It should go without saying that Beyoncé has had a huge musical impact on pop culture over the past couple of decades, but that is not her only accomplishment. She’s also had a huge influence visually through the innovations that have come out of her documentary film and music video work. Though her identity as a filmmaker tends to be overshadowed by her musical output, there exists an impressive visual archive of concert documentaries and visual albums that marks her as a presence in film.
Impact of Beyoncé’s films
Beyoncé’s live music documentaries push past expectations of an artist’s promotional material by combining brilliantly produced and edited live footage—as seen in her signature motif of seamlessly editing identical performance clips featuring unique costuming from different shows into impossibly fluid, synchronized moments—with more low-key, verité-style filming for behind-the-scenes insights into her team’s rigorous concert and tour prep.
This is often interspersed with intimate, self-shot, vlog-style video diary clips, ostensibly inviting audiences into her private world—but only revealing as much as she wants the world to see. These moments pull in just close enough to give oblique context to the rumours and conjecture that have swirled around her for much of her performing career, and then pull back, leaving the rest to be interpreted through her lyrics and strategically timed music releases.
When it comes to her visual albums, there is a good reason why Beyoncé was honoured with an iHeartRadio Innovator Award this year. She has upped the ante with her challenging, visually arresting work.
Her bold style and bravura visuals have not gone unrecognized, with Homecoming (2019) winning Best Music Film at the 2020 Grammy Awards, and Best Music Documentary at the 2019 IDA Documentary Awards, not to mention the six 2019 Emmy nods it also received. And to date, Renaissance (2023) has received several award nominations, including iHeartRadio’s 2024 “Favorite On Screen” award and the “Special Recognition” award from the 2024 GLAAD Media Awards.
One of Beyoncé’s most influential achievements has been renewing the idea of the visual album and solidifying its viability as a strategy to elevate the release of an album to “special event” status. Since the release of Lemonade, we’ve seen a wave of similar projects from other artists: creatively adventurous, thematically linked visual stories; cohesive works that exist to bloom and expand the artists’ vision beyond the confines of the audio record.
Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2018) is creatively brilliant on a similar level to Lemonade, functioning as a sumptuous expansion of the Afrofuturist worldbuilding mythos featuring the singular character of the rebellious android Cindi Mayweather/Jane that Monáe’s musical storytelling has embodied from the start of their career.
Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine) also made a stunning, immersive visual album with 2016’s The Odyssey, which pulls songs from her How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album to create a non-linear but still deeply interconnected story of love, loss, family history, home, identity and fame. Like Lemonade, The Odyssey features moments of poetic dialogue in voiceover by Welch and others, and audio snippets of anonymous people speaking that are not included on the original record but are placed within the visual album as thematically relevant transitional bridges between sections of the film.
Her visual albums—a chronology
Beyoncé’s revival of the visual album began with 2013’s surprise album drop of her self-titled record alongside 14 linked music videos made available all at once—unusual in an industry that tends to limit an album’s videos to a handful of songs released on a strategic rollout schedule—and five bonus videos, “Self-Titled 1-5.”
In the latter, she presents a making-of documentary in five chapters which include behind-the-scenes music video and studio footage with her creative collaborators, snippets of her various musical and visual influences throughout her career, and personal home videos, all tied together with Beyoncé’s narration via voiceover as well as a sit-down interview in the studio.
This was followed by 2016’s equally unexpected album Lemonade and its accompanying film of the same title, featuring deeply arresting visuals, bold narrative choices, and creative collaborations with a diverse array of artists and writers. These include Warsan Shire, the British-Somali former Young Poet Laureate of London; NYC-based Nigerian visual artist Laolu Senbanjo, whose vivid, Yoruba mythology-inspired white body paint can be seen adorning her dancers throughout the film; and Nigerian-American feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The cinematic end is equally stacked, with the list of filmmakers, cinematographers, and other creatives who bring the visuals to life including director and cinematographer Khalil Joseph, directors Jonas Åkerlund and Mark Romanek, and Hannah Beachler, who was the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Production Design for her stunning work on 2018’s Black Panther.
Lemonade’s visual influence is also deeply saturated in the work of renowned artist, cinematographer, and Knowles-Carter family creative collaborator Arthur Jafa. His work on Julie Dash’s 1992 film Daughters of the Dust, a seminal piece about Black women struggling to retain their Gullah culture, is reflected in multiple scenes in Lemonade that showcase the elegant beauty of southern Black womanhood and traditions. With Lemonade, unlike with the previous visual album for Beyoncé, there is a deliberate narrative thread winding through the film, with each chapter set to a different song on the album continuing the story, while spoken interludes weave it all together.
She followed this up with Black Is King (2020), the companion film to her soundtrack album, Lion King: The Gift, for Disney’s 2019 photorealistic remake of The Lion King, in which she also starred. With Black Is King, Beyoncé leans even further into the narrative structure, as the film follows a specific character through his “hero’s journey,” with each song from the album being dramatized through gorgeous, abstract music videos that showcase his character’s growth and evolution, as played by three different actors.
The film acts as a loose retelling of The Lion King featuring human, specifically Black African characters. But where the film rises above its source material is the decision to showcase African people, cultures, fashions, and traditions as the centrepiece of the work, as opposed to a convenient narrative backdrop.
On Black Is King, Beyoncé once again worked with production designer Beachler, as well as collaborating over the course of a year with a plethora of directors, fashion designers, visual artists and musical collaborators from across the African continent. With this film, Beyoncé subverts well-worn tropes about Africa as either a downtrodden monolith or exotic wildlife locale, and instead revels in the cultural and artistic richness that exists amongst everyday people across the continent, from stylized, historically rooted hairstyles, to traditional adornments blended with modern fashion, to diverse, regionally-specific African architecture and sweeping landscapes, to distinct dance styles represented throughout the multiple chapters of the film.
Depicting her personal and political identity
Something else that becomes clear as one traces her visual archive is all the ways that Beyoncé’s personal growth—as facets of her identity both as a Black woman in America, and as a global pop superstar, shift and change over the years—is intertwined and reflected in the musical explorations of her albums released over the past decade or so, and their accompanying increasingly brilliant visualizations.
With 2013’s self-titled Beyoncé, she is reclaiming her identity in different ways: as a solo artist after spending over half her life in a musical group, as a wife, as a mother, and as a grown woman who is unashamedly embracing her own sensuality and sexuality.
“I always felt like it was my responsibility to be aware of kids and their parents and all these generations, and I felt like it stifled me,” she says in the Self-Titled documentary. “I know finding my sensuality, getting back into my body, being proud of growing up, it was important to me that I expressed that in this music.”
This new, more overtly sexual version of Beyoncé can be seen in the steamy video for “Partition,” with the bold visual aesthetics inspired by the strip club she took Jay-Z to on the night of their engagement.
With Lemonade in 2016, the fact that this album about infidelity and righteous female anger was unleashed without warning two years after the infamous elevator fight incident— when security footage leaked from the 2014 Met Gala showed Beyoncé’s younger sister Solange furiously going after Jay-Z in an elevator despite his bodyguard’s best efforts, while Beyoncé looked on, making no effort to intervene—would seem to indicate a clear connection between the two.
However, Lemonade cannot be reduced to a diatribe about male infidelity, as its lush visuals and storytelling expand to include ideas about what it means to be a Black woman in America. These include the polarizing imagery from the “Formation” segment of her standing on a half-submerged and still sinking police car, as well as the later image sequences featuring mothers of murdered Black men holding up portraits of their sons.
In 2019’s Homecoming, the entire visual aesthetic of her headlining performances at Coachella paid tribute to American HBCUs (historically Black colleges & universities), and their distinct style, athletic fashions, stepping, and marching band cultures, amongst other vibrant elements.
Black Is King took Beyoncé all the way back to her ancestral African roots, with the first words spoken in voiceover being, “Bless the body born celestial, beautiful in dark matter… You are welcome to come home to yourself… Let Black be synonymous with glory.” And visually, it is a stunning ode to everything that it means to be African, whether from the continent or a child of the diaspora returning home.
With Renaissance and the accompanying film, a lot has been said about the entire album and the ways in which she centres and uplifts the queer community in celebrating Black 1970s dance music, unsung legends in ballroom culture, and pioneers of the house music genre. But on a more personal level, especially considering her more recent celebration of her own sexuality and the releasing of obligations to perform respectability for the world, her infectious dance number “Church Girl” also works as a sweet apology to her younger self for the slut-shaming judgement that featured on the Destiny’s Child hit, “Nasty Girl.”
The latter’s lyrics include the likes of, “Shakin’ that thang on that man / Lookin’ all stank and nasty / You swore you look cute, girl, in them dukes? / Booty all out, lookin’ trashy / Sleazy, put some clothes on, I told ya…”
But in “Church Girl”, the narrator as embodied by Beyoncé sings, “I’m warning everybody / soon as I get in this party / I’m gon’ let go of this body, I’m gonna love on me / Nobody can judge me but me, I was born free… I said, now drop it like a thotty, drop it like a thotty (you bad) / Bad girls actin’ raunchy, church girl, don’t hurt nobody (don’t hurt nobody).”
Beyoncé’s image and reality
Returning to her documentary work, from an audience point of view, there is also something to be studied in the incredible mass appeal of her six tour documentaries. Each one crafted meticulously by the star herself, they reflect an auteur-like approach that seems unusual for a music artist, even one as notorious as Beyoncé is for presenting a tightly controlled image to the public. (I once saw a list of very stringent rules included in a contract that concert photographers were required to sign to photograph her.) But her concert documentaries often seem to bring the viewer into very intimate parts of her life and creativity.
Because Beyoncé shares increasingly vulnerable moments of her life in her recent documentary works, it becomes easy for dedicated fans to feel like they know her deeply, and that she knows them. Parasocial relationships with celebrities are nothing new, but the evolution of social media over the past two decades, and how it influences the way society itself functions, has vastly changed the relationships between fans and creators, granting a sense of ownership and accountability that has never really existed before.
But Beyoncé seems to be successfully walking the fine line between mystery and relatability. Although she is known for having one of the most militant fanbases on the internet, she still only shares what she wants people to know about her life, and she rarely responds directly to any rumours or scandals regarding her or her family being speculated about in public, outside of widely interpretable lyrical references in her album releases.
What she does do, increasingly, is redirect the spotlight from herself onto the myriad artists and creative talents she collaborates with and elevate neglected but important pioneers within music genres and subcultures.
The former can be seen with her latest album Cowboy Carter, an album that makes the case for country music’s roots being in Black culture while spotlighting talented Black contemporary country musicians like Rhiannon Giddens, Shaboozey, and Tiera Kennedy, as well as white legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, among others.
In March 2024, Beyoncé released the documentary Call Me Country: Beyoncé & Nashville’s Renaissance, which highlighted such brilliant musicians as Shaboozey, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, Tanner Adell, Reyna Roberts and Willie Jones in it assertion that Blacks have had a profound impact on what is often considered a whites-only genre. Beyoncé’s focus meant that many terrific, underappreciated musicians have achieved first-ever placements on the Billboard charts, soaring streaming numbers, and an influx of new fans on their social media platforms.
Beyoncé took a similarly supportive role when she released Renaissance and asked the viewers to recognize and celebrate not only the queer trailblazers in music and ballroom culture who inspired the album, but also the community of workers, from the crew to the choreographers, it took to bring Renaissance to life.
Beyonce’s potential trilogy
“With the pandemic, there was too much heaviness in the world. We wanted to dance. We deserved to dance.” —Beyoncé
Beyoncé’s uplifting quote is fascinating considering the parallel trajectories of her personal growth and artistic output. From a bird’s-eye perspective, one could note that if the release schedule had gone according to her original plan, Black Is King, a celebration of the history of African culture both on the continent and within the diaspora, would have been followed by Cowboy Carter, a deep dive into, and contemporary reclaiming of the Black roots of country music, which would have then been concluded with Renaissance, a queer-affirming, Black joy-celebrating album and film that is suffused with futuristic aesthetics. So, despite the skewed timelines of the last two albums, Beyoncé has actually created a secret trilogy celebrating Blackness in the past, present, and future.
With those three highly successful works, Beyoncé has redefined what it means to be not just a genre-hopping performer but also an interdisciplinary creative artist who is unafraid to break new ground, both for herself and for all others following in her wake.
