. Dressed in bridal garb, it’s almost certainly a nod to the same opening moments of Kill Bill that I mentioned earlier, where the Bride is given enough retributive fuel to power a Tarantino martial-arts duology.

Beyoncé walks herself down the aisle, the space completely empty—or rather, it seems that way until she’s attacked by a spray of bullets, unsuccessfully attempting a couple of shots herself. We never see who’s shooting at her, and perhaps it’s all metaphorical anyway; we keep cross-cutting to a past moment where Jay-Z’s character was teaching hers how to load and fire a gun. So while bang, bang, someone shoots her down—whether that’s her baby, it’s not clear—she’s unable to match that violence.  

This might be a good place to acknowledge a curious theme in Beyoncé’s work. If there are several cases of her being betrayed by her partner and successfully retaliating—“Irreplaceable” (2006), “Single Ladies [Put a Ring on It]” (2008), and the like—there are also a number of projects where she doesn’t seem to have it in her, and sometimes even expresses something like shame or embarrassment about it.

In “Ring the Alarm” (2006), we watched her channel Basic Instinct (1992)—“a film about the murder investigation for a rock star who was stabbed, mid-sex, with an ice pick,” as I wrote in Vol. I. But none of that has necessarily happened, technically, since we spend much of the video with an emotional Beyoncé at home, perhaps merely lost in violent thought. In “Jealous” earlier in this chapter, she fantasized about walking in his shoes, doing the type of things that she’ll never ever do. And instead of getting even with her man, she wanders the streets of New York looking for him.

Since BEYONCÉ, its maker has produced lots of other art wherein she’s appeared to contemplate some romantic betrayal of her own, sometimes actual and sometimes more theoretical. That’s occasionally looked like allusions to having walked out on her husband—and more on that later. There are certain other moments, though, where she’s seemed to fantasize about, well, getting even with him, an idea that’s taken different forms over the years.

At her most out-there, as we’ll also come back to, she’s recorded multiple songs where she’s admired or envied some other woman—maybe even the other woman—for her good looks, for her coldness, for her steady hands. We might also include On the Run somewhere in this case file: Beyoncé’s character had gotten no further than fruitlessly aiming her gun in response to being shot at, but she’d still aimed it.

She manages to somehow survive her Kill Bill-style attack, and escapes in her wounded state on a black horse. It’s at this point in the show that we get her teary onstage performance of “Resentment”:

You could’ve told me you weren’t happy
I know you didn’t wanna hurt me
But look what you’ve done to me now

But despite these words, we’re returned to her big-screen self as she’s seen burying something unidentifiable out in the desert. Is it her gun? The hatchet, so to speak? “Love is an act of endless forgiveness,” she narrates, before officially paraphrasing the Reinhold Niebuhr quote from the tour book: “Forgiveness is me giving up my right to hurt you for hurting me. Forgiveness is the final act of love.”

Still, this relationship—this version of it, at least—simply wouldn’t do.  

Towards the end of On the Run, ’03 Bonnie & Clyde are suddenly awakened by flashing lights, presumably from helicopters circling the motel where they’ve sought refuge. They shoot at their assailants with their remaining ammo, and try to take off in the 1960s Pontiac GTO we’ve been watching them drive around in. But they’re eventually cornered, and after Beyoncé touches Jay-Z’s cheek in a final loving gesture, they’re gunned down in their car—just like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

“The road in the road movie is never just a background,” writes Neil Archer in The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (2016). “It is typically both the motivation for the narrative to happen, and also the place that allows things to occur.” With their tour, the Carters had been letting themselves indulge in an archly violent fantasy that saw them fleeing their problems. But that indulgence could not last indefinitely, and so the couple’s fictional selves were being cut off.

In his book, Archer observes that Bonnie and Clyde, which makes various references to gangster movies past, is “very pointedly a film that looks backwards in order to go forwards.” On the Run Tour arguably does this in its own way: after their onscreen deaths, Beyoncé and Jay-Z come back out onstage for the show’s two-pronged finale.

“This place is real special to us,” Mr. Carter tells the crowd mid-way through “Part II (On the Run).” “We got engaged here. Our baby, Blue, was conceived here. It’s a magical city!” They’d seemingly exited their cinematic adventure and taken themselves back to what had historically been a meaningful starting place for them: the City of Lights, which—again—was the tour’s only stop outside of North America. For the rest of the number, Beyoncé comes off playful but emotional, appearing to be fighting real tears.

It’s then that we make the switch to THIS IS REAL LIFE, the text appearing with the first few lines of “Young Forever,” where Beyoncé takes over from Mr Hudson on the 2009 Jay-Z collab. Both onstage and in the film, the performance is backed by home videos of the couple from the early days of their courtship through 2014. They hit up tarmacs and safaris; they get engaged on the night that they’d eventually go to Crazy Horse; they bring Blue home from the hospital, then watch as she gets bigger and bigger. Here they finally were: Clarence and Alabama Worley with their baby on the beach.  

The vibe of the number, which ultimately transitions into “Halo,” is at odds with all the gunslinging and mean-mugging that we’ve witnessed. And after Mr. Carter exclaims “We did it!” and Mrs. Carter nods, Åkerlund gives us a slow-motion shot of the couple embracing—Beyoncé’s skirt, printed with another black-and-white take on the Stars and Stripes, billowing behind this all-American (un-American?) power couple.

By the end of 2014, Parkwood was apparently exhausted, creatively as much as anything else. “We did two years pretty much non-stop, no break,” Lee Anne Callahan-Longo would remember—and the number of words I’ve spent solely on said years speaks to this.

2014 seemed tricky for Beyoncé even if we put the work aside—and even excluding things like the elevator incident and whatever marital drama may or may not have been attached. In September, a DNA test confirmed that four-year-old Koi was indeed the star’s half-sister, surely dealing the Knowles family a blow even a few years removed from Mathew and Ms. Tina’s divorce. Then, the next month, 33-year-old photographer Yosra El-Essawy, who’d been capturing Beyoncé on her Mrs. Carter Show when she was diagnosed with stage-four esophageal cancer, passed away from her illness. (One of the tour’s doc segments had revolved around her health.)

Amidst these stressors, Ms. Tina chose to take back the reins of her narrative. While serving as the keynote speaker at a Houston event, she beamed about her new-ish relationship with actor Richard Lawson, a longtime family friend whose courtship she recounted in some detail. But before she did that, she complicated the lore around her former partnership, suggesting that her famed business acumen—Beyoncé had grown up sweeping hair and performing at her mother’s salon, Headliners—had originated as a just-in-case liferaft.   

“After I got pregnant, my marriage just got really bad,” Ms. Tina explained of what would only have been the union’s first couple of years (Beyoncé was born 20 months into it):

I knew I had to do something, so I got very focused about going to school … Eight weeks after I had my baby, I took her to her … paternal grandmother, and I said, “Listen, you gotta keep her because I gotta open a business.” Because I would never be in this position again; I would never be totally dependent on someone … The adversity of me having this bad marriage caused me to go do something about my situation.   

This turned out to be wise, though perhaps for different reasons than imagined: Ms. Tina’s salon helped keep the family afloat after Girls Tyme was dropped by Elektra Records in the mid-’90s, Mathew having quit his job to manage the group.

But there were two important implications in her keynote, ones that returned some power to her as everyone received another wave of embarrassing headlines about her ex. For one, intuition had long ago told her that her world might one day ‘explode,’ as she suggests it did when she realized she needed a divorce. (As a reminder, she filed for the first time in 2009, a little after Alexsandra Wright’s paternity suit.) Second and perhaps more consequential, though, she could only jump ship because she was already smart enough not to be totally dependent on someone; she had a world to escape to, and had presumably raised her daughters to build worlds of their own.

Even when it’s on the table, escape isn’t necessarily for everyone.

Across the pond, the Carters were finishing up a dedicated month and a half of work on their joint project—musical and otherwise—in Paris. As Beyoncé’s longtime engineer Stuart White has explained, “We lived in a hotel and set up two studios in two different rooms … I tended to work with Bey in one room, while my assistant, Ramon Rivas, would work with Jay-Z in the other room.”

By American Thanksgiving, Beyoncé had reissued her self-titled album as a boxset called BEYONCÉ: Platinum Edition (2014). As well as the original “Audio” and “Visual” discs, there were now two new ones called “Live” and “More.” “Live” came with the Beyoncé: X10 segments that had aired on HBO over the summer, while “More” came with four remixes and two bonus tracks.

The remix that caused the biggest stir was a Nicki Minaj-featuring upgrade of “***Flawless.” (Released in August, the two had performed it during both Paris shows of On the Run.) In that one, Beyoncé cheekily addresses the elevator incident, or at least kind of: “Of course sometimes shit go down when it’s a billion dollars on an elevator.” There was only so much gossip to glean here—except, perhaps, the basic suggestion that with money came drama.

You could read a lot more into one of Platinum Edition’s new songs, a danceable track called “Ring Off” where Beyoncé essentially hypes her mom up for leaving her dad. (“Oh, now the fun begins!” she actually sings in the chorus.) The song sampled the keynote that Ms. Tina had recently given, where she’d wrapped things up by telling the room, “If you’re going through it, just know it’s called … ‘going through it.’ You’re not gonna get stuck there. You’re not gonna die, you’re gonna survive.”

It’s only in recent months that I clued into how much Beyoncé lyrically aligns herself with her mother’s experience being married to Mathew. For instance, the song opens with:

Mama, I understand your many sleepless nights
When you sit and you think about father
Or how you tried to be the perfect wife

Then, at the track’s end, there’s a shared we: “We can love again / This is where freedom begins, Mama.” One Knowles was starting fresh with a new man, the other seemingly with her own, but the key takeaway was that both had found themselves at some kind of romantic reset after all their tears.    

The other new song on Platinum Edition, “7/11,” was far lighter, a comparatively mindless ode to getting drunk and “goofing off with your ladies,” as Lindsay Zoladz put it. This one brought a video that Beyoncé had shot on an iPhone and co-directed with Todd Tourso, where she and her dancers party around the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles.

“7/11” would win a craft VMA for editing and, in the years to come, be credited with anticipating everything from TikTok to early-pandemic art. But in a funny way, it was really like Beyoncé had simply involved other people in the quirky shorts she’d long been making on her laptop; extremely rare for the Best Editing VMA, the star herself was listed as one of the three editors on the ballot.  

On the eve of BEYONCÉ’s first birthday in December, a 12-minute short called Yours and Mine (2014) was uploaded to its namesake’s YouTube channel, free of any credits. The footage was all from her visual album shoots, but now had been turned completely black-and-white. And as in the doc segments of Beyoncé: X10, this material was paired with a strikingly intimate voiceover as she revisited her game-changing project and its themes.

“My mother always taught me to be strong, and to never be a victim,” she says over footage from “Jealous,” “never expect anyone else to provide for me things that I know I can provide for myself.”

“Pretty Hurts” is the chosen backdrop for a comment that Beyoncé “grew up with a lot of conflict and traumas,” and has “been through a lot, just like everyone else.”

“I was brought up seeing my mother try to please and make everyone comfortable,” she tells us while we see shots from “Mine,” “but I’m no longer afraid of conflict, and I don’t think conflict is a bad thing.”

Over imagery from “***Flawless”: “Men and women balance each other out, and we have to get to a point where we are comfortable with appreciating each other.”

And finally, over imagery from “Superpower”: “I have a lot of empathy for men, and the pressures that they go through, and the cultures that have been created, especially for African American men.” 

You may pick up on my agenda in pulling these examples out, but they do bolster one of the arguments I made earlier, which is that BEYONCÉ would age as a prequel to her next album. Here was Beyoncé herself narratively bridging the two projects—gesturing towards having demons, but staying mum on what they were; implying that she’d been wronged, but not feeling resigned to her fate; a feminist, but one suddenly talking more than ever about men.

There are signs that Yours and Mine had only been made in the past little while, perhaps even the past few weeks. For one, it featured another MeLo-X score, built from remixed bits of BEYONCÉ: “We just wanted the music to be a sound bed for Beyoncé to get her thoughts out,” he explained. Second, we find the star in a similar headspace as she’d seemingly been recording “Ring Off,” sifting through her mother’s lessons and demeanour during her childhood, and trying to understand what all of it meant for her now.

But perhaps most concrete, there’s a moment where Beyoncé potentially refers to the recently-passed Yosra El-Essawy, saying, “I watched my friend’s body deteriorate, and to see someone pass on so gracefully put everything into perspective.” At risk of sounding overwrought, it felt like several chapters had recently been brought to a close, and that something would have to come out of the resultant ash.

Around this time—in a gradual process, meaning it snuck up on people—Beyoncé stopped playing various aspects of the media game expected of her as an A-lister. She’d always been known for her privacy, and had sometimes broken unwritten rules of stardom to protect it—marrying more or less in secret, for example, or releasing photos of Blue before anyone else could. But she took that desire for distance to new heights in the years after BEYONCÉ.

In hindsight, a lot of 2014 had been spent testing the waters. When she’d covered Out in April, journalist Aaron Hicklin began his piece by explaining that “the opportunity to write about the star materialized with an unusual condition.” Beyoncé was too busy for an in-person interview—she still made herself available over email—but Hicklin “would have unprecedented access to Parkwood Entertainment, the tight-knit, furiously devoted team at the heart of Brand Beyoncé.” Ed Burke, Todd Tourso, and Melissa Vargas, among others, all received their own mini-profiles.

When Beyoncé had covered CR Fashion Book, the spread—shot by “Ghost” director Pierre Debusschere—ran not with a profile but poems she’d written. (A behind-the-scenes short was uploaded to YouTube, scored by MeLo-X.) “You call me a singer, but I’m called to transform,” one poem read:

to suck up the grief, anxiety, and loss
of those who hear me into my song’s form.
I’m a vessel for all that isn’t right,
for break-ups and lies and double-cross.
I sing into that vessel a healing light.

When the star covered Time, she was blurbed by Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg, who technically drew more on things she imagined Beyoncé saying than any new quotes. “Her answer to the question, What would you do if you weren’t afraid? appears to be ‘Watch me. I’m about to do it,’” Sandberg wrote. “Then she adds, ‘You can, too.’”

While this is actually starting to change somewhat—more on that in Vol. IV—there’s generally been such a caveat whenever Beyoncé has opted to go the traditional media route since around this time. When she covered Vogue the next year, critic Margo Jefferson was commissioned to write a “think piece” to accompany the spread, and the journalist confirmed that there was “no contact with [Beyoncé’s] camp.” (The shoot was given its own short, co-directed by Ed Burke and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby.)

When Beyoncé covered Flaunt elsewhere in 2015, the star—and I’m not making this up—was granted a word-association game in place of an interview. When she covered Beat, things were again done entirely over email, with journalist Michael Cragg taking the emojis she’d included as a sign that things had probably come straight from her. (That shoot wrought a whole series of YouTube videos, including one soundtracked by a James Blake cover of Feist’s “The Limit to Your Love,” and another by Jack White’s cover of U2’s “Love Is Blindness,” which had been featured on Jay-Z’s Great Gatsby soundtrack.)

By the end of 2015, this metamorphosis suddenly felt complete: Beyoncé, one of the most powerful people in pop culture, had gone almost entirely media-silent.

There are multiple reasons why the star seemed to pull back from public life, a few that she’s cited and a few that I’ll add to the list myself.

In 2011, just after she headlined Glastonbury, Beyoncé had subjected herself to a televised chat with Piers Morgan. “It’s hard to keep that excitement that I used to have when I saw a photograph of Michael Jackson or Prince,” she told him, “the mystery and just being able to kind of create the fantasy in your mind.” Asked whether that was one of the reasons she was so private—to “try and keep the mystique,” in Morgan’s words—she nodded and replied, “It’s important. I enjoyed that. It’s an exciting thing as a fan, to be able to yearn for more.”

“Mystique” is a word Beyoncé has used many times as I’ve gone back through her career, with an uptick around Life Is But a Dream in early 2013. “When I first started out, there was no internet,” she says in that film:

people taking pictures of you and putting your personal life—or exploiting your personal life—as entertainment … I think when Nina Simone put out music, you loved her voice … But you didn’t get brainwashed by her day-to-day life and what her child is wearing and who she’s dating and all the things that … it’s not your business … and it shouldn’t influence the way you listen to the voice and the art.

While there’s been a market for glimpses into the private lives of our favourite stars for basically forever, it’s true that none of the artists she’d named had lived out their imperial years in the digital era, with the landscape so structured around accessibility and immediacy. (Scholar Daphne Brooks has pointed to Aretha Franklin as another possible influence on Beyoncé’s interest in narrative control.) In all, Mrs. Carter has arguably done her best to recall a previous era of fame, when mystique wasn’t just possible but in fact the norm.

“One day I decided I wanted to be like Sade and Prince,” she wrote in 2021. “I wanted the focus to be on my music, because if my art isn’t strong enough or meaningful enough to keep people interested and inspired, then I’m in the wrong business. My music, my films, my art, my message—that should be enough.”

Any discussion of Beyoncé’s approach to press beginning around 2014 needs to acknowledge the following: for a decade and a half before that, she’d largely played the game as expected, and the game could be a slog.

Embarking on this project, especially as someone who didn’t start reading much Beyoncé-related writing until after BEYONCÉ, I’ve been wowed by how she’d sometimes been written about earlier in her career. And I’m not referring to journalists doing their jobs, but rather how they’ve often lined even their best work with constant condescension and exoticization. I winced each time I read a white writer turn to some Starbucks-y word (“coffee,” mocha,” etc.) to describe her skin tone, or write that Destiny’s Child “bump and grind like little trollops on stage,” or print Beyoncé and her family’s Southern drawls in a way that felt borderline Margaret Mitchell-esque.

I’ve also been aghast at some of the questions that she’s been expected to answer. We’d heard a couple tackier ones in the circa-2007 Beyoncé Experience documentary—“Does size matter?”—and YouTube is awash with footage of her from the late ’90s through early ’10s visibly embarrassed and/or frustrated during interviews. (See: the obsession with her figure in the press room at the 2007 Golden Globes, or her being grilled about starting the family she was privately trying to start in early 2010.) Her media silence would make it harder than ever for anyone to ask her meaningful questions about her art, but it’s just as true that many who’ve secured an audience haven’t taken the opportunity to ask meaningful questions about her art.

Even when they have, Beyoncé has seemingly struggled to satisfy people with her answers. Since Destiny’s Child, she’s been dogged by criticisms of her performance as an interviewee, ones that often flirt with multiple -isms at once. “I’m not talking about her accent when I say she’s inarticulate,” reads a comment sitting on a 2013 forum, “it’s just the way she phrases things and the kind of (limited) vocabulary she uses.” In 2015, the New York Times wrote that she “occasionally comes off daffy”—and in a piece guessing at why she’d gone silent on everyone.

More recently, the star has indicated that comments like these eventually got to her. “Used to say I spoke too country,” she sings in the opening minutes of Cowboy Carter, a handful of years after advising the global class of 2020, “You don’t have to speak a certain way to be brilliant.” At least some of her behaviour, then, can probably be chalked up to a basic desire for self-preservation. “In this business, so much of your life does not belong to you unless you fight for it,” she’s said. “I’ve fought to protect my sanity and my privacy because the quality of my life depended on it.”

There’s also a clear convenience to approaching fame the way Beyoncé does; since we don’t expect her to be anything but silent, she can take that would-be PR time and energy and spend it on literally anything else. “Beyoncé ignores rumors, does not correct inaccurate reports, and allows the BeyHive—her fan base and machinery—to function independently,” Alicia Wallace wrote in 2017, when that statement was perhaps the truest it would ever be. “While they must wait for the full reveal, they revel in the mystery and the fun that comes with trying to anticipate her next move.”

Simultaneously, as Sasha Frere-Jones once put it, “This puts a heavier burden on fans, who have to create a community and discuss what Beyoncé has started but will not nurture.” She’s implicitly asked everyone to find the answers to their questions in her work, or otherwise turn to a third party for help—an interview with a collaborator, say, or a piece of writing by someone like me. This means that all of us get by on some amount of projection, filling in any gaps with our imaginations. And while this can be a real blessing for artistic analysis, it may be slightly more complicated for the woman herself, whose every movement is now scrutinized in sometimes ridiculous ways.

“When you’re a celebrity, no one looks at you as a human anymore,” she says in Yours and Mine. But in lieu of dehumanization, Beyoncé has in some ways purposefully embraced a more favourable kind of it: deification. And that comes with its own set of downsides.  

You may be wondering, What does any of this have to do with Beyoncé’s filmmaking? And the answer is: everything.

In the absence of sit-downs with journalists or spontaneous IG Lives, the star’s moving-image work has emerged as one of few venues through which she reliably speaks to us. These releases therefore tend to come off as official statements about particular projects and/or stretches of time—and are generally read as being chock-full of material she’s been keeping safe in her “crazy archive” just for this moment.

As Tshepo Mokoena has written, noting that 2012 had seen Beyoncé launch a Tumblr—eventually supplanted by her website, where she used to upload photo dumps to a section called “The Vault”—“Over time, it would become clear that visual media, rather than the 140-character written word, was her preferred mode of mass communication.” Even once she made the jump to Instagram that same year, she’d often leave posts uncaptioned. (Again, her approach to some of these things has evolved a little in recent years, but we’ll get to that next time.)

When Beyoncé releases a film, there’s a sense that fans are finally getting the facts—an idea bolstered by her affinity for documentaries, with their air of truth-telling and record-correcting. The implication is that this is a reliable narrator finally chiming in with one of her rare but earnest peeks behind the curtain.

But we’ve already been talking about the star as a sometimes sketchy onscreen historian, in ways that have ranged from naughty to knotty. (Some examples are harmless or even funny, like how the “B” she draws in the sand in Year of 4 stemmed from her writing “Brazil,” not “Beyoncé.”) At best, she gives us a highly filtered version of her life, since it was she herself who hand-selected and narrativized everything we see. And while this is entirely within her right as a filmmaker, there’s still always technically the risk of distorting the record.

“The more I mature, the more I understand my value,” Beyoncé said several years ago:

I realized I had to take control of my work and my legacy because I wanted to be able to speak directly to my fans in an honest way … There were things in my career that I did because I didn’t understand that I could say no.

There are different meanings of the word “value,” but there’s indeed significant monetary value in Beyoncé conducting herself this way. Soon in this story, she’ll hire a business powerhouse named Steve Pamon, who told Billboard in 2019, “It has become part of Beyoncé’s brand to surprise and delight. The other big piece, mathematically speaking, is the amount of money and effort that people put into hype.”

In the aggregate, the star keeping herself so scarce foments demand for her art; if a glance into her private world is available only through a new piece of music or feature film, there are many who’ll happily pay for it. And as we’ll see a couple of times later, they’ll even subscribe to a whole new streamer.

Not uncommon in this story, it was to be a controversial awards season for Beyoncé.

To get the non-controversial stuff out of the way first, though: On the Run Tour was nominated for Best Music Film at the 2015 Grammys, whose visual awards are split between a work’s director(s), producer(s), and star(s). While this was the first nomination in the category for star/producer Jay-Z as well as producers Svana Gisla and Dan Parise, it was the fourth for director Jonas Åkerlund (a two-time winner) and the second for both star/producer Beyoncé and producer Ed Burke, who’d been nominated (with Frank Gatson) for co-directing I Am… World Tour.

Best Music Film is the Recording Academy’s long-form visual award, and has favoured different kinds of projects in different moments since its mid-’80s inception. In the 21st century, it generally goes to traditional docs about rock—or sometimes jazz, soul, and rap—acts, particularly legacy ones. When there are exceptions, they’re typically made for concert films, but that’s happened just five times since the turn of the millennium, and again nearly always for rock legends. (In the award’s four decades, six winners have concerned the Beatles in some way.)

Beyoncé will eventually become one of just two “non-rockers” (said semi-ironically) who’ve won Best Music Film for a 21st-century concert film—the other is actually Madonna, who won for Åkerlund’s The Confessions Tour (2006)—but not for On the Run Tour. The Carters’ project was nominated against three other concert films that February—starring Coldplay, Metallica, and Pink—plus Morgan Neville’s back-up singer documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom (2013). It wasn’t much of a surprise when Neville’s film won, not only because of voters’ established preference for docs but because it had won the most recent Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

So now for the 2015 ceremony’s dual Beyoncé controversies. A big awards-season player that year—in both music and film—was Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), about the Selma to Montgomery marches. Its credits song, a John Legend and Common track called “Glory,” drew a line from the Civil Rights Movement to the recent goings-on in Missouri. “Resistance is us,” Common raps. “That’s why Rosa sat on the bus / That’s why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up.”

Though “Glory” wouldn’t be eligible for any Grammys until 2016, it had recently won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and was about to win the equivalent Oscar. So despite it not actually being a 2015 nominee, Legend and Common were booked to perform the song at that year’s Grammys.

The story goes that Beyoncé reached out to the pair asking if she could introduce their performance with her own of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the gospel classic that appears in Selma when Mahalia Jackson (played by singer Ledisi) beams it over the phone to MLK, Jr. at his request. “You don’t really say no to Beyoncé if she asks to perform with you,” Legend explained at the time, and so they didn’t.

In lieu of anything from BEYONCÉ, which was nominated for Album of the Year—as a reminder, she and Jay-Z had done “Drunk in Love” at the 2014 ceremony—the star performed “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” with a chorus of a dozen Black men. Everyone onstage wore white, their bodies forming a sort of “X.” The men went barefoot, and at one point made what had become known as the “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. Beyoncé finished her rendition of the song, which drew mixed reviews in gospel circles, with tears in her eyes.

Everyone involved here had walked right into some drama, since Ledisi wasn’t just in attendance but actually nominated against Beyoncé for a Grammy; “Drunk in Love” would win Best R&B Performance over Ledisi’s “Like This.” That made it especially easy for both artists’ fans to start warring about whether Beyoncé deserved to be up there singing Mahalia Jackson’s song.

“Why aren’t you singing that song?” Ledisi was asked on the red carpet, and while she first burst out laughing and responded, “I don’t have a clue,” she then said that she and Beyoncé now both existed in an honourable lineage: “Her generation will now know this song.”

To cap the evening off, in what was widely considered an upset—if not her album, then multiple publications guessed that it would be Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour (2014)—BEYONCÉ lost Album of the Year to Beck’s Morning Phase (2014). Prince had been invited to present the statuette, in all likelihood by producers who assumed it was Beyoncé’s; it could’ve been a cool full-circle moment given his influence on her project.

When Kanye West briefly jumped onstage during Beck’s acceptance speech, in a joking nod to his infamous stunt in Beyoncé’s name at the 2009 VMAs, Prince visibly struggled to stifle a giggle.

The very next day, a documentary called “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”: The Voices (2015) appeared on YouTube, again free of credits.

As had become Beyoncé’s go-to for such material, this eight-minute short was entirely black-and-white. She’d deviated, however, from her usual soothing voiceovers so that she and her Grammy co-performers could address the camera as talking heads. Their words are bolstered by footage of them rehearsing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and by the kinds of shots more typical of a Parkwood doc—Beyoncé sitting with Todd Tourso while she scribbles on a mock-up of the stage, for example.

“She’s taking a leap and taking a risk,” one collaborator says, “going from her normal presentation of a record or a hit song, and … doing what’s close to her heart.” We then see another add:

It’s a great message to send out to the world, especially because of all of the turmoil going around, with Ferguson and Mike Brown … I feel like being a part of this is showing Black men in a positive light … We have value. Our lives have meaning.

Early on, the star tells us that she had a personal connection to the song. “The first time I heard ‘Precious Lord,’ I was a kid and my mother sang it to me,” she says, “and my mother played me Mahalia Jackson’s version.” Though I haven’t been able to cross-check this detail, J. Randy Taraborrelli claims in Becoming Beyoncé that Ms. Tina specifically sang it to her eldest child when the family was experiencing their mid-’90s financial difficulties. “With her eyes closed and her hands facing her daughter, palms up in supplication,” the biographer writes, “she … sang the hymn, almost as if in a trance, completely overtaken by the message.”

In any case, Beyoncé adds a second connection. “My grandparents marched with Dr. King,” she explains:

And my father was part of the first generation of Black men that attended an all-white school, and my father has grown up with a lot of trauma from those experiences. I feel like… now I can sing for his pain, I can sing for my grandparents’ pain. I can sing for some of the families that have lost their sons.

On one level, the short was a rebuke to anyone who’d criticized her presence on the Grammys stage. Perhaps more significant, though, it was a snapshot of her artistic headspace in 2015. She’d not only lovingly invoked both parents, seemingly prioritizing empathy in spite of everything; she’d also cast herself as a sort of intergenerational, intracommunal vessel—a dot-connector who could sing others’ pain.

As the onscreen rehearsal comes to an end, a smiling Beyoncé orders a very polite “Cut” before the picture drops out.

With the star between albums, 2015 would be a year of corporate levelling up for Parkwood. For one, she began eyeing a relocation of her company from New York to Los Angeles, where she was apparently beginning to spend most of her time. Soon, she’d also swap out many of the business people around her. As publicist Yvette Noel-Schure explained once this started coming to the public’s attention, Beyoncé had “created new departments and recruited new executives from the tech, business and entertainment sectors … to help grow Parkwood and its interests.”

One of the those interests, evidently, was mentorship. In Vol. I, Beyoncé claimed that she’d be “an art teacher at a middle school” were her music career to fizzle out, and in Vol. II—her career not exactly tracking to fizzle out—she’d said that she dreamed of nurturing other talent through a label of her own. “I don’t know if I want to manage,” she clarified in Beyoncé: For the Record (2009). “But if anything, I am a really good teacher and I know a lot of things about performing, and I would love to just help new artists and young artists.” In 2013 alone, she’d publicly returned twice to the idea of developing other acts—in her interview with the Gentlewoman, and at her BEYONCÉ screening event in December.

2015 was the year that she finally started making these dreams a reality, signing a handful of artists to development deals through Parkwood. There was teenager Sophie Beem, an aspiring pop star from New York who’d once been an X-Factor contestant; there was rapper Ingrid, a childhood friend of the Knowles sisters whom Mathew had at one point signed to Music World Entertainment. (She’s the one cycling with Beyoncé and Solange in the “Blow” video.)

There were also teenage sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey, lifelong actresses best known around that time for covering pop songs and posting their work on YouTube. As mentioned in Vol. I, Chloe had actually played Beyoncé’s younger self in the opening scene of The Fighting Temptations (2003), but she and her sister got back on the star’s radar after their take on “Pretty Hurts” went viral in late 2013.

We’ll come back to these signees when they’re officially launched.

As far as her own career went, I’d forgotten how busy Beyoncé herself managed to be during this quote-unquote off-season. Things had begun in February with the official release of her slow and sultry update of “Crazy in Love,” which Boots had co-produced for the 50 Shades of Grey (2015) soundtrack.

The months that followed also brought a wild amount of shorter moving-image work—or “content,” in Parkwood parlance—for me to weave into this chapter. “We do a lot of video, a lot of content,” Lee Anne Callahan-Longo told a room of undergrads that year (not too long before she was replaced by JPMorgan Chase’s Steve Pamon, who’d coordinated the bank’s sponsorship of On the Run). “The old model of video is dead, but content is certainly important.”

In 2015, Parkwood’s chosen home for content was Tidal, a music and video streamer Jay-Z had recently purchased. The platform was officially launched in March of that year, in part through a press conference hosted not only by the Carters but also Usher, Madonna, Chris Martin, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Kanye West, and more. “The artists announced onstage at the New York event Monday were introduced as co-owners of the company,” Variety summarized, “representing the first artist-owned digital-music service.”

On the Carters’ seventh wedding anniversary the next month, Beyoncé released a Tidal-exclusive video called “Die with You” (2015), which featured her singing the love song at a piano while her husband filmed her. (I’ll talk more about it when it gets an upgraded video later.) She and Minaj then took Coachella to film a video for their recent collaboration, “Feeling Myself,” which would be released as its own exclusive.

“Feeling Myself” (2015) is kind of like “7/11” with glossier production; there’s a similar sort of jokey, improvisational vibe as the two drink and dance around the desert. And though it’s officially a Nicki Minaj video featuring Beyoncé, the song having appeared on The Pinkprint (2014), it practically screams Parkwood production: not only do we seemingly hear Todd Tourso named in its opening seconds, but there’s also a sense that the camera belongs first and foremost to his boss, the only half of the collab who sometimes holds it to her liking or swats it away. There are even sudden cutaways to quick doc inserts, like the kind Beyoncé was always building into her work.

“Changed the game with that digital drop,” she boasts of her self-titled album, not wrongly. “Know where you was when that digital popped / I stopped the world!”

Later that spring, on Stevie Wonder’s 65th birthday, Beyoncé released another Tidal exclusive called “Happy Birthday Stevie” (2015), a five-minute short highlighting the rehearsals for an electrifying Wonder tribute she’d performed two days after the Grammys. Her clothing indicates that these were the same sessions as those for “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” with both black-and-white docs clearly made in tandem. (There appears to have been at least some overlap between the two groups of men who’d accompanied her onstage.)

Most of “Happy Birthday Stevie” plays like a Beyoncé-led jam session, and she tells us that that’s exactly how rehearsals felt. (It also builds in archival footage of 13-year-old Wonder performing “Fingertips,” a song the star had included in her tribute, on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.) She explains that she’d been a fan of co-performer Ed Sheeran’s for a few years, and that she reached out to him for the tribute because he’d previously covered “Master Blaster (Jammin’).” We’re also treated to an extended guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr., the future Cowboy Carter collaborator who’d joined Beyoncé and Sheeran for “Higher Ground.”

In September of 2015, Beyoncé headlined two music festivals: Global Citizen, where she performed an hour-long set (and Sheeran made another appearance), and the Mr. Carter-founded Made in America, which not only gave her an extra half-hour but was also simulcast on Tidal.

The latter’s extended runtime was mostly felt in the form of more costume changes and props—Crazy Horse-style poles for “Partition,” for instance. But there were also a couple of additional interludes, including a Dikayl Rimmasch-directed one where a nude Beyoncé played around with an orchid on a rotating chair, scored by the instrumental from her “Back to Black” cover for The Great Gatsby.

Mostly, though, the two September sets overlapped. She opened both with her “Crazy in Love” redo from 50 Shades of Grey. Both had been designed in part around wooden boxes built for her and her dancers, which could stand upright or be turned on their sides. Both featured screen content where Beyoncé for some reason wore clothes that read, “Ivy Park.” Both featured a dance interlude set to the late Maya Angelou’s 1978 poem “Phenomenal Woman.” And in both, Beyoncé performed a version of “Diva” that sampled Quincy Jones’s Ironside theme, better known now as “the Kill Bill siren.”

As well as temporarily putting the Made in America set on Tidal, Beyoncé then uploaded a three-minute exclusive called “Unboxed: 2015 Festivals BTS,” where we watch her team design and build her stage (at first using a Betty Boop toy as her stand-in on their mini model). The clip’s doc footage was again black-and-white, while snippets from the two festival livestreams appeared in colour.  

In Vol. I, we talked about The Making of Dangerously in Love (2003), a behind-the-scenes short where Beyoncé betrays that she doesn’t have final cut—“No, don’t put that in there!” she says after making a risqué joke. “Unboxed” contains a fascinating coda to that moment, one clarifying where exactly the power now lay a decade or so later. “Cut that shit off!” the star joke-orders a videographer during her 2015 rehearsals. “Make me,” he responds, to which she evil-laughs and fires back, “I can!”

Finally in terms of these Tidal projects, a little after she and Nicki Minaj performed “Feeling Myself” at an event for the streamer in October, the performance was released as an exclusive on the platform. To further urge people into subscribing, Beyoncé uploaded a couple behind-the-scenes glimpses (both black-and-white), including a 22-second video where she reimagined Prince’s “Darling Nikki” from Purple Rain.

Post-BEYONCÉ, in keeping with her greater pull back from traditional A-list life, its maker became especially selective about things like brand endorsements; even before then, product placement was always hard to find in her videos. With the advent of Tidal, however, she didn’t seem to mind that there was always a watermark on the actual picture, something that would appear on almost everything released around this time. (“Feeling Myself” contains an additional bit of advertising for Tidal, with the logo visible as a poster when Beyoncé is taking selfies in the tub.)

Taking precedence, it seems, was her wish to steadily lure fans over to the service.

But what of longer-form projects?

We should first acknowledge the 2015 Emmys, which had taken place between Beyoncé’s festival sets. On the Run Tour had garnered her a second Emmy nom, this one for a Primetime Creative Arts Emmy that was then called Outstanding Special Class Program (it’s now Outstanding Variety Special [Live]). She was listed as one of nine producers on the ballot, alongside Jay-Z, Lee Anne Callahan-Longo, Ed Burke, and more.

The film was nominated against the 2014 Tonys, the 2015 Golden Globes, the 2015 Oscars, and the Emma Thompson-starring Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Live from Lincoln Center) (2014). While the latter ended up winning, Beyoncé had chosen not to attend the ceremony anyway, possibly because the Creative Arts Emmys are presented during one separate to the Emmys proper. (She hadn’t gone when her 2013 halftime show was nominated, either, though she did have a Mrs. Carter Show stop in Brazil that day.) Fear not: we’ll get multiple more brushes with the Emmys before we’re through.

Six years had now passed since Beyoncé had physically appeared in a narrative feature, Obsessed (2009). And putting aside her voice performance in Epic, there was a sense that her acting career had awkwardly paused; as a reminder, Vol. II concluded with her pulling out of Clint Eastwood’s A Star Is Born remake. It was also reported around the same time that she was attached to a Ryan Murphy-directed musical called One Hit Wonders, but that apparently died on the vine, too.

In truth, there were various attempts by directors to get Beyoncé in their movies and television specials in the mid-’10s. For one, Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, who was set to helm the live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017), tried to reunite with his Deena Jones by offering the star the role of feather duster Plumette. He’d later admit that it probably wasn’t a big enough part to entice her, and Plumette would eventually be played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

According to Bradley Cooper, who’d produced and starred in American Sniper (2014) for Eastwood and eventually saw the A Star Is Born remake through as both director and leading man, Beyoncé was still the first choice for the film’s leading lady when he was given the reins of the project around then. “She was incredible,” Cooper would say, recalling how he pitched his take on the film to her at her house while Jay-Z watched Judge Judy. “And we developed it for like a year together … then that fell through.”

Cooper’s original choice for the film’s male lead was apparently an unnamed “actual musician” that the studio wouldn’t get on board with, and Variety has suggested that this may have been Tidal co-owner Jack White—soon to become a creative collaborator of Beyoncé’s regardless. As everyone knows, Lady Gaga and Cooper himself would take over these two main roles, and the film premiered in 2018.

Beyoncé was also reported to be in talks to play Glinda the Good Witch of the South in The Wiz Live! (2015), a televised staging of the musical co-directed by Kenny Leon and Matthew Diamond. This would’ve been another role on the smaller side, if one attached to a title that had been so formative—and that would’ve put the star directly in the lineage of the great Lena Horne, who’d played Glinda in The Wiz (1978). The role ultimately went to Uzo Aduba, who performed alongside a couple of names (Common, Ne-Yo) from earlier in Vol. III.  

When it comes to named roles in films Beyoncé hasn’t co-directed—there have been nine, all but one discussed already—she’s typically played a real person (e.g. Etta James) or someone who’d been played by someone else in the past (e.g. Carmen, Deena Jones, Nala). I’ve also gotten into how several were characterized by the legends they either evoked (e.g. Deena being a Diana Ross stand-in) or actually invoked (e.g. telling a version of James’s story).

“One of the ways she established gravitas, adding dimension to her persona and exceeding the career trajectory of her peer group,” argues Jason King in a 2019 essay on Beyoncé’s acting:

was to step into the high heels, as it were, of talented and assertive 20th century black female musical icons … Just as Diana Ross silenced naysayers and deepened her post-Motown persona by stepping into the role of jazz icon Billie Holliday in 1972’s “Lady Sings the Blues,” Beyoncé rocketed to superstardom by playing, or playing alongside of, a bevy of black musical greats, superimposing their phenomenal auras onto hers.

When the star has originated a role, it’s often been in the context of an existing media property; it’s the new Austin Powers movie, or the new Pink Panther movie, or it’s Obsessed, where she’s the wife in the unofficial Fatal Attraction redo. There’ve been a couple exceptions, The Fighting Temptations and Epic (though that was technically an adaptation of a children’s book), but they’re the kind that prove the rule.

So what is that rule? Well, something I’ve hoped to convey throughout this series is that Beyoncé has often seemed to seek film-world respect by latching onto its already-respected entities. In the context of her acting, this means that a project is already somewhat iconic before she’s involved; in conjuring up film history, history is baked in even if she doesn’t make any of her own. It also means that her roles in these projects, as with the titles themselves, are as easy to quickly summarize the way I did just a moment ago—aspiring blockbusters rather than arthouse fare.

These circa-2015 offers—Plumette in Condon’s film, the titular star in Cooper’s, Glinda in Leon and Diamond’s—were all consistent with this idea; the fact that Beyoncé was herself an icon was incidental to these films’ icon status, not what made them iconic. A couple may have aligned her with her idols (Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand with A Star Is Born, Lena Horne with The Wiz), but there wasn’t any guaranteed ROI past that. Their soundtrack potential also varied, with Beauty and the Beast and The Wiz more or less locked save for perhaps a new credits song.

A decade and a half into starring in movies, one wonders whether Beyoncé took a real hard look at the pile. On the one hand, she’d played a smattering of beloved characters in titles that meant a lot to people, with Dreamgirls landing her a Golden Globe nomination for acting (separate to her two nods for Best Original Song). On the other hand, only a couple of these opportunities had come without some kind of trade-off; more often, she’d been an enjoyable part of an otherwise mediocre project (e.g. The Pink Panther [2006]) or part of a solid project that had wilted at the box office (e.g. Cadillac Records [2008].)

If Beyoncé’s goal in Vol. I had been to win an Oscar for acting, she’d unfortunately never come all that close, despite a great deal of time and investment. In both that chapter and the following one, we talked at length about the diets, and the tears, and the let-downs from different awards bodies. (There’d also been aspects of movie-making she openly hated, like having to kiss co-stars while a room of people watched—another thing to add to the cons list for both Beauty and the Beast and A Star Is Born.) And this is all to say nothing, I might add, of how critics couldn’t exactly agree on whether she was a promising actress to begin with.

Just as important, though, lots had changed since Obsessed—Beyoncé hadn’t yet directed a feature then, let alone four—and even since Epic. As I argued earlier, her self-titled album in late 2013 had come with her most monumental “movie” project yet, and it was an entirely customized one. It had originated with the images in her brain and on her vision boards, and was brought to life by a hand-picked team that she’d gotten to lead—working on it for as long as she needed, and promoting it just as she preferred.

If Beyoncé was now considered a legend in her own right, her fifth album was easily the central gem in her crown. And when each of these filmmakers courted her in 2015, ultimately unsuccessfully, they wouldn’t have known that she was already working on a new film of her own.   

At some point in the Carters’ music-making journey, it was clear that Beyoncé had a solo album that should emerge first. “The music she was making at that time was further along,” Jay-Z has said. “So her album came out as opposed to the joint album that we were working on.”

In the fall of 2015, around when she was headlining those two festivals, filmmaker Kahlil Joseph was approached by Beyoncé about working together. It wasn’t the first time they’d been in contact: while a 2017 New Yorker profile would explain that “nothing had quite gelled” between them in the past, he appears to be credited (as “Khalil” Joseph) under “Additional Cameras” on Life Is But a Dream. Joseph had spent the intervening years working with other musicians, directing videos for artists like FKA twigs and spearheading two films tied to albums: m.A.A.d (2014), the companion to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), and The Reflektor Tapes (2015), a documentary for Arcade Fire.

When Beyoncé contacted Joseph this time, he’d recently lost his younger brother, painter and curator Noah Davis, to a rare cancer. And as Hilton Als summarized in the same New Yorker profile, the star was looking for a co-director on “a film linked to her new album, a story of infidelity, the gathering and shattering of trust.” She planned on paying for it out of pocket, and it was “set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina,” so Joseph eventually headed to Louisiana with his wife/producer, Onye Anyanwu, and their newborn daughter, Zora.    

There were certain things that made Beyoncé and Joseph complementary collaborators, at least on paper—a shared fondness for black-and-white, a preference for shooting on film. But just as I’ve so far been arguing that the star is a highly visual musician, those who’ve spent time with Joseph and/or his work also tend to describe him as a highly musical visual artist. Als, for his part, dubbed Joseph “a master of sound.” Cinematographer Chayse Irvin, a frequent collaborator, has echoed that he “sees cinema more like jazz than anything else.”

It seems, however, like the two were unfortunately less compatible in practice. Irvin has described a six-day shoot in December of 2015, by which point Beyoncé’s album was nothing close to complete. They filmed at various historic sites around New Orleans—Anyanwu once mentioned snakes and “what seemed to be thousands of mosquitos,” and Beyoncé herself has joked about the mud—including several with existing ties to the film or TV worlds. There was Fort Macomb, a Civil War landmark that had been featured on True Detective, and there was the Destrehan plantation, where both Interview with the Vampire (1994) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) were shot. (A second plantation, Madewood, would later appear in The Beguiled [2017], and the Beyoncé connection was more than a little exciting to Sofia Coppola’s cast.)

Multiple sources in my research pointed to tension between Joseph and Parkwood, with Irvin actually calling the project “a nightmare” for the director. “There wasn’t much trust from Beyoncé and her team for what he was doing,” the cinematographer has said, but he’s elsewhere said that the highly improvisational Joseph “refused to write a treatment … so there was no way for the production company to draft a budget, or for Beyoncé and her team to completely figure out what we were doing.” Whatever happened, it seems to have soured Joseph’s feelings on the film, and what few public comments he’s ever made about it—and about Beyoncé, whom he likes to suggest he didn’t exactly jump to work with—have presumably been coloured by that.

But anyway, it was around this time that he introduced the star to the oeuvre of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. Though based in London, Shire happened to receive an email from Parkwood while on a trip to Los Angeles—and like many who’ve received these over the years, she initially assumed it to be fake. She luckily ended up in “a huge industrial studio” with Beyoncé that same afternoon, and their meeting doubled as a chance to bond over their late mutual friend, photographer Yosra El-Essawy. “It helped me grieve,” Shire would later tell journalist Alexis Okeowo for her own New Yorker profile.

This is something I didn’t realize about what became Lemonade (2016) until recently: that it was in some ways the product of joint mourning on the part of its core creatives—a way to process lost family, lost friends, and perhaps more generally things that were. According to Todd Tourso, Parkwood had been looking to “expand on the emotional arc of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief,” five tiers (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) outlined by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying (1969).

The team apparently wanted to apply these expanded stages to an intergenerational relationship—“and then in conversations, we got to talking about African-American generational struggles,” Tourso has said. Or as Melina Matsoukas would put it in still another New Yorker profile (though the director wasn’t yet involved in late 2015), Beyoncé “wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family.” Ask Joseph about the film, however, and he’ll tell you that “the whole thing was [his] idea,” that he “helped [the star] think through how to present it as a visual project and the people to cast.”

In any case, Shire had left her meeting with a copy of the album, and was asked to write alongside it. She’d “long composed her poetry to music, so the process was familiar,” Okeowo writes in her piece on the poet:

“I really drew from my own experiences,” [Shire] told me. “Women lose their minds often because of men.” … She had conversations with her husband about their problems, and “what it means to forgive.” She reflected on her parents’ divorce, and imagined what it would have taken for them to stay together: “That was a place for me to be able to play around with this version of events where things do work out.”

While Beyoncé chipped away at her film, the public got a little trigger-happy with rumours of a fake one.

In the first week of 2016, the Sun claimed that the star was secretly working on a biopic of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, the Indigenous South African woman who, under the name “Hottentot Venus,” was cruelly exhibited around 19th-century Europe for her “exotic” features. As per the report, Beyoncé was co-writing the film alongside a team of screenwriters, and actually intended to play Baartman in it.

Despite the story coming from a notoriously sketchy tabloid, it spread like wildfire as if it were either credible or plausible given Beyoncé’s film history. (I was surprised to see how many reputable news organizations parroted it without skepticism.) And there was immediate blowback online, with one South African chief going on the record that the star was both ‘arrogant’ and ‘lacking basic human dignity.’

Eventually, Yvette Noel-Schure issued a (by this point rare) statement on her client’s behalf. “Beyoncé is in no way tied to this project,” the publicist wrote, though she added: “This is an important story that should be told.”

While some publications would openly wonder whether the project was being scrapped because of the criticism, I’m inclined to think that it never existed—at least, not in the iteration that the Sun had suggested. Given that Lemonade would be full of nods to real historical figures and events, not to mention steeped in 19th-century aesthetics, it’s possible that someone had been poorly tipped off to the project Beyoncé was in fact working on. You can see how someone might recognize Baartman’s likeness on a vision board or in a research folder, and broken-telephone it into something it wasn’t. (Beyoncé would eventually name-check her for real on a song recorded with Jay-Z, released early in the next chapter’s timeframe.)

It’s more likely, though, that the star had been set up for a bad day online—something that may happen to her more frequently because it’s assumed she won’t respond (excellent for rage-bait and ad revenue). Anyone genuinely researching Baartman’s life probably wouldn’t have called it “an important story that should be told,” since it had already been told numerous times onscreen—and as recently as 2010, when Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus had competed for the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Later that January, Coldplay—set to headline the Super Bowl halftime show the next month—released their new single, “Hymn for the Weekend” (2016). Though Beyoncé isn’t credited on the song, where she does prominent background vocals—she’d later be seen recording them in the Coldplay doc A Head Full of Dreams (2018)—she was a main draw of its music video, directed by Ben Mor.  

“Hymn for the Weekend” comes off as a love letter to India and especially Hindu culture; we watch as Chris Martin and his bandmates play their instruments and frolic around different Indian cities, all while a Holi festival takes place. But embedded within this concept is a more specific love letter to moviegoing. Not only is there a brief cameo from actress Sonam Kapoor, certain scenes were also shot at the Imperial Cinema, one of Mumbai’s oldest movie theatres as a remnant of the silent era. Under Mor’s direction, the camera treats everyone from projectionist to patron with reverence, like pieces of a sacred ritual.

Martin is called to the single-screen Imperial to see a movie called Rani (Hindu queen, according to Merriam-Webster), the newest vehicle for none other than Beyoncé. The video portrays her, in henna and a sari, as the hottest actress around; she graces screens big and small just about everywhere you look—little girls admire her on the street, and older ladies ignore her as they do their shopping—but she also smoulders from various posters, and at one point is even projected onto the side of a boat.

Most fans remember “Hymn for the Weekend” as a side quest of Beyoncé’s, if a pretty hyped one (it’s actually Coldplay’s most-watched YouTube video). But I’m mentioning it in this story because, once again, she hadn’t taken a live-action role in years, yet here she somehow was as usual: a seductive, glowing, inescapable film star. And in that sense, perhaps it was less arbitrary a gig than it may have seemed upon release.   

Sometime the same winter, Chris Martin invited Beyoncé and Bruno Mars to cameo in Coldplay’s upcoming halftime show, set to be directed by Hamish Hamilton. The frontman specifically wanted to bless the world with those two artists doing “Uptown Funk,” which had recently become the longest-running Hot 100 number-one of the ’10s. Both accepted, but Beyoncé had some additional plans for America’s most-watched telecast of the year. 

A few weeks before the Super Bowl, Melina Matsoukas signed on for “the fastest delivery [she’d] ever done in [her] life”: a video Beyoncé wanted to premiere just 24 hours prior to halftime, one of multiple the star was adding to Lemonade in the months leading up to its release. As with BEYONCÉ, the project’s music and visuals were being completed in tandem, two halves of an equation. “We had to update the audio to the video team on a constant basis, which added another level to the complexity,” engineer Stuart White has explained. “Sometimes you’d see stuff visually and it would inspire something sonically.”

In his piece on Kahlil Joseph, Hilton Als describes the original cut of Lemonade—which Beyoncé has apparently only let the filmmaker screen in museum contexts—in some detail. “There are no big production numbers, no violence against the male oppressor,” Als writes, though the footage he summarizes did make its way into the final cut nonetheless (a group of women preparing and congregating for an outdoor feast, for instance):

There is something spooky, seductive, and profound about Joseph’s footage of Knowles; he seems to have burrowed into her soul, into the soul of the sadness that she and he were feeling at the time … After Knowles saw Joseph’s cut of “Lemonade,” she chose to go in another direction, and to involve additional directors in the project. She kept some of Joseph’s work, but layered it with her pop take on life, a cleaner narrative line, and a dose of revenge.

Said additional directors were exclusively names we’ve met: Matsoukas, but also Dikayl Rimmasch, Todd Tourso, Jonas Åkerlund, and Mark Romanek. (Lemonade would become the first of Beyoncé’s directorial features not to be co-directed by Ed Burke, with Parkwood’s visual director merely executive producing.)

Going by eventual interviews with the film’s collaborators, they seem to have been given a wide range of information about the project, told only as much as was necessary. “I didn’t know anything … at all except what they asked me to do,” Khalik Allah would say in 2018. Eventually credited as both a cinematographer and second unit director on the film, he explained that it was the first time he’d ever handed off his footage—in this case, Super 8 portraiture of New Orleanians on the street—to be edited into someone else’s vision: “Everyone played their position … It was like I was another accent, as part of the whole thing.”

Though Beyoncé hadn’t yet worked with Romanek—as a reminder, he was a longtime collaborator of Jay-Z’s—this meant that everyone on the directors list proper was already vetted to some extent. In a fascinating way, they’d also all been involved in either On the Run or Åkerlund’s On the Run Tour, which is to say a past instalment in the Carters’ cinematic marital-demon saga. (It was Romanek who’d introduced Rimmasch to the Carters, and snippets of “99 Problems” had been part of the 2014 show’s screen content.)

Vetting be damned, though, it was during these final months of work that the public started to hear rumblings of a new Beyoncé visual album. She’d already been clocked back in December taking over the New Orleans Superdome. In January, she was spotted shooting bits of “Pray You Catch Me” in Los Angeles. But perhaps most bizarre, Parkwood stylist Marni Senofonte went ahead and uploaded a Snapchat of the water tower on the Sony Pictures lot—where Beyoncé had also filmed her background visuals for her Vanguard performance—that she’d captioned, “Tis Truly a Movie.”

The day before the Super Bowl in February, Matsoukas’s video, called “Formation” (2016), suddenly appeared on YouTube.

Lyrically, the surprise drop was many things: a celebration of Beyoncé’s tri-state heritage as well as Southern Blackness more generally, a fuck-you to haters and conspiracy theorists, and a flex of power—sexual, industrial, financial. The video set these things against images exemplifying Black pain and survivorship in equal measure; there’s a little boy dancing for a line of police in riot gear until the officers raise their own hands in surrender, there’s four-year-old Blue Ivy (a kid bullied since literally before she was born) giggling and playing with two other little girls, and there’s Beyoncé herself sinking a police cruiser into a flooded New Orleans.

“I wanted to show—this is black people,” Matsoukas would say. “We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” As much as the video brings to mind post-Katrina floodwater, it also gives us NOLA in party mode, at Mardi Gras and in darkly-lit bars. Some of these shots had actually been pulled from That B.E.A.T. (2013), a documentary about the New Orleans bounce scene. Compounded by the song itself being full of Black queer slang—in part because it sampled the voices of local celebrities Messy Mya and Big Freedia—Wesley Morris summarized the release as “remarkably gay.”

Though it isn’t obvious, the segments where Beyoncé appears had been filmed exclusively around Los Angeles; Matsoukas had rented a museum that was then styled to resemble a plantation home, and it was on a soundstage that the team built the artificial lake in which the star and cop car were submerged.

“Formation” was the first piece anyone had gotten from Beyoncé’s forthcoming album, but it would turn out to be a sort of coda to it. One could argue, if they so desired, that it’s really a credits song—not a proper chapter of the story she’d be telling, but a tone-setter, both thematic and aesthetic.

The star had roughly returned to the backdrop of “Déjà Vu” (2006) exactly a decade later, but it felt less like she was gesturing towards antebellum Louisiana from a 21st-century vantage, and more like each of the Beyoncés we see in the video exist in their different timelines simultaneously. As she’d suggested she wanted to achieve with her 2015 Grammys performance, she’d become a time-travelling vessel.   

At the Super Bowl the next day, Beyoncé did dance-battle Bruno Mars while duetting “Uptown Funk,” but first she performed her new song. Styled to recall Michael Jackson during his 1993 halftime show, she and her dancers—themselves dressed in a nod to the Black Panther Party—formed another “X” with their bodies (as they do in the video) while moving through the number. They were also accompanied by an all-women drumline whose instruments bore those same uncontextualized words, “Ivy Park.”

Immediately afterwards, a TV spot announced Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour, set to begin in April. The visual itself was a new version of the Dikayl Rimmasch-directed one that had been used during that sexier interlude from her Made in America set in September.

In the ensuing weeks, right-wingers threw hissy fits, charmed by neither Beyoncé’s messaging nor her symbolism. Leftists were themselves divided about the same, unsure whether the star should be thanked for her advocacy or regarded with skepticism as a multi-millionaire with new work on the way. At the same time as BET called the whole thing “the Blackest takeover of a Super Bowl halftime show in history,” SNL aired a short about all the white people only just realizing Beyoncé was Black. Either way, when a rumour started to circulate that she was sitting on a video featuring the parents of the late Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, it didn’t sound so hard to believe.

In the midst of this, various American police unions called for a boycott of her upcoming tour, and we’d later learn that she posed on the set of the “Hold Up” video holding a “BOYCOTT BEYONCÉ” sign. That means she was still shooting Lemonade in the eight weeks leading up to its release—and theoretically, that what remained of the work may have been shaped somehow by Super Bowl weekend and its aftermath.  

The next month, Beyoncé added a whole other leg to the table of both 2016 and this story more generally: the athleisure brand Ivy Park, a Topshop partnership that had first been announced back in 2014 (though not by that name, which she’d obviously been dropping as an Easter egg over the past little while). The venture seemingly tributed both “Ivy” (or IV, aka four) and Houston’s Parkwood Park, the one we keep returning to in Life Is But a Dream—clearly a site of significance in the star’s brain.  

Like many brands, new Ivy Park x Topshop collections would appear thrice annually—at Spring/Summer, at Autumn/Winter, and around the holidays via Resort. All but one would also be accompanied by a moving-image campaign produced by Parkwood, which means two things as far as we’re concerned.

First, the venture has always been a prime brand-extension opportunity for Beyoncé; under the guise of selling clothes, she could still do things like tacitly endorse another celebrity or display her support for a given cause—feats tricker to pull off in endorsement work for others, put together by others’ teams. (In the next chapter, once Ivy Park ditches Topshop for Adidas, she’ll essentially use a collection to wink at the Oscar campaign she isn’t running.)

But because it was Beyoncé’s usual team putting these spots together from the jump, they’ve also always been consistent with her filmmaking quirks. In the Topshop days, this meant liberally moving between black-and-white and colour, throwing in some footage shot on film as well as the odd home video, and overlaying everything with her own voiceover. Even more interesting, these short-form offerings would sometimes elaborate on—or even tease—her filmography in the traditional sense, an idea that’ll follow us into Vol IV.

Ivy Park was launched in the few weeks leading up to Lemonade, though we didn’t know that last part yet. In late March, a two-minute spot for the brand’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection—titled “Where Is Your Park” (2016)—was uploaded to YouTube.

“I would wake up in the morning, and my dad would come knocking on my door, tell me, ‘It’s time to go running,’” Beyoncé narrates as we watch her and her dancers exercising in her new product line. This recalled an infamous bit of Girls Tyme/Destiny’s Child lore: that Mathew Knowles used to have his young charges sing while they ran around the neighbourhood, in an effort to build up their endurance and breath control. “I remember wanting to stop,” the star continues, “but I would push myself to keep going. It taught me discipline.”  

Interspersed throughout is material shot around Houston, particularly of the Knowleses’ home on Parkwood Drive and of Parkwood Park. (Much of this material is actually copied and pasted from Life Is But a Dream.) When Beyoncé tells us that she’d keep her runner’s mind occupied with thoughts of the sacrifices her parents had made for her, we get a shot of Headliners. When she adds that she was keenly aware she was her little sister’s hero, we’re shown that familiar footage of the two playing with their cousin on their front steps. (With the exception of this one home video, all the past-tense stuff in the spot is black-and-white, with the future-looking Ivy Park stuff in colour.)    

 But because this is too specific to Beyoncé and her childhood spent training to be a champion—and to the album project she was narratively transitioning into—to make for a compelling athleisure sell, Parkwood Park is then spun into a metaphor:

There are things I’m still afraid of. When I have to conquer those things, I still go back to that park. Before I hit the stage, I go back to that park. When it was time for me to give birth, I went back to that park. The park became a state of mind. The park became my strength. The park is what made me who I am. Where’s your park?

It’s worth saying that Life Is But a Dream had visualized one of these examples, bringing us to Parkwood Park when Beyoncé goes into labour with Blue (in that sequence where we travel up and then down the massive tree trunk). It seemed less, then, like the star was embarking on something wholly new with her brand and more like she was coming back to certain threads that she’d been working with for years, directly elaborating on her most recent visual projects.

(An interesting micro-example of this: for the campaign’s print version, Beyoncé recreated a 1984 Helmut Newton photo of Wall Street and Kill Bill star Daryl Hannah hanging sexily from gymnastics rings.)

Less than a week after the spot, on the Carters’ eighth anniversary, Mrs. Carter was announced as Elle’s newest cover star. The accompanying shoot presented her with natural curls as she modelled Ivy Park in a dance studio, looking not unlike Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (1983).

While the spread featured a Q&A with Beyoncé, it doesn’t seem like she sat for an interview; the intro suggested that writer Tamar Gottesman had pulled it together from merely observing her at her photoshoot in January. As Elaine Lui speculated for Lainey Gossip—noting that Gottesman was probably the daughter of billionaire Noam Gottesman, whose wedding the Carters had attended the year prior—“There is no evidence that they spoke at the shoot. There is no evidence that Beysus even looked at Tamar at the shoot.” Though Elle doesn’t disclaim as much, it seems as though this was another email-conducted affair.

As in “Where Is Your Park,” the cover story threaded Ivy Park’s launch with the messaging of Beyoncé’s next album. After she’s told us that Topshop is one of few places she’d ever been able to shop incognito, that breathable fabrics were a priority for her, and that the brand’s ethos was to “celebrate every woman and the body she’s in while always striving to be better,” we get into some of the artistic Easter eggs.

Asked what she’s learned from her entrepreneur parents, Beyoncé paints a picture of two distinct but complementary role models:

They taught me that nothing worth having comes easily. My father stressed discipline and was tough with me. He pushed me to be a leader and an independent thinker. My mother loved me unconditionally, so I felt safe enough to dream. I learned the importance of honoring my word and commitments from her.

The star reiterated that she was a feminist, but again broadened her focus beyond just women:

I don’t want calling myself a feminist to make it feel like that’s my one priority, over racism or sexism or anything else … Some of the things that we teach our daughters—allowing them to express their emotions, their pain and vulnerability—we need to allow and support our men and boys to do as well.

And lest America think “Formation” had been Beyoncé’s big anti-carceral coming out, she clarified that, too:

Anyone who perceives my message as anti-police is completely mistaken. I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe. But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice … If celebrating my roots and culture during Black History Month made anyone uncomfortable, those feelings were there long before a video and long before me.

Here, we’d slyly been given the tenets of the star’s forthcoming work—that nothing worth having comes easily, that men had pain and vulnerability they deserved to have heard, that Beyoncé was celebrating her roots and culture while aware of the real threats to both.

“I hope I can create art that helps people heal,” she concludes. “Art that makes people feel proud of their struggle. Everyone experiences pain, but sometimes you need to be uncomfortable to transform.”

The same Elle issue turned several pages over to launching Parkwood’s 2015 signees—“a cadre of young artists whose sound and image [Beyoncé] has personally groomed and fostered,” as Gottesman wrote. Each would be making an appearance somewhere on the Formation World Tour, and each would debut a single and video that April to launch their respective 2016 EP.

The first video of Sophie Beem’s—from her self-titled EP—was “Skyline” (2016), directed by “No Angel” cinematographer Shomi Patwary. To some extent, it fused various other BEYONCÉ videos, combining the neon lights of “Blow” with the arcade setting of “XO” and carefree night out of “Jealous.”

To kick off Ingrid’s Trill Feels, the rapper teamed up with Sevyn Streeter for “Flex” (2016), which came with a Houston-set video that felt a bit like a “No Angel” redo. This one was directed by Kevin Calero, who’d previously done a handful of work for Canadian artists like Foxtrott and Coeur de pirate. 

But the most promising offering—at the time of writing, it has more than six million views to Sophie Beem’s roughly 214k and Ingrid’s 190k—was Chloe x Halle’s “Drop” (2016), from Sugar Symphony. In its Andy Hines-directed video, the sisters perform among horses at California’s Big Sky Movie Ranch, where a number of notable productions—particularly Westerns, for both the big and small screen—have been filmed over the years.

“Drop” heralded the arrival of an immensely exciting Gen-Z act; nothing else out there really sounded like early-days Chloe x Halle, with the former sister—then just 17—having also co-produced the single. That they were a package deal with contrasting but compatible personalities and vocal sensibilities was also a crucial part of their appeal. One of the video’s set-ups featured them with their locs braided together, as if to literalize their yin and yang-ness. “They need each other to become one,” reads a comment still sitting underneath it on YouTube. “That’s so dope.”

Aside from the fact that she was about to begin her Formation World Tour, no one knew in any concrete terms how imminent Beyoncé’s next album was; she’d dropped her last one eight months into its associated tour, after all. There were still doubts when, not too long after the Elle story was published, cryptic teasers appeared online for something called Lemonade, set to air on HBO just four days before she’d be hitting the stage in Miami.

Billed as “A World Premiere Event,” Beyoncé appeared to be lip-syncing in this mystery project, and there were seemingly dancers doing choreography. At the same time, she was speaking softly over the cryptic imagery—“What are you hiding?” “Why can’t you see me?”—that was edited together like something in the horror genre, and soundtracked by a collection of unnerving noises.

It feels silly to say now, but it wasn’t obvious to everyone that these were album teasers; though you can see that some comments underneath them guessed as much, others wondered whether Lemonade was the name of Beyoncé’s next single, or a narrated short in the vein of Yours and Mine, or (as multiple users put it, if in jest) “another vegan diet.” But when Lemonade premiered on that Saturday night in late April, it turned out to be the star’s 65-minute magnum opus—another self-billed “visual album,” but one with a much bolder and more headline-making story to tell than her previous two.

“yosra i hope you’re proud of us,” Warsan Shire tweeted shortly after its release.   

Put one way, Lemonade is a dozen music videos strung together, the film running about 20 minutes longer than the album on its own. Songs had been notably trimmed and reimagined by MeLo-X, to the point where the project’s featured artists—Jack White, the Weeknd, James Blake, and Kendrick Lamar—seemingly weren’t needed onscreen. The added runtime, then, came from the film’s interludes, where Beyoncé reads stretches of Shire’s poetry. (In the end, the poet had adapted several existing pieces, including “How to Wear Your Mother’s Lipstick,” “Nail Technician as Palm Reader,” and others.)

The album was initially released as a Tidal exclusive on the same evening, but only after much of the film had already aired. On one level, this meant Beyoncé had again forced everyone to picture exactly what she wanted them to as they heard her new music for the first time. But just as important, it was in that multimedia state—audio, but also visuals and poetry—that her project was at its most potent: the star was finally—after years of rumours and semi-admissions—telling her story of being cheated on, but where she was also drawing a parallel between “betrayal in the context of [her] marriage to what it means to be African American,” as Daphne Brooks has put it.

Crucially and controversially, however, Lemonade is not ultimately about the dissolution of a marriage—until its halfway mark, one would be forgiven for assuming it was an elaborate divorce announcement—but a marriage that’s shattered and pieced back together in a stronger state. In a coffee-table book that Beyoncé would eventually release featuring photos from the album era, called How to Make Lemonade (2017), there was a page titled “BROKEN IS BETTER THAN NEW.” Printed below was a definition of kintsugi, a Japanese practice that makes art out of repairing broken pottery, the cracks not just kept visible but actually highlighted in gold or silver. And indeed, a kintsugi bowl appears in the film.

“We chose to fight for our love, for our family,” Jay-Z would say, “to give our kids a different outcome, to break that cycle. For Black men and women, to see a different outcome.” While promoting BEYONCÉ earlier in this chapter, its namesake had spoken vaguely of having learned to take the good with the bad; her sixth album wrung a whole narrative from this idea, and its overall message was—like the drink itself—as sour as it was sweet.

The film begins with one of many invented stages of grief, which are announced through onscreen titles: INTUITION, where Beyoncé’s character surmises that her husband has been unfaithful (“Pray You Catch Me”). After throwing herself off the roof of a building—yet another onscreen death—she’s plunged into an underwater dream sequence where she observes the situation from a distance, literally watching her own double as she sleeps.

Then pulling from one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages, DENIAL, Beyoncé takes a baseball bat to a neighbourhood’s worth of cars (“Hold Up”) as she wonders what she’s actually done wrong in her marriage. The scene pulls heavily from Ever Is Over All (1997), an audiovisual piece by artist Pipilotti Rist, and was read as invoking the Yoruba deity Oshun—the “water goddess of female sensuality, love, and fertility,” as Kamaria Roberts and Kenya Downs note. At one point, the star also destroys a CCTV camera reminiscent of the one that had captured her family on the night of the 2014 Met Gala.

In ANGER, the second stage originating with the Kübler-Ross model, Beyoncé’s character tells her husband to go to hell (“Don’t Hurt Yourself”), though we suddenly cut away mid-number to Super 8 footage of other women around New Orleans. “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman,” we hear Malcolm X say in a 1962 speech, adding that she’s also the most unprotected, the most neglected.

It’s around here that Beyoncé’s album zooms out a bit from its central couple—seeking explanations for their ordeal that are more structural and generational than personal, and accordingly, injecting whatever happens next with some wider stakes. It’s also here that we drop Kübler-Ross entirely: APATHY has Beyoncé link up with Serena Williams, among other women, for a second big kiss-off in/around a bus as well as the Madewood plantation house (“Sorry”). By the end of the scene, the star’s character has left her husband with her baby in tow, infamously suggesting that he “call Becky with the good hair.”

Now separated but deeply unhappy, Beyoncé spends much of EMPTINESS being driven around in the back of a black car (“6 Inch”). Not only is she styled like some kind of sex worker, but one who’s actually luring johns to their deaths, a claim I promise to return to. As the song wraps up, the house that’s served as our setting for it is being engulfed by flames, and the star and her fellow ladies pose blankly in front of the burning structure while cameras flash.

In ACCOUNTABILITY, she sings of a late father who raised her to be wary of men like him (“Daddy Lessons”), one of several equivalencies made between the project’s fictionalized Mathew Knowles figure and its fictionalized Jay-Z figure. Though she performs the song from two set-ups—one where she travels around in jeans and braids on a horse, and another where she’s joined by a guitarist at Fort Macomb in period attire—much of the scene is again turned over to footage of New Orleanians, a handful of father-daughter pairings among them. We also see shots of a traditional jazz funeral, lending a curious air of celebration to any of the film’s supposed deaths.

The REFORMATION section then gives us a surprise: Beyoncé’s character returns to her husband and, blessedly, passes the bulk of culpability over to him. Speaking through Shire, the conversation turns to the hurt he’s caused with what you might call his limited imagination. “Why do you deny yourself heaven?” the star asks. “Why do you consider yourself undeserving? Why are you afraid of love?” On a Louisiana beach decorated with flowers and furniture, she dares to choose optimism (“Love Drought”), figuring that the only way to go is up.

The real-life Mr. Carter then joins his wife onscreen—in a high-ceilinged apartment in what appears to be Paris—for FORGIVENESS. She sings directly to him that she’ll stick around if he shows her his scars (“Sandcastles”), likening the foundation on which they’d built their marriage to literal sand. All the while, they’re surrounded by family heirlooms and drawings clearly done by a child; little Blue Ivy seems to represent the next generation whose lives will be shaped by the choices this one makes.

“So how we supposed to lead our children to the future?” we hear a woman ask at the top of RESURRECTION, before answering the question herself: “Love.”

The next song is turned almost exclusively over to an offscreen James Blake, who sombrely sings about forging ahead despite everything that’s happened. Onscreen, the lens again widens beyond the Carters: a montage gives us Black women of various ages clutching photographs of male family members they’ve lost. While this includes model Winnie Harlow, actress Quvenzhané Wallis, and ballerina Michaela DePrince all tributing different ancestors, there are also the so-called Mothers of the Movement sitting with portraits of their late sons: Sybrina Fulton with Trayvon Martin, Gwen Carr with Eric Garner, and Lesley McFadden with Michael Brown.  

These same ladies follow us into HOPE, as do Zendaya, Amandla Stenberg, Chloe x Halle, Ingrid, and more—all gathered at the Destrehan plantation for what seems to be a meal and a show. On an outdoor stage, Beyoncé performs an anthem for these guests about her plan to keep running ‘cause a winner don’t quit on themselves (“Freedom”); an extended stretch is delivered live and acapella rather than paired with the album track, in some ways turning Lemonade into a concert film for 35 seconds. (She’ll do this again in her next visual album.)

Our final section, REDEMPTION, opens with the star speaking of a curse-breaking grandmother who “found beauty where it did not live.” And then, as in Beyoncé’s live shows for almost a decade by that point, Lemonade is given a dedicated home-video section in the form of “All Night.” We see the Carters getting matching “IV” tattoos on their ring fingers; we see them cutting their wedding cake; we see selections from Blue’s life so far, including shots of her playing with her dad in a cleared-out New Orleans Superdome. All of this is mixed with footage of real couples and families on the streets of the same city, children everywhere being led to the future with love.  

In the final few shots of the film—before we get “Formation” in the credits—the Carters hold hands on a nice lawn while their four-year-old smiles between them. The actual final frame has Beyoncé covering the camera lens on the way to stop the recording, characteristically controlling exactly what we see.  

Lemonade, one of the biggest swings of 21st-century pop culture, takes a famous couple’s personal problems and turns them political. In choosing to work through things and stay together, the Carters would argue—in what would reveal itself as a trilogy of albums stemming from their circa-On the Run sessions—they were healing demons, familial and communal, and writing a new story for the next generation. As Spencer Kornhaber has summarized of Beyoncé’s film, “The imagery on display proposes that progress will come from Black women drawing strength from one another and more Black men being made to feel themselves capable of living the kinds of lives that society has told them they can’t live.”

Kahlil Joseph’s contributions serve as some of the film’s most crucial glue, spliced as they ultimately were throughout its runtime. We continually return to Beyoncé and her mostly women co-stars at their various (and more than a little haunted) Louisiana locations, everyone seeming to exist somewhere just outside of the story proper. Not unlike what I argued of the more inaudible voices that had accompanied the star’s on her self-titled album, these characters sometimes feel a bit like ghosts passing through the film—and more on that later, too.

The Joseph-directed stretches, all landscape shots and Dutch angles and as much natural light as the star would tolerate, drew plenty of comparisons to the films of Terrence Malick. (Joseph had in fact worked with Malick in the past, shooting B-roll for To the Wonder [2012].) For many viewers, they also strongly recalled Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), a key title of the L.A. Rebellion that was set to turn 25 later in 2016, meaning it was already being restored in time for a Beyoncé-triggered resurgence. “Warmly received and lavishly praised for its beauty and dreamlike narrative,” Cara Buckley wrote around then:

“Daughters” tells the tale of Gullah women on the Sea Islands off the Southeastern United States in the early 1900s who are tugged north by the Great Migration. It was the first feature film by an African-American woman to have a wide release, an achievement sullied only by the icy reception that Hollywood gave Ms. Dash, back then and pretty much ever since.

Lemonade contained several images that plainly invoked Dash’s film—of characters in high-necked dresses sitting in trees, and posing for photos with an antique camera, and enjoying food outdoors. (Separately but probably not coincidentally, Melina Matsoukas had hired Daughters of the Dust cinematographer Arthur Jafa when the time came to put together “Formation.”) Both projects also made some kind of reference, explicitly in Dash’s screenplay and more implicitly in Beyoncé’s “Love Drought” sequence, to the 1803 mass suicide of 75 enslaved people at Georgia’s Igbo Landing. As the National Museum of African American History and Culture explains, the event “holds symbolic importance within African American folklore as a powerful and evocative story of resistance against enslavement.”

It’s easy to see why Dash’s film would’ve been on the Lemonade vision boards. Both stories concern multiple generations of women in a single family, and both revolve around the older generations trying to make the right calls for the younger ones’ sake. (“The past and the future merge to meet us here,” we hear Beyoncé say early in her project.) A connection that’s been less discussed, though, is how the whole of Daughters of the Dust is narrated by a character named Unborn Child, a young girl whose ancestors we’re watching decide whether to leave their island community behind, in a move that would directly impact her.  

This detail might be key for making sense of Lemonade’s poetry, since Beyoncé actually seems to inhabit different women at different points in the narration. There are plenty of first- and second-person moments related to the main couple, of course (eg. “Are you cheating on me?”). But towards the end of the project, when the star speaks of the aforementioned grandmother who believed “nothing real can be threatened,” said grandmother is presumably Beyoncé herself, since we’re about to hear her sing those words on “All Night.” She’s suddenly narrating, in other words, from two generations down her matrilineal line, as Blue’s imagined daughter.

In the decade and a half that Beyoncé has been directing movies, none has probably received the kind of frame-by-frame and line-by-line analysis that Lemonade has. “Despite the potential for restricted access due to a limited HBO run and exclusive availability via the music streaming service Tidal,” writes Landon Palmer, “[it’s] one of the most widely discussed and dissected media texts of recent years.” (The film remains a Tidal exclusive to this day—it was reported in May of 2016 that more than a million people flocked to the platform in the first week of its release—though it’s also always been bundled with the CD, and five pieces would eventually appear on YouTube.)

This is partly why my summary above is the closest I’ll come to chronologically walking you through the project; for that sort of thing, you might also check out the Dissect podcast’s season on Lemonade, or any of the books that get into the film (I’ve tried to cite several in this chapter), or the countless online pieces that go deep on a specific aspect of it—its showcase of culturally and historically significant Black hairstyles, its “musical and visual journey through the African diaspora,” the potential hidden messages in its cameos, and more.

What I’d like to do below is pull out a handful of threads that don’t stray too far from my actual areas of expertise, that help me position Lemonade as just one entry in a stylistically- and thematically-connected filmography, and that haven’t already been pulled out to death:

• Lemonade as Beyoncé’s ultimate Gothic offering;
• the curious role played in its story by her own work ethic;
• the way that the film—and only really the film—is undergirded by issues of fertility and infertility;
• its blurred line between fiction and non-fiction, including its pointed use of specific home videos;
• and how the project shook the table—industrially, but also personally for both the star and myself.

Among several reasons why Lemonade felt like a continuation of BEYONCÉ, there was its Gothicism.

It once again dealt in the secrets people keep in the dark, in houses that are cold and empty when they’re not being actively hollowed out by fire. The direction for the film’s costumes, according to Marni Senofonte, was “antebellum-slash-Victorian-slash-modern-day,” intended to reflect the collapsing of different timelines. When we don’t hear Beyoncé’s own music or Shire’s poetry—itself dripping in Gothic imagery, but I’ll come back to that—or something from an obscure or even exhumed source (Malcolm X’s voice, Nina Simone’s “Wild Is the Wind,” Tchaikovsky’s Swan Theme, etc.), we hear things like thunderstorms, and swamplands, and crickets.

There’s also the fact that, as mentioned, Beyoncé spends much of the project seeming like a ghost surrounded by other ghosts. “Unknown women wander the hallways at night,” she says early on, in what sounds less like a reference to mistresses and more like a nod to the many phantoms bearing witness to her protagonist’s situation. The star may play at least a couple of these in addition to the scorned wife at the story’s centre, but even said scorned wife sometimes comes off like a spirit herself. Before we get to the film’s talk of birth and baptism, after all, we first have to watch her jump to some kind of death at its opening, and listen as she imagines her own eulogy from beyond the grave.   

While people typically invoke the Kübler-Ross stages of grief in the context of processing loss, I learned writing this chapter that On Death and Dying was actually born out of the psychiatrist’s work with terminally ill patients. As per Cody Delistraty, the book “has been widely misread by the public: her original research was on how people coped with the prospect of their own death, not with the loss of another.” To put this differently, Beyoncé had riffed on Kübler-Ross in a way that was uncommonly authentic to the original publication; it’s the star’s own trajectory of dying and being reborn in her relationship that Lemonade traces.  

Overall, it’s unsurprising how often words like “Gothic” come up when you’re reading about the film. Spencer Kornhaber found that “6 Inch” harkened back to “Partition,” but considered the newer song “queasier and more gothic.” In an academic article, Aisha Durham argued that the project “recalls Michael Jackson’s masterpiece ‘Thriller’ for its ability to show the beauty of Black art through the gothic and grotesque.” Given the film’s setting, many writers were quick to label it a Southern Gothic more specifically; scholar Lauren Cramer, for instance, wrote that it “restages elements of the Southern Gothic around the emotional lives of black women.” (A film that comes up often in reviews is Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou [1997], another Louisiana-set story about the girls and women of a family navigating a father and husband’s secrets.)

All of this, of course, was a path Beyoncé had been going down for some time—perhaps since “Déjà Vu,” which obviously shares certain things with Lemonade as far as both mise-en-scène and romantic anguish. (As we’ll talk about next time, Cowboy Carter also returns to many of these same images and ideas.) To help me think through this stuff better, I took Vol. III as a chance to finally pull an unread book off my shelf, Gothic Cinema (2020) by scholar Xavier Aldana Reyes, and felt my jaw drop repeatedly as I made my way through it: Beyoncé’s 2016 project contains just about every hallmark of the Gothic mode, almost as if it were going down a list.

As Aldana Reyes explains, Gothic films tend to entwine the architectural and the psychological, with oppressive settings making particularly apt locales for oppressed women. Things like “trapdoors, hinges and hidden chambers,” he writes, also go hand in hand with “characters who discover aspects about themselves they were not previously aware of, would rather forget or have actively repressed.”

At the same time as we physically spend much of Lemonade in empty and eerie spaces—fortresses, plantation homes, underground parking garages—the film contains numerous architectural metaphors, both visually and in Shire’s poetry. “I tried to make a home out of you,” Beyoncé narrates in its opening moments. “But doors lead to trapdoors.” (“You can’t make homes out of human beings,” she says in an alternate trailer that once surfaced, the line not appearing in the final cut.)

Her project is also aligned with the Gothic in how its protagonist is made out to be an inheritor of trouble, with its 19th-century locations and costuming a constant reminder of the weight of history—both America’s and her own family’s. “The past is an unfair, brutal place,” writes Aldana Reyes, “one that is defined by threat and the possibility of return: of secrets, of curses, of the supposedly dead and of the actually dead (spectres).” More than once does Beyoncé suggest that her situation is predestined, alluding to some sort of “curse” in her bloodline. As Carrie Battan put it in her review, the star “builds a striking image of marital strife as familial heritage.”

With the so-called Female Gothic in particular, a kind of film that really took shape in the 1940s (key titles including Rebecca [1940], Gaslight [1944], and so on), there’s often a sense of what Aldana Reyes calls “transhistorical doubling”—the idea that the film’s heroine is linked to some other unfortunate woman in the past, and that she’s tentatively doomed to the same fate. “The fear of repetition … literalises the relationship between the heroines and the generations that came before them,” the author writes:

between new and old notions of gender roles. It is not a coincidence that the Female Gothics are often set in the nineteenth century … in Victorian houses … American backwaters and plantations … or in claustrophobic spaces stuck in time … In fighting a villainous husband, the Gothic heroine goes against the social structures that have traditionally enabled male control and contributed to female oppression.

More than anyone else in Lemonade, it’s Beyoncé’s mother whom she seems doomed to tragically emulate—or rather, is emulating when the film opens. Onscreen and in Shire’s poetry, we see and hear daughters watching and learning from mothers throughout the story, and the star speaks multiple times of a woman who’s found herself with a partner uncomfortably reminiscent of her father.

Which is where Beyoncé herself, fed up with all of this baggage, steps in to intervene. “Key to the development of the resourceful and self-reliant heroine … is her awareness of the past,” argues Aldana Reyes, “as well as her ability to learn from it to change the course of present events.” Or as our narrator declares in Lemonade, “There is a curse that will be broken.”

Because this is a Beyoncé project, another spectre hovering over the story is her own work ethic.

The first several tracks of the album are heavy on the idea that her character hasn’t done anything to ‘deserve’ infidelity, that she’s covered all of her bases as a wife, and this seems to include being at the top of her professional game. Early-Lemonade Beyoncé, as Kornhaber has written, believes “that the fierceness of her body and brain should have secured her husband’s loyalty as surely as it has secured her an unwavering fan base.” On “Hold Up,” she refers (as she always does) to their “top-tier, five-star” car sex, but she’s also sure to call herself “the baddest woman in the game.” “You ain’t married to no average bitch, boy,” she proclaims on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” reminding him that she has her own money.

But we find the couple separated by the end of the first act anyway, at which point we get the bewilderingly rich text that is “6 Inch.” Speaking purely lyrically, the song has Beyoncé saluting a woman for her borderline-robotic hustle, which she performs not just for money but also the sheer love of it. It’s hard not to picture the woman described as some kind of sex worker, worth every minute as she stacks cash in clubs in her towering heels. Though people tend to assume that the subject here is the star herself—in which case, sex work has become a curious metaphor for the job description of a global superstar—it’s technically written in the third person; if it is about Beyoncé, then we’re likely meant to read at least some detachment into her grinding.

As the song wraps up, however, we suddenly switch to second-person. “Know just what to do to make you love me,” the star sings—addressing a client or a lover (or even both), depending on how you’ve been hearing the song. It’s then that we get what Kornhaber calls its “goosebump-inducing outro”:

Now, ooh, boy, I’ll make you feel
You’ll always come back to me
Come back, come back
Come back, come back
Come back, come back

By the end of these six “come back”s, Beyoncé is practically croaking the words out, a far cry from the coolness and control “6 Inch” has telegraphed up until now. So no matter what you’ve been picturing while listening, we end on a note of pure desolation.

If you’re interpreting these lyrics straightforwardly, this switch to the second person would seem to be Beyoncé confirming that she’s indeed the hardworking woman she’s been singing about. And even this is thought-provoking on its own, given the song’s dour conclusion—highly unusual as far as her other diva anthems. Is this meant to be the present tense, and our betrayed wife has thrown herself into work to distract from her recent separation, admitting by the song’s end that she’s still longing for her man? Or is this some sort of flashback, and we’re listening as she keeps herself busy while he’s out doing God knows what? Regardless, she’s ended the track both physically alone and unhappy about it.

There are other possibilities here, including that Beyoncé is singing from the perspective of two different women on the song—first the sex worker whose hustle she admires, and second her lonely self. (This is obviously compelling in a whole other way; who is the first character, and what exactly is her role in this story of infidelity? And what would it say, following that thread, that the star spends most of the song complimenting her?)   

The “6 Inch” scene in Lemonade takes advantage of this ambiguity—not cancelling out the above readings, but giving us even more to mull over.

Onscreen, we see Beyoncé being driven around spying on men from under the brim of a massive hat, and dancing behind glass in some sort of peepshow built into the side of a house, and clutching a duvet to her chest in a bed somewhere in that same house. A cursory analysis of all of this tells us not only that she’s chosen to play the song’s sex worker, selecting and seeing clients throughout the scene, but also that this isn’t terribly fulfilling; lyrics like “She don’t mind, she loves the grind” are paired with shots of her looking rather despondent. (It’s the EMPTINESS section, after all.)

Except that Beyoncé doesn’t seem to be soliciting these men, exactly; she seems to be killing them, luring her targets to a room at the end of a long hallway where they meet an unfortunate fate. (The above sequence of one cowboy plays out virtually at the speed of light—grabbing stills was a feat—so this detail isn’t necessarily whacked over viewers’ heads.) “She murdered everybody and I was her witness,” the star sings of her working girl, and the scene would appear to come at this literally.

“6 Inch” ends with Beyoncé walking away from this bedroom as it begins to burn, the flames eventually spreading to the rest of the house. And we officially conclude with a slow zoom out, more than half a minute long, where she—as well as the other women who’ve been occupying this space—stands inscrutably before the flash of numerous cameras while it burns behind them. It’s quite the shot: a home ablaze while the public has a field day.

How you choose to read this scene will, as with the song itself, depend on who you think Beyoncé is playing in it. This could all still be a metaphorical take on her distracting herself with work, whether that’s before or after leaving her husband. It could also be something a bit more out-there than that, where—and I realize how this sounds—she’s imagining herself as the woman her husband has been seeing outside of their marriage; as I argued in our discussion of On the Run, the star has recorded more than one song where she flatters the woman who threatens to—or who already did—rip her man away (on at least one other occasion, by actually killing him).

But because I’m not looking to impose any particular reading of this scene, I’ll give you an even more bonkers one for the road, unlocked by an under-the-radar fact: when Beyoncé performed “6 Inch” on her eventual Formation World Tour, something she’d do just once, “REVENGE”—a word that doesn’t appear in/on Lemonade save for the final line of “Formation”—was projected onto the big screen.

I’ve more than once encountered an analysis of the scene that sees the star avenging mistreatment and/or dehumanization by burning this building—sometimes standing in for patriarchy, other times soulless capitalism, or even her own “curse”—to the ground. The makers of Dissect, for instance, interpret the final shot of Beyoncé standing with all those other women as her having freed everyone trapped inside.

The Dissect team, though, also saw a nod to the Afro-Brazilian spirit Pomba Gira, whom they’ve written can be called upon for help “in matters of love, sex, and vengeance.” What if “6 Inch” is another of Beyoncé’s maybe-analogies for trying and failing to get even with her husband: a sex worker killing would-be clients because she can’t bring herself to make use of them? (This may add an interesting layer to the self-crucifixion concept of her sole Formation World Tour performance; whose sins is she dying for?)

I’m also reminded of how circa-2014 Beyoncé, a little after trying and failing to shoot her gun during that one On the Run interlude, told stadiums around the world, “Forgiveness is me giving up my right to hurt you for hurting me.” When “6 Inch” hits in Lemonade, FORGIVENESS is still a few sections away.

By this point in the film—even if you’re not big on that last reading—Beyoncé’s character has attempted a few kinds of retaliation: she’s said a handful of not-so-nice things, but she’s also ignored her husband’s teary phone calls and removed herself from their home.

We learn on the next song, the zydeco-tinged “Daddy Lessons,” that she was raised to fight fire with fire this way; the dad who turned her into the “soldier” and “tough girl” we’ve heard her boast about being is also the dad who advised violence in the face of any man like him who comes around. “Her father was hard on her, and didn’t want nobody to take advantage of her,” explained Kevin Cossom, one of the song’s writers. “It painted a country picture in our minds.”

But the album’s narrator is taken advantage of nonetheless; tough girl or not, she’s betrayed by the man she loves. So here she is at the project’s mid-way turning point—professionally successful but dead behind the eyes, the work philosophy she’d once glorified now tainted. Her attempts at revenge haven’t helped much, either; they’ve only given her things of her own to apologize for. (The same way that the film has so far revolved around her own DENIAL, her own ANGER, it’s likely her own ACCOUNTABILITY we’re looking at.)

From here on, there’s something different about the way work comes off in the project. “Spend my life in the dark for the sake of you and me,” Beyoncé claims on “Love Drought.” “I love you more than this job, please don’t work for me,” sings James Blake on “Forward” shortly thereafter, almost as if he’s standing in for her husband. Work—or perhaps just the particular way our narrator and her man were approaching it—is gradually recast as something with the power to eat away at their relationship.

It’s clear by the finale of “Formation” that Beyoncé’s character intends to keep dreaming it, working hard, and grinding ‘til she owns it. Now, though, not only is her hustle made out to be for the greater good of her community, her man is also lyrically there with her at every turn—in the jewelry she wears, across the table at Red Lobster, and so on. There’s no longer that same sense of physical separation that had spoiled the otherwise alluringly mercenary “6 Inch.”

I’m now going to complicate things even further, if that’s cool. Lemonade the 45-minute album gives us the perspective of a woman who’s being cheated on, and who, after leaving her partner for a spell, ultimately decides to reconcile with him. Lemonade the 65-minute film, on the other hand, gives us the perspective of a woman being cheated on as she struggles with her fertility, and it’s on the heels of pregnancy loss—in addition to anything else, of course—that she reconciles with her man.

The film therefore tells an even thornier story than its musical counterpart—which isn’t to say that the album doesn’t stand alone, necessarily, but that there were seemingly things Beyoncé wanted to convey about the period covered without having to scream them. This hadn’t exactly come out of nowhere: on “Mine” earlier in this chapter, there’d been nods to longing for an absent partner simultaneous to experiencing some sort of maternal grief, and there’d later been a pregnancy in almost every film referenced via On the Run. And in time, Jay-Z would confirm this subtext to be more like text, suggesting a causal relationship between his philandering and a series of miscarriages (though neither half of the couple was yet using the plural there in 2016).  

This aspect of Lemonade doesn’t come through so much in its lyrics—unless you’re inclined to project it onto “Me and my baby / We gon’ be alright” from “Sorry,” that is—but rather in the poetry and images chosen to accompany them. The work of Shire’s that made the film is laced with what you might call reproductive horror, whether that’s references to unwanted blood or to bones being forced into foreign shapes by a growing baby. “Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead,” Beyoncé narrates at the beginning of APATHY, imagining the eulogy that her partner—and implied murderer, if only in spirit—might deliver at her funeral.

One of the more explicit sequences on this front comes during EMPTINESS, both before and throughout “6 Inch.” We first find Beyoncé speaking of two lovers having sex that’s somehow both passionate and tragic. “She sleeps all day, dreams of you in both worlds,” she says. “Tills the blood, in and out of uterus. Wakes up smelling of zinc. Grief sedated by orgasm, orgasm heightened by grief.” This was perhaps a sadder take on the same sex-as-couple’s therapy theme that pops up throughout BEYONCÉ; it’s now both the cause of, and solution to, their pain. 

Then, as the opening notes of “6 Inch” play, the camera slowly makes its way down the long hallway I’ve already been talking about, towards a rectangle at the end that’s glowing red. “Dear moon, we blame you for floods,” we hear Beyoncé say, “for the flush of blood, for men who are also wolves. We blame you for the night, for the dark, for the ghosts.” After a long wait while the song comes in, her character begins performing it. And then, for a split second during that same rapid-fire montage from which I grabbed the shots of her killing the cowboy, “LOSS” very briefly appears onscreen.

Later, as this room at the end of the hall begins to burn, an emotionless Beyoncé travels in slow-motion towards the camera, away from whatever sanctum this truly is. At which point we get our six “Come back”s, plus our slow zoom out of her and those women standing camera-ready despite what’s happening behind them.

These are indelible images no matter their meaning, but the whole set-up has long struck me (and others) as decidedly uterine—like a miscarriage expressed architecturally, literalizing the effect of her husband’s infidelity on the home she’s been trying to make out of him. As I’ve been hinting at and will continue to hint at for the remainder of this series, houses in Beyoncé projects very often seem to stand in for other things. And this reading of “6 Inch,” my actual final one, lends credence to the theory that it’s at least partly a flashback.

It’s largely after this scene that Lemonade becomes about children, to some extent—what they inherit from their parents, and how well they’ve been set up to succeed as a result. But as far as the story’s main husband and wife go, it’s unclear whether they actually have an heir to speak of yet; though the following shots aren’t presented back-to-back, an empty cradle gives way to a teary Beyoncé cradling her belly in the Superdome, which gives way to an umbilical-cord allusion—or at least, a shot of the star holding up her own end of an umbilical bargain.  

In the same 2019 “interview” where she’d mention dying and being reborn in her relationship, Beyoncé concluded of this same period in her life, “Having miscarriages taught me that I had to mother myself before I could be a mother to someone else.” It’s a quote that may help unlock more of her 2016 album’s structure: FORGIVENESS begins with a baptism—not of any onscreen baby, but of the star herself. “Do you remember being born?” she asks. “Are you thankful for the hips that cracked? The deep velvet of your mother, and her mother, and her mother?”

It’s only once we’ve gotten through this rebirth—and the RESURRECTION section, with its acknowledgement of other families’ tragedies—that we move into HOPE. As “Freedom” comes in, we slowly approach an infant sucking her thumb, a baby with huge eyelashes credited as Zora Grace Davis: Kahlil Joseph’s newborn daughter. Out of death comes life, these frames suggest in their ordering—a fresh start, a blank page—and it may be worth saying that Zora was born just three days after the loss of her uncle, Noah Davis. “So here we were reeling from a loss and at the same time so grateful to be nurturing a new soul in our family,” her mother (Lemonade producer Onye Anyanwu) would remember.

In the same section, Beyoncé reads from Shire’s “Nail Technician as Palm Reader,” another of the film’s poems that draws on pretty visceral reproductive imagery:

The nail technician pushes my cuticles back, turns my hand over, stretches the skin on my palm, and says, “I see your daughters, and their daughters.” That night in a dream, the first girl emerges from a slit in my stomach. The scar heals into a smile. The man I love pulls the stitches out with his fingernails. We leave black sutures curling on the side of the bath. I wake as the second girl crawls head first up my throat, a flower blossoming out of the hole in my face.

It’s not too long after this passage, where actual wounds have become sites of childbirth, that the star’s narration appears to jump forward in time—and perhaps that’s because it now can. When we get a second umbilical allusion, Beyoncé is no longer alone but instead joined by another woman, her bloodline literally extending beyond herself. “Pull the sorrow from between my legs like silk, knot after knot after knot,” she says.

As in Life Is But a Dream, Lemonade seems to end with a hard-earned reward in the form of Blue Ivy, the “All Night” section giving us a look at how rich life has become. When, in the previous film, Beyoncé had told us, “My baby was born out of a conflict in my life, and that struggle had to be settled,” she may very well have been referring to her professional split from her father, but she technically hadn’t said that.

Not unlike BEYONCÉ, Lemonade blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, and with good cause; aside from this making for a richer piece of art, many people went hunting for “Becky with the good hair” even with that little to work with. At the same time, in keeping with every long-form visual project of the star’s, the film contains a notable amount of doc footage as well as her own home videos—a suggestion that while certain details may have been fudged or abstracted (one of the first shots has her seated in front of a red curtain, as if beginning a rock opera), the emotions and stakes and perhaps rough outlines of characters here were meant to be taken as real.   

Though I’ve mentioned that “Formation” contains snippets of the documentary That B.E.A.T, the film also weaves in a swath of recently-captured material of New Orleanians. (Some of this was the portraiture shot on Super 8 by Khalik Allah, and other stuff may have come from Kahlil Joseph’s team during that week-long 2015 shoot.) The project as a whole also appears to have taken its title from a home video filmed at the 90th birthday party of Jay-Z’s grandmother, Hattie White, in October of 2015.  

“I had my ups and downs,” the new nonagenarian says in a speech, which is also included towards the end of “Freedom” on the album proper, “but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” (At least a few of you reading this will find it interesting that Beyoncé had actually posted that now-meaningful photo of herself with a lemon a couple weeks prior to the party. It therefore may not have been intended as the Easter egg it’s aged as—but if it was, then the speech probably felt like a godly sign.)

There are two stretches of the film that I’d argue use documentary footage to especially thought-provoking effect. One is “Daddy Lessons,” where clips of Mathew Knowles very suddenly appear mid-way through the song’s second verse, the number itself put on pause. Until now, we’ve surely already had the real-life Knowleses and Carters and Knowles-Carters in mind as we’ve been engaging with the project, but the footage is really the first onscreen invocation of anyone (putting Beyoncé herself aside).

“Do you wish your grandmother and grandfather was here with us?” Mathew asks Beyoncé on a couch sometime in the ’80s, the camera set up across the room the way we’ve seen her adult self replicate many times in her work. Once little Beyoncé says yes after some prodding, she guesses that they’d probably “have fun” if they could all be together, and father and daughter exchange “I love you”s. While they chat, we cut to a newer home video of Mathew and Blue playing together—seemingly sometime in the past while, and in what looks like a hotel room.  

The Mathew footage functions a couple of ways. For one, it helps hammer home that this is a generational story, father becoming grandfather, and of course points to some kind of healing process that’s been happening among the Knowleses offscreen. (There’s also something poetic about the actual question he asks Beyoncé in the first clip, since the premise of Lemonade is in some ways that your grandparents are always with you.)  

But there were also viewers who took the clip of Mathew and Blue together as confirmation that they had a relationship; I’ve mentioned here and there that the doc footage in Beyoncé’s films can sometimes function for the public like evidence of things having happened or not happened, and many had assumed that Mathew wasn’t really part of his granddaughter’s life.

(Three years prior, when the Sun had tried to stir up drama by reporting that he’d not yet met one-year-old Blue, he issued a statement that similarly cast a sort of corroborative sheen over Beyoncé’s film work: “It has been well documented that he has met his granddaughter, a fact that was made clear on Beyoncé’s HBO documentary.”)

The second particularly interesting doc sequence is “All Night,” where footage of the Carters is paired with all that other material of couples and families on the ground—not unlike the way much of “XO” had been turned over to various lovers at Coney Island. The film’s visual language proposes, however believably, that there isn’t ultimately anything separating the Carters from these Average Joes; as the family had written following the elevator incident, “At the end of the day, families have problems and we’re no different.”

“All Night” also gives us a shot of Ms. Tina dancing with Richard Lawson at their wedding in 2015, in what reads like Beyoncé including both women’s happily-ever-afters. This is where freedom begins, Mama.   

Several years after Lemonade, Beyoncé would suggest that young people looking to share their gifts with the world ‘build their own stage’ if necessary: “Make them see you.”

This is largely how I’ve come to understand the star’s directing, which both transformed an already-illustrious career and emerged simultaneous to her noticeably pulling back from acting in others’ projects. I’ve argued that those early-career films may have felt like flimsy stages, if you will—always coming with some kind of trade-off. Often while writing this series, I’ve thought back to a circa-1994 Madonna telling the L.A. Times of her own string of cinematic trade-offs: “I have to be a director. I feel like I’m constantly being double-crossed.”

At one point while reading about Beyoncé’s 2016 project, I came across a Washington Post article that—in an eerie and slightly devastating way—summarized what I feel is more or less my argument about what visual albums in particular have done for her film career. “Beyoncé once did the expected thing and made her own incursions into films,” wrote Ann Hornaday just after the project’s release:

among them a starring role in the dreadful 2006 ‘Pink Panther’ remake and a respectable turn as Etta James in “Cadillac Records.” But in addition to the myriad personal and political points Beyoncé is making (and scoring) in “Lemonade,” she has permanently interrupted the conventional image-management narrative. Rather than beg for big-screen acceptance, she adjusts the frame to suit herself, becoming a genuine innovator in a form of transmedia—part video, part film, part art installation—that may share DNA with Hollywood but has little or nothing to do with corporate financing, packaging or deliverables. At a time when female representation in film is the subject of endless conversations and even federal investigations, [she] simply gets on with building her own aesthetic and industrial empire … By becoming a bona fide auteur in the boundary-less, sound-and-image universe we all now live in—Beyoncé has turned the concept of “breaking into movies” on its head. Instead, she’s the one who’s broken the movies, bending the medium to her own fiercely autonomous will.

There are several bangers in this passage, but let’s get into the “transmedia” bit. Like Beyoncé’s self-titled album, but taking its approach up several notches, Lemonade elegantly combines a variety of visual media: different kinds of footage shot by different people in sometimes different years or even decades, with the aspect ratio constantly changing to reflect the range. It was a feature film that was technically a collection of videos, and it had also premiered on television before landing on a music streamer. The project’s very existence therefore begged certain questions about genre, but how well would the film, television, and music worlds—typically keen on thinking of themselves as separate, no matter our boundary-less mediascape—be able to answer them?

All of this, of course, was consistent with the musical project itself, which had not only fused an ambitious range of genres (reggae, rock, country, and so on) but also built in a wealth of samples from the music world and elsewhere—speeches, viral videos, and even audio from some of the home movies included in the film. “There are no boundaries as far as genre goes,” MeLo-X has explained of the album’s recording—he has credits on multiple tracks in addition to scoring the film—while clarifying that Beyoncé didn’t necessarily set out to incorporate so many genres, contrary to whatever the Recording Academy would come to believe.

(Just so I’ve put this somewhere, and assuming I’ve correctly interpreted the fine print: with 4 and then BEYONCÉ, the star had made an album with her preferred collaborators, then presented it to Columbia for a sign-off—her own people, Parkwood and anyone else they’d invited, having handled all creative. Columbia then released these projects, with her company’s logo still slapped on the packaging. Beginning with Lemonade, however—and in an arrangement that continues to this day—Beyoncé’s albums have been both produced and released by Parkwood Entertainment, LLC. “under exclusive license” to Columbia Records, by this point seemingly just a distributor and a Grammy submitter/campaigner. The same appears to be true for anything released since 2016 by her signees.)

While BEYONCÉ’s iTunes package had included a “Credits” video track clearly outlining which collaborators were responsible for which pieces, Lemonade’s contributions were much more swirled together. And since certain directors were again big industry players with recognizable stamps, journalists and fans were left feverishly guessing—sometimes quite unsuccessfully—which scenes belonged to whom, especially since only some would ultimately give interviews about their work.

Kahlil Joseph had provided the film with its backbone, but he’d also overseen specific musical numbers, including—but not limited to—“Pray You Catch Me,” “Freedom,” and “Sorry” (a scene he might actually make a faceless and uncredited appearance in). In the credits of Lemonade, Beyoncé once again opted for ranked directorial tiers that reflected how the project evolved in production, separating Joseph and herself (the “Directors”) from everyone else she hired later (the “Additional Directors”).

As for these latter five names, it’s widely known that Jonas Åkerlund directed “Hold Up”—even if his go-to people hadn’t immediately confirmed as much, the scene contains several of his trademarks—but it’s perhaps less known that he directed the whole underwater sequence preceding it.

“All Night” contains Joseph-directed footage of Beyoncé performing around Fort Macomb, plus the material of Louisianans on the street, but it also has the kind of home-video overload that points to her own directorial presence. Nevertheless, some sources still erroneously credit the segment to Melina Matsoukas, who I don’t believe has ever suggested she worked on anything beyond “Formation.”

I wouldn’t have known that Dikayl Rimmasch directed “6 Inch” were it not for a single offhand Instagram post from 2021. (His grid generally helped me fill in several bits of this series.) Though he’s the only Lemonade director—save for the star herself—who’d also have a directing credit on her next visual album, he doesn’t seem to have given an interview about their work together since On the Run.

It’s hard to say concretely what Todd Tourso’s contributions were—in January, he’d been photographed with his boss on one of the post-Joseph shoots—but he obviously would’ve overseen the project in its entirety as Parkwood’s creative director.

And as far as I can tell, Mark Romanek worked exclusively on “Sandcastles”—fitting given that it was Jay-Z with whom he had the decade-plus working relationship.     

To some degree, quantifying everyone’s contributions this way has no real point. As David Ehrlich wrote upon the film’s release, Lemonade “isn’t an anthology, it’s a chorus meant to harmonize with a single voice.” You might instead think of Beyoncé’s post-2016 visual albums like mosaics, the individual tiles certainly available for examination but ultimately there in the service of a greater image. Alissa Wilkinson would eventually argue of Lemonade, a project she characterized as ‘genre-flouting,’ that it was:

a remarkably cohesive experience … given the number of collaborators Beyoncé worked with. It both hews to and challenges the auteur theory, the idea that the director of a movie is more of the “author” than the writer; in this case, there are seven credited directors, but it’s unmistakably the work of one artist—Beyoncé.      

In her own review, Miriam Bale had written that the star was “redefining authorship” as “director, star and something more,” adding: “As a black woman, that’s a necessity; she has to rewrite all the rules if she wants to work and evolve in movies.” It seems as though many critics felt that Beyoncé’s more recent visual offerings had emerged directly out of the experiences she’d had making films prior—that she was perhaps rewriting rules in the first place because of how she’d bumped up against the standard ones.

“Where Cadillac Records had flopped at the box office,” argues Tshepo Mokoena in her biography of the star, “Obsessed made millions but was critically panned. So Parkwood pivoted away from scripted films. Instead, it became the driving force behind music-based works, either about the process behind some of [her albums] … or taking on the form of the albums themselves.” Few things have arguably been as revolutionary for Beyoncé’s film reputation as this pivot, in which she’d essentially made her music output and her film output one and the same—not just spiritually linked, but synonymous.

This is the main thing that I think distinguishes Beyoncé’s visual albums from the ones they may have inspired, or even that had inspired them. At their best—and some of them are unequivocal masterpieces—these other projects have generally been welcome companion pieces to their music rather than compulsory as far as accessing 100% of that music. While the industry was still playing catch-up to the concept of full-scale visual counterparts after 2013, Beyoncé had gone ahead and dropped another visual album that was arguably twice as intense and intricate. And as I’ve hopefully made clear vis-à-vis Lemonade, you actually can’t experience all of the project if you’re only ever listening to it.    

Analyzing the re-emergence of visual albums in the ’10s, Landon Palmer has suggested that the format may be attractive to artists like Beyoncé because it’s “unencumbered by studio demands, network standards, or even traditional expectations of narrative structure and runtime.” I argued earlier in this chapter that BEYONCÉ had seen its maker spearhead and customize her own cinematic vision rather than be jammed into someone else’s—giving her as much control over things like distribution and promotion as it did the work itself. Lemonade had allowed her to do this again, but where she’d ended up with something that was more obviously the latest entry in her filmography. 

Though some writers had started attaching words like auteur to Beyoncé as early as the ’00s, you may have already noticed that there’s a noticeable uptick in its frequency when you’re reading about Lemonade. Compared to the four films she’d co-directed over the previous seven years—not that those tend to be mentioned in coverage of her fifth one—there was something about it that evidently struck people as newly sophisticated, accomplished in a way they hadn’t yet seen from her. “Only upon the release of ‘Lemonade,’” wrote Ehrlich, listing off the star’s other well-known hyphens, “did it become clear that she’s also a bonafide auteur.”

With the exception of Life Is But a Dream, Beyoncé’s first crop of self-directed features had all been well-reviewed, so it wasn’t necessarily a sudden spike in critical acclaim. It probably wasn’t a difference in access, either: putting aside the direct-to-DVD release of Live in Atlantic City, her first films had all similarly aired on television—in the case of Life Is But a Dream, on the same prestige network as Lemonade—around the same time that they became high-selling DVDs. (If anything, Lemonade being a Tidal exclusive has likely only hurt the star on her road to film-world respect, something we’ll talk about next time.)  

Her fifth feature was more emotional and buzzed-about than any of those other projects, of course; Beyoncé had spun her greatest heartbreak into her biggest artistic triumph, and the gossip element—especially given how rarely she’d taken to speaking by now, putting more stock into Lemonade’s semi-peek behind the curtain—surely factored in. Reviews of the film tend to mention how significant it was to receive such vulnerability from this celebrity in particular; writing for the A.V. Club, Ashley Ray-Harris considered it to be part of a larger “unveiling” that Beyoncé was seemingly embarking on in her 30s.

A great deal of the project’s rapturous reception also came back to how it spoke loudly and clearly to her community—and more than anyone, the many Black women of her fanbase—after an especially trying few years; it was wrapped up in everything from the endless speculation about Beyoncé’s own family, to memorable misogynoir controversies involving the rest of the film’s cast, to constant headlines about racial violence and police brutality. “Lemonade asks that we finally see the specific pain these systems have caused for black women both privately and publicly,” argued Ray-Harris. Not too long thereafter, Aisha Durham would conclude that Beyoncé had used “her celebrity body—her commercial capital—to advocate for poor Black lives.”

If Life Is But a Dream and her first three self-directed concert films had all revolved around her telling her own story, sometimes in ways that would be critiqued as vain, Lemonade felt less like the Beyoncé Show; there was more obvious cultural and political significance to what she had to say, even if it was still achingly personal. The fact that she’d enlisted several other directors to help see her vision through, something that’s unfortunately opened her up to allegations in some circles that she “needs” co-directors to make a film—but more on that next time, too—arguably further steeled against criticisms that her project was self-serving. To put it differently, this was a win that could be shared.

But there may have been a few additional things about Lemonade that lent it a newfound air of ‘respectability,’ realistically speaking—and I’m about to use a lot of single quotes to convey that I’m saying some of the below with at least a mild eye-roll. For one, cinephiles tend to valorize certain kinds of films and formats over others, with many considering narrative features to be the ‘pinnacle’ of the medium. Beyoncé’s newest project wasn’t a scripted narrative in the standard sense—that’s another asterisk we’ll come back to in Vol. IV—but it was still something closer to one than any of the concert films or documentaries she’d served up prior.

There was also an ‘elevated’ way in which Lemonade was both presented and talked about. As a music video-based project from a major pop star, its being sold as a “visual album” marked it as inherently more ‘artful’ than other industry offerings from around that time. But there was also the idea that its references leaned more ‘highbrow’ than your average Beyoncé project prior to 2016, that it was clearly the product of research—research that had led her to avant-garde art installations, and the L.A. Rebellion, and lesser-known corners of American history and culture. Along these lines, Tshepo Mokoena would call the star’s sixth album a “curatorial display,” while Daphne Brooks has referred to Beyoncé’s tendency towards “deep citationality” beginning in the 2010s.

The twin implication was that Lemonade took work to unravel and digest, its layers making it especially ripe for breakdowns and explainers by fans and journalists—especially since Beyoncé would be doing little of that herself. Academics were immediately looped in, not just because the star had endeared herself to scholars in a new way but because of initiatives like the “Lemonade Syllabus,” which put the film in conversation with Black feminist theory and other key literary works. Though I don’t think this was without precedent—in Vol. I, we talked about Beyoncé’s Josephine Baker nods making their way into the academy, and I know of Beyoncé-specific university courses that appeared as early as the I Am… Sasha Fierce era—Lemonade nevertheless helped usher in what felt like an explosion in Beyoncé scholarship.

I can only do so much eye-rolling here at the end of the day, since it was these exact aspects of her project and its reception that opened a door for me I haven’t yet closed almost a decade later. For the first three years of the film undergrad that I’d started in the fall of 2013, I was very good at seeing Beyoncé connections in the stuff we were learning about—MGM musicals, blaxploitation, spaghetti Westerns, the work of Jean-Luc Godard—but had learned to expect chuckles if I dared bring them up (the same way I picked my battles with, for example, my Lady Gaga x Alfred Hitchcock thoughts).

In 2017, though, I walked into class one day in my fourth year to find a professor loading up the “Sorry” video on YouTube, and it wasn’t long after graduating shortly thereafter that I heard word of Lemonade being added to my alma mater’s first-year syllabus. The star had clearly managed to convince this crowd that she was worthy of serious study, and I latched onto the shift at full throttle. By the time I got to grad school in 2019—having name-checked Beyoncé’s 2016 project in a Cinema Studies application detailing my interest in the blur between the music and film industries—the chuckling had stopped.

The Formation World Tour, the first all-stadium tour by a woman, was easily Beyoncé’s most impressive live production up until that point. Its stage, designed by industry heavyweight Es Devlin (who’d first worked with the star on her 2015 festival sets), featured a rotating cube—dubbed “the Monolith” by its makers, in what might be our first brush with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—onto which the show’s video content could be projected in three dimensions. “When it starts to move, the sounds you hear are sounds I designed,” MeLo-X explained of scoring his second tour for Beyoncé. “It’s how I feel like that shit would sound in real life.”

The show felt like a live version of Lemonade, with the same Gothicism and a lot of the project’s anger and heartache kept intact. The star had squeezed most of the album onto the setlist, with the Monolith visuals overwhelmingly coming from the film or its shoots; the exceptions, some of which had again been directed by Dikayl Rimmasch, were countable on one hand. (There was, however, a sliver of different poetry written by Shire, with Beyoncé at one point narrating, “His teeth ache with memory from taste.”)

Among the exceptions was a home video of her 16-year-old self telling the camera that she planned on staying humble no matter what: “If you ever meet me and I have a little attitude, just slap me.” The clip seemed intended as at least somewhat ironic, since it punctuated an interlude remixing clips from her new album’s more boastful videos—“Don’t Hurt Yourself,” “Formation,” and so on. “Changed the game when that Lemonade dropped,” she’d sung during “Feeling Myself” earlier in the show, again not wrongly. “Know where you was when that Lemonade popped / I stopped the world!”

Which is not to say that the tour was all attitude; one of its most cathartic moments came when Beyoncé performed “All Night”—“This song makes me feel so good,” she was taken to saying while introducing it—practically face-to-face with fans. There was also, of course, the matter of Prince: just 48 hours before Lemonade’s release, the Purple One had been found dead in his home, of an accidental fentanyl overdose. Beyoncé’s team quickly pulled together a tribute section to him, bringing back her cover of “The Beautiful Ones” from Purple Rain, and playing a lengthy stretch of that album’s title track while the Monolith was lit up in purple.    

As with the Mrs. Carter Show, official doc segments were uploaded to YouTube throughout the Formation World Tour’s run (again a foreboding sign for anyone hoping for a longer documentary). In typical fashion, these were a feast for anyone interested in the logistics of a show of this scale—a closer look at the 1,700 gallons of water pumped onto the stage each night for “Freedom,” for instance. Less usual, they were pretty light on Beyoncé herself; when she appears, she’s almost always seen but not heard—checking in on her “Victorian streetwear”-inspired costumes, which Marni Senofonte explains came out of the film, or sitting patiently on her laptop while hair stylist Neal Farinah and makeup artist Sir John get her ready for a show.  

But even though the star was now almost exclusively speaking through her art in 2016, many felt that said art was more than sufficient for its moment; it’s always validating to know that your favourite artist is just as disturbed by certain news stories, or that they’re similarly nervous about a looming presidential election. “Contemporary society was flooded with anger, sadness, and fear, and there was a clear need for joy and hope,” Alicia Wallace has written:

The truth in “Lemonade,” whether Beyoncé’s or her audience’s, brought freedom and healing. Was this a strategic marketing tactic? Or a genuine act of resistance? Either way, its power cannot be denied.

Her whole project took on increased significance in the first week of July, when two Black American men were murdered by police a day apart: Alton Sterling, a Louisiana father of five who was shot by two officers dubiously claiming he’d been reaching for a gun, and Philando Castile, a Minnesotan murdered during a traffic stop while his family sat in the car. Footage of both killings was mass-circulated, with Castile’s fiancée Diamond Reynolds having actually live-streamed his final moments on Facebook.

Beyoncé, as well as penning a rare open letter, took a largely acapella version of “Freedom” to project these men’s names onto the Monolith from Scotland, alongside those of some of the ‘countless other’ victims of police brutality.

As the year progressed, it seemed more and more like Lemonade would be earning the distinction as the first Beyoncé solo project not to have any kind of documentary—no behind-the-scenes look at recording the album, and only still photos released from the film’s set. (20-year-old me was also rather disturbed not to be able to buy a Formation World Tour book, since she’d opted out of that, too.)

In essence, the star had kept the curtain mostly closed about the era where fans were most dying to have it peeled back. But maybe that wasn’t surprising given the subject matter; she’d said perhaps all she needed to through her April release, where she could share and withhold and spin things to her heart’s content. One also wonders whether it factored in that her main co-director hadn’t especially loved working on it. Joseph would suggest in 2017 that he didn’t seek out the final cut, apparently shrugging and saying, “I don’t even know what she ended up doing. By the time it came out, I was working on something else.”

Harder to wrap one’s head around is that there wouldn’t be a Formation World Tour concert film, either—another first for the solo Beyoncé, and unfortunately the first of multiple. (In the absence of such a project, one fan strung the official YouTube uploads together to make a half-hour short, resembling the kind of backstage bonus feature that would’ve appeared on a bygone-era Beyoncé DVD.)

We know that some kind of film project was being considered, however, not just because the star would never skip archiving a tour but because the gig is currently sitting on the resumes of various camera operators and editors around the internet. The name that tends to be listed as a director is once again Hamish Hamilton, he of the 2006 and 2014 VMAs as well as Beyoncé’s 2013 and 2016 halftime shows.

One source suggests that the film was set to give us the New Orleans stop specifically—a sensible choice given the visual album—with another naming Houston as a second anchor location. (Big Freedia, the bounce legend who’d lent her voice to “Formation,” was brought out in New Orleans as a surprise.) But Beyoncé had also made a real spectacle of the tour’s final stop in New Jersey: she performed “6 Inch” for the first and only time; she brought out special guests Kendrick Lamar, Serena Williams, and Jay-Z; and many of her costumes had been dyed a canary yellow. Given how Beyoncé: X10 had combined different nights and looks from the Mrs. Carter Show, an approach the star would only lean harder into in the years to come, it seems likely that she was eyeing something along those lines in 2016.

Going forward, fans would chalk her decision not to release a concert film up to pettiness; she’d eventually tell them, rather boldly, that they could “watch the Formation World Tour in [their] mind.” But I’ve always wondered whether its absence secretly came down to something totally logical. Maybe the cubic Monolith—whose content had, again, already largely appeared in Lemonade—didn’t quite translate onscreen. Maybe much of the show—its setlist, its arrangements, its choreography, and even its blink-and-you-miss-it invocation of Nefertiti—would be used in Beyoncé’s next big performances (where some might argue these things were improved upon).

Or maybe she’d found herself pregnant with twins by the tour’s end, throwing her a narrative curveball that she needed some time—and a whole new film, perhaps—to process. This was no longer a matter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z writing a different story for Blue’s sake, but for a gaggle of little Carters. The two new additions represented a new chapter in and of themselves, apparently symbolically as much as literally. The following year, Beyoncé would write:

I researched my ancestry recently and learned I come from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave. I had to process that revelation over time … I now believe it’s why God blessed me with my twins. Male and female energy was able to coexist and grow in my blood for the first time. I pray that I am able to break the generational curses in my family and that my children will have less complicated lives.

Lemonade itself was more than generous as far as memorializing the era, of course. But though music and film critics raved about it, with both groups including it on their end-of-year lists, it quickly became clear that neither industry was prepared to physically award it. (The VMAs had seemingly dusted off a presumably-shelved award, Breakthrough Long Form Video, in part to recognize the project and its impact, but it was also fan-voted. And predictably for the VMAs, the award would then disappear again following Lemonade’s win for half a decade, even as artists—Beyoncé included—continued to make “long form videos.”)

The film was nominated for four Emmys, including three to be presented at the Primetime Creative Arts ceremony—Outstanding Production Design for a Variety, Nonfiction, Event or Award Special; Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming; and Outstanding Variety Special—and a fourth, Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, to be presented during the “big” ceremony a week later. Beyoncé was on the latter two ballots—as both executive producer and performer for Outstanding Variety Special, and as one of two co-directors (the other being Joseph) for Outstanding Directing.

The star was expected to appear at the Emmys in September; not only was there a seat reserved for her, but her appearance had also been teased. Reports would later claim that she’d been too unwell to attend, but one wonders whether the Creative Arts presentation a week prior had factored into her ghosting. Outstanding Production Design had gone to Grease Live! (2016), Outstanding Picture Editing had gone to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Outstanding Variety Special had gone—infamously, and I’m sorry to upset fans all over again—to The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Prime Time Special (2016).

Winning Outstanding Directing may have felt like a pipe dream, and that award would indeed go to Grease Live!, too. But Beyoncé could now forever call herself an Emmy-nominated director.

The same month as the Emmys came Ivy Park’s Autumn/Winter 2016 collection, which meant a new moving-image campaign. Despite being 70 seconds long, this one managed virtually every filmmaking quirk of the star’s at once: film and digital, black-and-white and colour, flashes of home videos, and even behind-the-scenes footage from her tour—further proof that she’d been capturing and archiving that sort of thing as usual, even if little would come of it.  

Naturally, all of this is voiced over by Beyoncé herself, who poeticizes about how thoughts of her loved ones help her take her body to its limits. “Even when my throat is burning, my lungs feel like they’re drowning, sweat is stinging my eyes, my feet feel like they’re gonna explode,” she narrates, “I picture that one person I love more than anyone … I push past the pain and I find love.” Just like the brand’s inaugural spot, the star’s athletic discipline had been tangled with the messaging of her sixth album.

Beyond the bounds of her tour, Beyoncé seemed interested in performing Lemonade in its entirety, more or less as she’d managed with her previous album.

In June, she and Kendrick Lamar had performed “Freedom” at the BET Awards, kicking through onstage water the way she’d been doing in stadiums for months. In August, much of the tracklist found its way into a medley at the VMAs, to which she’d brought several cast members, including the Mothers of the Movement. (That same night, “Formation” won four craft VMAs—for direction, cinematography, editing, and choreography. It also took home Video of the Year among its fan-voted awards, marking Beyoncé’s second and still most recent VOTY win.)

The star performed “6 Inch” and “All Night” at a Tidal event in October—using the wooden boxes from her 2015 festival sets and 2016 tour for the first number, and singing angelically alongside a live orchestra for the second. (In between the two came “Haunted,” as if to narratively merge their two albums, with “All Night” also incorporating a “We be all night!” from “Drunk in Love.”) In early November, the star and her dancers then pant-suited up for “Formation,” among other hits, at a Hillary Clinton rally.  

Each of these performances translated the Lemonade film to the stage, with Beyoncé incorporating an impressive amount of Warsan Shire’s poetry, but the most ambitious was probably the VMAs one. Despite not being the honoree of the night, the star was again given 15 whole minutes to perform what she could from her album—she ultimately did five songs, starting with the opening four and ending with “Formation”—with poetry, visuals, choreography, costumes, and even props from the film all appearing.

While that was another Hamish Hamilton-directed VMAs, the performance also suggested that more time had been allotted for in-venue rehearsals than had been true in the lead-up to Beyoncé’s Vanguard set, and especially since “Ring the Alarm” in 2006.

A far cry from Why’d them fools just got my face and not the jacket?, she always seemed to know where exactly the camera would be next, their movements in relation to each other clearly rehearsed. (If you’re curious what this looks like from the back end, this was Hamilton’s POV during the 2016 halftime show.) MTV also let her smash a lens with a baseball bat during “Hold Up,” then swat a second away during “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” The power dynamic between Beyoncé and the iconic network, in other words, had officially flipped.  

Still, the performance that would cast the largest shadow was her surprise one with the Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards (CMAs), which happened two days before the Clinton rally.

Shortly after Lemonade’s release, the Chicks had started to perform “Daddy Lessons” on tour, lead singer Natalie Maines having apparently become obsessed with the film. (Beyoncé immediately took notice, sharing a video of their cover with her followers.) The two acts were united a few ways, most obviously in that they were all Texans and not exactly considered part of country music’s in-crowd in 2016.

The Chicks had famously fallen out with the establishment in early 2003, when Maines told a crowd in England—a week before America began its invasion of Iraq—that they were not only against the impending war but ashamed George W. Bush was from Texas. “Becoming the subject of national scorn practically overnight,” I’ve written elsewhere, “country radio stations ceased playing their music and former fans destroyed CDs in the street.” Though the group weren’t the only Bush-critical celebrities at the time, to say nothing of how they’d eventually get their comeuppance, American country listeners overwhelmingly supported the then-president.

According to a 2024 oral history, CMAs executive producer Robert Deaton had reached out to Beyoncé’s team upon hearing Lemonade in April, “Daddy Lessons” being his obvious hook. The star didn’t respond for months, but her eventual acceptance came with an unexpected condition: she wanted to bring the Chicks. “She felt it was important to make the statement that she respected the Chicks and acknowledged who they were and what they were about,” CMAs director Paul Miller has said.

At the early-November ceremony in Nashville, Beyoncé and the Chicks performed “Daddy Lessons”—mashed up, very poetically, with the group’s hit 2002 cover of Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien’s “Long Time Gone.” And in another look at how Beyoncé had learned to perform on live TV without sacrificing her directorial vision, both Miller and Deaton have offered interesting anecdotes about the days leading up to the broadcast.

“The night before the Nashville rehearsal,” Miller has said, “when Beyoncé walked in with her entourage and Jay-Z, they handed me a video of what they wanted the performance to look like. It was the product of seven days of rehearsals in L.A., edited to their liking.” Once the team got to rehearse in the auditorium, they then re-jigged it, re-blocked it, and continued to pass production notes the CMAs’ way “up until air.”

The performance was among the lighter and less tightly-choreographed ones Beyoncé got to give around this time. Fans took it as both a fun one-off and a sort of history lesson; as Jewly Hight analyzed for NPR, “[the star’s] country excursion represents something more like reclamation than invasion, since the genre’s roots entwine with African-American folk, blues, string band and pop contributions.”

But said reclamation wasn’t exactly received with open arms; to paraphrase a years-later Beyoncé, there was a lot of talking going on while they sang their song. Big country names appeared unimpressed when the camera cut to them, or would throw social media tantrums, or straight up just exited the room. In time, Black Opry’s Tanner Davenport would share that he’d witnessed a woman in the crowd yelling a racist comment. Meanwhile, as Andrew Unterberger has written, “Complaints from viewers about Bey’s country qualifications flooded social media.” (There was then a whole other saga about whether the CMAs had truly deleted a video of the performance on socials.)

“It was just a weird vibe in that building,” the Chicks would summarize. And while Beyoncé chose to stay characteristically silent about it for the better part of a decade, it turned out that she’d herself gone home feeling ‘unwelcome’ enough to start plotting her revenge. 

In the first week of 2017, which is to say the final days of the Obama presidency, it was reported that Beyoncé would be headlining Coachella in April. But just a few weeks later, she announced through an elaborate photoshoot (featuring a new Warsan Shire poem titled “I Have Three Hearts”) that she was, truth be told, pretty pregnant—and “blessed two times over.” Lady Gaga was quickly enlisted to put a replacement set together on just a month and a half’s notice, and it was decided that Beyoncé would headline the 2018 festival instead.

The star’s first post-announcement appearance was set to be the Grammys, where she was not only slated to perform but widely predicted to finally win Album of the Year. (Lemonade was her third contender in the category, after I Am… Sasha Fierce and BEYONCÉ.) Those predictions, however, were accompanied by less confidence-instilling reports suggesting that Lemonade’s genre-bending, despite being a highlight for most listeners as well as one of the project’s greatest legacies, had rubbed some voters—and even nominees—the wrong way.

According to a February New York Times piece, there’d been a meeting of the Grammys’ Rock Sorting Committee at which 70 or so members had a “very spirited debate” about whether Beyoncé was “trying to ‘run the table’ on nominations in a diverse group of categories”—the evidence being that Columbia had submitted both “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and “Daddy Lessons” for rock and country recognition, respectively. In the end, “Don’t Hurt Yourself” would be nominated for Best Rock Performance, but “Daddy Lessons” was rejected wholesale by the country committee.

Around this time, Disturbed frontman David Draiman indicated some discomfort being nominated against Beyoncé—though not featured artist Jack White, it seems—for Rock Performance. Though he seemingly sought to take issue with the Recording Academy itself, which he argued needed the same amount of sub-categories for rock that they’d afforded other genres, his comments came out clumsy:

Is it diverse? Absolutely. It’s too diverse! When you can have, with all due respect, a Beyoncé and a Disturbed in the same category, something has gone wrong. Not taking anything away from her whatsoever, we’re just very different from each other.

In Vol. IV, the “Daddy Lessons” debate will be given a fascinating—and gratifying—coda in the form of Cowboy Carter, but it remains to be seen whether “Don’t Hurt Yourself” will one day get its own.  

Not that Beyoncé would do either Lemonade song at the Grammys in February.

Following an intro from Ms. Tina, she chose to sing two never-performed ones, “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles.” As had also been true of “6 Inch”/“Haunted”/“All Night” at that Tidal event four months prior, there was first a prologue that saw her perform alongside a screen-projected version of herself and her dancers, though she was joined this time by projected versions of her mother and daughter, too. Together, the three generations invoked several bits of religious and spiritual iconography, drawing on some of the same references that had inspired both Lemonade and Beyoncé’s pregnancy shoot.

“Love Drought” then took one of the defining images of that song’s video, where the star and her dancers sit in chairs that have been knocked over, and turned it into a nerve-wracking live concept. In addition to a halo-like gold headpiece, she’d been dressed in a custom gown channelling Oshun and other deities by way of Gustav Klimt and Art Deco, a cherub visible on each hip. Combined with staging and camera blocking that was decidedly reverential, it felt by the final moments of “Sandcastles” like Beyoncé had transcended human womanhood entirely. For the next few years, if mostly artistically, she’d often style herself as a goddess instead.

As with I Am… World Tour and On the Run Tour, Lemonade had competed for Best Music Film that night, with Beyoncé and Joseph listed as the project’s two directors. (Clashing with her collaborative filmmaking approach, the rules stipulate that you have to be involved in “over 51%” of a work’s “total playing time,” which seems to have rendered the rest of the film’s directors ineligible for statuettes.) Its fellow nominees included a concert film about the Grand Ole Opry, plus three docs—about Yo-Yo Ma, Steve Aoki, and the Beatles. 

Despite Beyoncé’s project feeling like the shoo-in for many, it unfortunately wasn’t destined to be the first visual album to win Best Music Film since Annie Lennox’s Diva (1992). The award ultimately went to The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years (2016), a Ron Howard film about, well, the Beatles’ touring years.  

Though Lemonade was nominated for nine Grammys, Beyoncé would take home just two. One was Best Music Video, an award presented before the broadcast proper, for “Formation.” Never before had she been nominated in the short-form visual category, with the statuette given—like Best Music Film—to a video’s director(s), producer(s), and star(s). In this case, that meant Melina Matsoukas, producer Nathan Scherrer, and Beyoncé herself, respectively.

The second Grammy she won was Best Urban Contemporary Album, which she accepted right after her performance. “We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible,” she told the room, reading from a prepared gold cue card. “My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness, and our history—to confront issues that make us uncomfortable.”

Between the atypical cue card and the fact that Best Urban Contemporary Album—whatever the hell that means, by the way—wasn’t always presented during the broadcast (it’s since been rebranded as Best Progressive R&B Album), there was a growing feeling that the star had prepared herself not to be taking home the evening’s big prize. And indeed, Album of the Year was presented to Adele’s 25 (2015). The English singer took much of her speech, during which Jay-Z appeared genuinely crushed and Beyoncé struggled to stay her own tears, to address the latter directly.   

“We all got to see another side to you that you don’t always let us see,” Adele said, after thanking Beyoncé for how her work made Adele’s whole friend group—particularly her Black friends, she added—feel. “We appreciate that—and all us artists here, we fucking adore you.”

That same February came Ivy Park’s Spring/Summer 2017 campaign, which edited together a minute’s worth of audio from various women—Chloe x Halle, “Feeling Myself” co-writer SZA, actress Yara Shahidi, and more—as they meditated on what seemed to be the act of exercising. Much of it has a picture-in-picture concept, where nature footage in colour has been overlaid with these ladies’ black-and-white likenesses.

Though Beyoncé is seen in the spot, she never speaks—technically a step up from the brand’s 34-second Resort campaign in December, where she hadn’t appeared at all. Lee Anne Callahan-Longo had suggested in 2015 that the idea behind Ivy Park was less for the star to be the face of a new brand and more to launch something that could eventually operate independently. Nevertheless, its campaigns seemed to be diminishing in their production value and, to put it non-academically, narrative oomph.

Ivy Park’s Autumn/Winter campaign later in 2017, which was 40 seconds long, wouldn’t have any spoken content despite featuring another handful of special guests, including actress Laverne Cox and dancer Karen McDonald (who, among other projects, had appeared alongside Beyoncé in a Melina Matsoukas-directed Toyota ad in 2014). Eventually, the brand’s Resort campaign in December would give us a mere 12 seconds of a model stretching courtside while we heard birdsong and street noises.

There’ll be a notable exception to this trend in the first half of 2018, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it in the next chapter; Ivy Park is in for some big shifts across the board.

To re-ground us in the spring of 2017: on her ninth anniversary, Beyoncé released an upgraded video for “Die with You,” the piano ballad from a couple years prior. This new clip had the same framing as the original—the star plays the song for Jay-Z while he films her on an iPhone—but now edited this together with a decade and a half of home videos of the couple and their growing family, including lots of footage no one had seen.

Things begin in the early days of the Carters’ relationship, before following them through their engagement, marriage, and first several years of parenthood; by the end of the video, Blue is planting lipstick prints on her mom’s pregnant belly in anticipation of her siblings’ arrival. As in the original Tidal exclusive, though, things end with Beyoncé awkwardly but endearingly getting up from the piano and curtsying for Jay-Z, after which we get a quick flash of the grinning cameraman himself as he goes to stop the recording.

Beyoncé’s visual work, even compared to that of her musician-filmmaker peers, is uniquely about a life spent producing visuals. We’ve obviously watched her conceptualize videos and concerts/concert films over two decades, and—as I mentioned in Vol. II, and will return to next time—we’ve gotten a bonus real-time look at her developing her technical skills, from editing and blocking to lighting and lenses.

But even zooming out from the making-of stuff, her projects are both stylistically and narratively heavy on the idea of showing someone/something love by committing them/it to film—and teaching others how to do the same for the people/things they love. I’ll come back to that in Vol. IV, too, along with how Beyoncé’s tendency to document her life may have originated with her father. (For now, you can think back to him speaking to his camera as he filmed his family on the steps of the house he was so proud to live in.)

Mathew’s firstborn would become a filmmaker several times as likely to make the camera into a sort of character in everything she did; for as many fly-on-the-wall moments as we’ve gotten over the years in Beyoncé’s work, she’s way more prone to drawing our attention to the device filming her. If she feels her growing baby kicking in a hotel, she’ll tell her MacBook camera with the giggly excitement one might use to tell a loved one. She’ll start a video like “7/11” by hitting record on an iPhone and then getting into position for her first counts of choreo—the sort of thing another artist might edit out. But there’s also all the talking she’s always doing to videographers, and all the home-video footage woven into every project—the camera having borne witness to basically her whole life, almost as if it were itself a colleague or family member.

For a long time, Jay-Z has been a consequential wielder of this camera—capturing Beyoncé the way only a partner really can, but also someone with his own extensive relationship to both image-making and cinema (as a big movie buff, of course, but also a longtime director and producer). “Oh, I got a great shot right now,” he says in Life Is But a Dream as he films her bathed in sunlight on that yacht. “You don’t even know—look how good this shot is!” Virtually every other visual project of Mrs. Carter’s has contained Mr. Carter-recorded sequences, whether that’s smartphone-filmed vacation footage or something else taken on a Bolex or Super 8 camera.

But all of that goes in the other direction, too. Through Beyoncé’s eyes—themselves often gazing through a viewfinder or an iPhone—Jay-Z has seen his star persona undergo one of the most interesting transformations out there, from self-mythologized violent drug dealer to goofy husband and dad. By showing the public a side of him that he hasn’t necessarily played up much in his own work, Beyoncé’s films have somewhat laundered his image over about two decades, such that he’s generally thought of these days as romantic, therapized, and other qualities along those lines.

It’s not that the Beyoncé Cinematic Universe has made him out to be flawless, to be sure, but it’s pretty much the only realm where you’ll ever find Jay-Z singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” at the top of his lungs, or gently carrying an infant car seat home from the hospital, or massaging bubbles out of his wife’s postpartum abdomen. And these things have been paramount to landing the plane that was Lemonade; Beyoncé had made a big ask of her fans as far as tolerating her husband’s continued presence in her life and work, and it helps a great deal to periodically get these other more flattering glimpses of his character.

“Someone said that to me,” Dikayl Rimmasch at one point remarked of his 2014 work with the couple, “that I got something out of Beyoncé and Jay-Z that no one else had. I think that’s wrong. Every home movie they have is more natural than anything I shot.”

Though the Lemonade film, save for “Formation,” had been passed over for basically every major award, it would receive the rare honour that is a Peabody—“for the audacity of its reach and the fierceness of its vision,” as the institution put it.

At this point too pregnant to travel—we’d later learn that she’d actually been put on bedrest around this time—Beyoncé sent the Parkwood team to accept the award in May, which was presented by “Run” star Rashida Jones. “In this era where everyone tries to divide us,” said Steve Pamon—standing onstage with Ed Burke, Parkwood producer Erinn Williams, and Beyoncé’s longtime A&R Teresa LaBarbera Whites—“please do not be afraid to tell your story. Our boss, Beyoncé, wasn’t afraid to tell hers.”

A few weeks later, following what she’d call “an extremely difficult pregnancy,” the star gave birth via emergency C-section to twins Rumi and Sir Carter, both to become muses and characters in her work.

It was later the same June that Jay-Z released 4:44 (2017), his most recent solo album at the time of writing. Aside from the Carters’ longtime affinity for the number, the rap mogul would confirm a theory that the Standard hotel’s rooftop bar, Le Bain—from which he, his wife, Solange, and Julius were descending when they provided TMZ with their hot 2014 exclusive—was, wildly enough, located at 444 West 13th Street.

“We was walking to the west side, some romantic New York shit,” Jay-Z said, “and then we walked by it and realized and was like, ‘Oh shit, fuck this place.’” (This, of course, seemed an implicit admission that the elevator incident had indeed been related to their marital problems.) Elsewhere, he remembered writing the title track after waking up and checking the time at exactly 4:44 a.m., something I did over and over as I pulled Vol. III together.

4:44 is sometimes reduced to a “response” to Lemonade, and while that isn’t wholly inaccurate, the album is just as concerned with Jay-Z’s own upbringing and personal demons as Beyoncé’s had been with her own. On its press tour, he spoke in particular about the lasting impact of his family’s abandonment by his father, the late Adnis Reeves, and how the rapper eventually arrived at a place of empathy for him, same as his wife had the men in her life. (“The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” reads a verse from the Book of Ezekiel printed in How to Make Lemonade, “neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.”)

Nevertheless, the album’s centrepiece is probably still its title track, an all-encompassing apology that supports the transgressions his wife had alluded to on her 2016 project, from the general thrust of infidelity (“I never wanted another woman to know / Something about me that you didn’t know”) to some of the fallout that may have ensued from it (“I apologize for all the stillborns / ‘Cause I wasn’t present, your body wouldn’t accept it”).

“[I was] really proud of the music she made, and she was really proud of the art I released,” Jay-Z would say. “At the end of the day we really have a healthy respect for one another’s craft.” In the next chapter, they’ll prove as much by finally making good on their joint-album plans, then going back on the run in a sort of victory lap now that they were on the other side of all of this.

Though 4:44 isn’t typically called a visual album, Jay-Z had produced videos—labelled “Short Films” on Tidal—for all but one of its 13 songs, their releases staggered over eight or so months. Interestingly, almost none would have required his physical presence on a set, since they were largely cinematic vignettes starring big Hollywood names (Mahershala Ali, LaKeith Stanfield, Ron Perlman, and more) or otherwise animated. There was also about 50 minutes’ worth of supplementary material related to the album’s themes—ego, masculinity, therapy, etc.—that was similarly star-studded and sometimes quite artfully put together.

As Lauren Cramer—who, like me, considers 4:44 a visual album—has written, most of its videos revolved in some way around the figure of the Black child, “[creating] the space for the artist to contemplate time and the future of the black family.” This seems to have been very intentional—one of the extratextual shorts was called “Footnotes: Kids”—and was of course aligned with Lemonade’s own interest in children. Miles Jay’s “Smile” (2017) dramatizes Jay-Z’s childhood spent watching his mother, Gloria Carter (Dominique Fishback), struggle with her queerness. “Marcy Me” (2017), directed by the Safdie brothers, follows a young boy as he picks up bodega snacks for a party on an apartment rooftop—intensely surveilled through all of this, for no discernable reason, by a police chopper.

Jay-Z’s videos also had certain direct links to the Beyoncé Cinematic Universe, and not solely because Mrs. Carter herself appeared in three. “Moonlight” (2017) star Tessa Thompson would appear via voiceover in Beyoncé’s next feature, and Mark Romanek had directed “The Story of O.J.” (2017). “MaNyfaCedGod” (2017) star Lupita Nyong’o would appear physically (and lyrically) in her next visual album, the video having also been directed by Francesco Carrozzini of “Jealous” (and the song itself featuring James Blake). This principle also held true with 4:44’s supplementary stuff, where several talking heads—Kendrick Lamar, Will Smith, DJ Khaled, etc.—have played some sort of role in Beyoncé’s film career, though we haven’t discussed everyone in that list yet.

But she’d indeed appear in three “Short Films”—one dropping just after this chapter’s timeframe, though I’m including it here for storytelling’s sake. In “Blue’s Freestyle” (2018), directed by Maurice Taylor, her cartoon self appears alongside Mr. Carter’s as the couple (plus their twins) watch Blue go rogue at a talent show, rapping instead of dancing ballet.

In the collagist “4:44” (2017), an eight-minute video helmed by TNEG (the trio made up of “Formation” cinematographers Arthur Jafa and Malik Hassan Sayeed, plus Elissa Blount Moorhead), Beyoncé and/or her work appears via several bits of mixed media. We get a few seconds of her underwater in Lemonade, the image turned black-and-white. We get a shaky audience video of her and Jay-Z doing “Drunk in Love” on the Mrs. Carter Show, more than a minute long. And finally, we get a glimpse of a baby Blue Ivy in Beyoncé’s “Blue.”

The most high-profile appearance, though, would be the eight-minute “Family Feud” (2017), which had necessitated a more traditional kind of shoot. Directed by Ava DuVernay, it employed a staggering list of famous faces—Michael B. Jordan, Jessica Chastain, Trevante Rhodes, David Oyelowo, Brie Larson, Rosario Dawson, Rashida Jones, and others—to tell a reverse-chronological story beginning in 2444 and gradually jumping backwards more than four centuries to 2018.

The Carters—Blue included—eventually show up once we reach the present day, and it’s here that we realize the speculative events of the video have ensued from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s romantic peacemaking; everything that’s happened has depended on how well their teachings have been abided by. “It’s like I remember my father saying when I was a little girl,” explains Blue’s adult self (Susan Kelechi Watson), one of America’s “Founding Mothers” who’s helping to rewrite the Constitution in 2050. “Nobody wins when the family feuds.”

The video’s final two minutes have Jay-Z leaving actual Blue in a church pew while he stops by the confessional, needing to say a few words not to a priest but to his wife. “I’ll fuck up a good thing if you let me,” he raps, Beyoncé bearing witness to this worldwide admission:

Let me alone, Becky
A man that don’t take care of his family can’t be rich
I’ll watch “Godfather,” I miss that whole shit
My consciousness was Michael’s common sense
I missed the karma that came as a consequence
N***** bustin’ off through the curtains ‘cause she hurtin’
Kay losin’ the babies ‘cause their future’s uncertain

The Godfather has come up in this story—and even this chapter—previously, but here Jay-Z had drawn a proper parallel between the film’s 1974 sequel and his own marital issues. In The Godfather Part II, Kay (Diane Keaton) tells Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) that she plans on taking their kids and leaving him. In response, he vows to be a better husband, adding, “I know you blame me for losing the baby.”

While Jay-Z’s verse understandably skips over how Kay then admits to having actually had an abortion, her reasoning for seeking one had indeed come back to her unborn child’s future being too uncertain. As she tells Michael, clearly trying to hurt him as much as she herself is hurting, “I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world!”

“Michael triumphs in his mob wars and raises his clan to white-collar prominence,” Frank Guan has written of the reference:

but loses his actual family in the process … Jay’s been mobbed up too long to give up playing Don Corleone, but at least the Don he’s emulating now is [Marlon] Brando’s Vito—stably married to a woman from the same culture and a father who’s there for his children—and not Pacino’s Michael.

During these same months of 4:44’s rollout, the second half of Beyoncé’s 2017 seemed a healthy mix of dinner dates, spin classes, and weddings—including those of Parkwood’s Todd Tourso and (forgive me) Lemonade star Serena Williams. In Vol. IV, Mrs. Carter will turn to the documentary format to colour in the details of these months, which had in fact required a significant amount of recovery to both her body and creative spirit. 

Towards the end of the year, it was confirmed that she’d been cast as Nala in Jon Favreau’s live-action update of The Lion King (1994), in what was set to be her first non-Parkwood movie role since Epic. “I think that part of it is that she’s got young kids, part of it is that it’s a story that feels good for this phase of her life and career,” Favreau would say. “And I think she just really likes the original very much.” 

All of this rings true to me, though I’d add that Beyoncé had recently become the mother of a son, to say nothing of how The Lion King—like Epic, of course—is about a child who must heal their relationship with their dad in order to come into their power.

But the additional implications of the news were immediately felt among the Beyhive: not only was she apparently not done acting in the traditional sense, but she’d surely be involved in the remake’s soundtrack. Would she be going back in for Best Original Song? The answer was yes, but no one predicted how much of a bearing her role as Nala would have on her own directing work.

Way back when, we began Vol. III by catching up with 31-year-old Beyoncé as she prepared to headline her first Super Bowl halftime show and release Life Is But a Dream—two key components in what was branded as a sort of new-mom comeback. We now end things not only with the star as a 36-year-old mother of three, but also on the other side of the one-two punch that was BEYONCÉ and Lemonade.

When I decided to call this chapter “Insulation,” as part of a greater metaphor I’ve been building up to over the past however many months, I was thinking about that word in two ways. First off, though it feels funny to say this now, Beyoncé could theoretically have retired a living legend after her sixth album (some might argue her fifth, and they’d probably make some great points).

Her 2013 and 2016 projects, then—but especially their visual counterparts, which had solidified her as both an industry disruptor and an award-winning filmmaker—were crucial padding in her already remarkable two-decade career. What stories did she want to tell now that she’d closed the book on this rocky chapter, effectively exorcizing a demon in public? And what would they look like now that she’d nestled into the visual format where she seemed to flourish most?

Truthfully, though, I was also thinking about insulation in the sense of it sharing a root word with insular, as Beyoncé spent this same half-decade becoming wildly inaccessible. She’d said goodbye to one version of fame, in which she already preferred to keep herself at a distance from the public, and hello to something even more elusive. No longer could she be spotted walking around Tribeca wearing a baby carrier; she and her husband had purchased a Bel-Air compound shaped bizarrely like a “4,” from which they’d be raising their three kids almost entirely out of the public eye.

This marked an optics shift that ran parallel to her recent self-styling as a deity, and it’ll become important in the next chapter as she continues to release work meant to empower the Average Joe. How meaningfully can such a cordoned-off star do that? How well can you read a room that you’ve technically excused yourself from?

Next time, we’ll get into both the beauty and the bugs in the house Beyoncé built—and I don’t mean the newest piece of her real-estate portfolio. ●

PROJECTS DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER*

*Directors are listed only on Parkwood-produced projects to visually distinguish those entries (all directors are listed somewhere in the text above). Projects on which Beyoncé herself had a locatable directorial credit are in bold.

Life Is But a Dream (2013) — directed by Beyoncé, Ed Burke, Ilan Benatar
Epic (2013)
Live in Atlantic City (2013) — directed by Beyoncé, Ed Burke
BEYONCÉ (2013) — directed by Beyoncé, Ed Burke, Melina Matsoukas, Pierre Debusschere, Jonas Åkerlund, Hype Williams, @LILINTERNET, Ricky Saiz, Jake Nava, Francesco Carrozzini, Todd Tourso, Bill Kirstein, Terry Richardson
Self-Titled (2013-2014) — directed by Zachary Heinzerling
“Run” (2014) — directed by Melina Matsoukas
Beyoncé: X10 (2014) — directed by Ed Burke

[chapter break]

On the Run Tour: Beyoncé and Jay-Z (2014) — directed by Jonas Åkerlund
Bang Bang (2014) — directed by Dikayl Rimmasch
“7/11” (2014) — directed by Beyoncé, Todd Tourso
Yours and Mine (2014) — director unknown/unlisted
“Take My Hand, Precious Lord”: The Voices (2015) — director unknown/unlisted
“Die with You” (2015) — director unknown/unlisted
“Feeling Myself” (2015) — director unknown/unlisted
“Happy Birthday Stevie” (2015) — director unknown/unlisted
“Hymn for the Weekend” (2016)
“Formation” (2016) — directed by Melina Matsoukas
“Where Is Your Park” (2016) — director unknown/unlisted
“Skyline” (2016) — directed by Shomi Patwary
“Flex” (2016) — directed by Kevin Calero
“Drop” (2016) — directed by Andy Hines
Lemonade (2016) — directed by Beyoncé, Kahlil Joseph, Dikayl Rimmasch, Todd Tourso, Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Mark Romanek
“Die with You” (2017) — director unknown/unlisted
A Head Full of Dreams (2018)

Mononym Mythology is a newsletter by me, Sydney Urbanek, where I write about various intersections of popular music and moving images. If you got something out of this issue, feel free to share it with a friend or cover one of the caffeinated beverages I’ll need to finish the next issue. You can reply directly to this if you received it in your inbox, and otherwise my email is here. I’m also on X and Instagram.