Alyssa disagreed with my definition. She preferred to think of art as communication. After all, what art exists without the intent of communication?

Simply to offer a counterpoint, I suggested that art made with no audience in mind as a sort of foil to her scheme. But she reminded me that one even communicates when something is made in isolation, with no intent of being shared with the broader culture. There is such a thing, after all, as communicating with one’s self.

How true that is. Aren’t we communicating with ourselves all the time? It would be foolish to think any time a person wrote something down that there was always an intent for such writing to be seen. No, sometimes writing, painting, drawing and all the rest are done for one’s self. Not as an ego-building exercise, quite the opposite. In the case of writing to oneself I can avow that this can be a strictly practical affair. Thoughts can bounce around in one’s head indefinitely, but writing a thought down brings it out of the mind. Now it can be read, revisited, revised.

Writing can be intentionally for artistic ends, be it for an audience or for oneself, but writing to oneself can also be a matter of cleaning house.

This is how I’ve come to thought of my habit of journaling. Though I’ve written little (or published, at least) on this blog, I have not stopped writing for a day. For the first time in my life I’ve actually taken up the task of journaling and have found it able to assuage the “bounciness” of the thoughts that rattle around in my head daily.

In fact, I’d suggest that the writing I’ve done in my journal, addressed to no one but my self (be it past, present, or future) is more vital than the writing I’ve put out into the world. As writing is my main means of creative expression, it is vital that I do both, but if I only write with the intent of that writing being seen, I’m probably going to miss out on the most beneficial qualities of writing in terms of health.

It’s been said that “character is who you are when nobody’s watching.” No one behaves identically behind closed blinds as they do with them wide open. In the worst of cases this means a type of double life—the addict who uses their substance in the dark and who is a well-behaved citizen in the daylight. But we can also accept this spectrum of behavior for what it is—evidence of our consciousness being internally diverse. I, as everyone, have tendencies in behavior when in private and when in the public eye. But journaling, and I presume other ways of communicating with oneself such as certain forms of meditation, offers a unique opportunity, a third way. It’s not a bridge between the public and private, it is instead the opportunity to commune with the society within one’s self, through the mediating factor of the page.

It’s curious but not surprising that journaling is associated with both sanity and insanity. After all, those who have seemed to have gone genuinely insane seem to have no shortage of personalities to converse with, though they might be totally alone. Likewise, one who seems to genuinely be at peace with oneself is not simply permanently happy as a brute fact—they simply have better ways of working through the sorts of problems that arise in daily living. They have a way to mediate before mediating.

How many times have I written something, and then after the fact realized: yes, this is what I think! I didn’t know that’s what I thought when I was simply thinking about it, I had to communicate the thought in order to get a proper perspective on it, even if the communication was just towards my self.

My current journaling practice is kept as simple as possible in order to encourage myself to actually do it. First of all, the actual journal I selected I wanted to be nice so as not to feel disposable, but I also did not want it to be too fancy so as to discourage me from bringing it outside or slipping it into my back pocket. So I found the perfect balance when I was in a Japanese stationary store (there’s no shortage of these in LA—another thing I’ve loved about this city). The brand is “Midori” and its an “MD Paper” journal that has nice paper that’s supposed to prevent smearing and bleed through. I have no complaints.

The size was indeed just right, and since the day I bought this first volume of my journal I’ve brought it everywhere with me. I use it to jot down notes for work, spare thoughts throughout the day, even profound quotes that arise from conversations. But the primary use comes in the form of a morning journaling routine. I have set aside a small non-intimidating amount of time to simply write out two lists: one is my fears and resentment, another is my gratitudes.

The suggestion for this approach came from a friend of mine. The practice wasn’t entirely foreign to me since my wife and I used to do a daily gratitude list together. I enjoyed that, but it also might give oneself the wrong impression that only those sorts of feelings are allowed to be recorded. The other sort of feelings, which I call my “fears and resentments” list, can also benefit you when written down.

I actually think of myself as a very non-resentful person. I think that I don’t hold grudges, that I let things go, that I try to see everything in a somewhat positive light. And yet, every morning, when I sit down to write this list, it’s always at least one entry long. Sometimes it’s something as large scale as a global event or particular political leader, and sometimes it’s just my cat. In fact, it is often my cat. I was amused when rereading my journal to see how often my cat oscillated between being on my resentment list and my gratitude list.

And to be clear, I do not distinguish which entries are fears and which are resentments. In the moment I am certain which category they would fall under, but in retrospect, its clear to me that these are to two points on the same axis.

It’s important to remember to be grateful. If you disagree with that, I can almost guarantee you are a miserable bastard (no offense). But it is surprisingly difficult. I find most often that I can only muster gratitude for the things right in front of me—the sunlight trickling into our apartment, my cup of coffee, my incredible wife. It can be much harder to be grateful for more general things—those more often end up in the fear and resentment category.

I’m grateful that I kept my expectations low for this journal. Though these lists are my minimum, my quota to hit for the day, I end up writing more organically. Writing down at least one thing in each list is a task so simple I would feel like an idiot if I didn’t do it, which expedites the process of overcoming the mental hurdle that awaits one whenever any task is ever attempted. That’s what a habit is, right? A task which has become translucent—where we no longer perceive any of the friction required to get started, because the brain has gotten so used to it that it would be a waste of mental energy to weigh the pros and cons of starting it.

As Melville wrote,

“Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”

This is the first time in my life I’ve ever finished a journal. I’ve begun many in my life, but I’ve always become too intimidated or too embarrassed. I built it up in my head. But this time I kept expectations low, focused on habit building, and here I am, five months later, writing in a second volume with no plans to ever stop.

Completing a journal has allowed me to enjoy the other side of the activity, the opportunity to be communicated to, and to notice emergent qualities in the flows of my thinking and writing.

Since I began journaling shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, this first volume actually has quite a nice narrative arc. A few pages into the book, I was in despair. I had no job lined up, I was worried about finances, and my wife and I were beginning to consider back-up plans. I need not indulge by transcribing it here, but suffice to say I was in a bad way.

But not much later in the journal, I am employed, things are beginning to line up, and my writing completely changes. In the moment, this period felt incredibly long. It felt like it would never end. But within the scope of my journal, it was only the first 20 pages. The rest of the entries after that point represent a time where things have moved by much quicker, yet 150 pages have been filled. A finished journal can offer one a rare perspective, akin to a bird’s eye view of one’s own thinking.

I am now 20 some pages into my new journal, much the same mark where I was in my first journal where I was in genuine despair. But this time, things are looking pretty good. My life is beginning to re-balance. And as long as I remain committed to this habit, I can look ahead, towards the blank pages that fill the rest of the book, and wonder what life might look like then. I can ask, what sort of place do I want to be in my thought-life by then? Not a few months from now, but 150 pages from now.

Others have said that the mind progresses in spirals. I think this is true. So as I proceed, forgive my lack of linearity and direction. But I simply need to write, even if its in the form a spiral.

Most of my life has, in some way, revolved around the city of Los Angeles. Revolved around but never touched, until now.

I grew up in Central Oregon, where California is looked upon with derision—the residents of SoCal cities being known for routinely moving up to Oregon and driving up the cost of housing. Of course, the whole thing is a sort of local in-joke, a shared sarcasm, because we all know that the vast majority of the locals are direct descendants of Californians, me included. My parents grew up around LA, my grandparents still live in the county, and my brother is just South, in Orange county. But even beyond the family connections, I also developed an interest in film early on, and any interest in the film industry means, by default, a certain degree of interest in Los Angeles and in Hollywood.

But throughout my life I’ve also pushed this city away from me. Though I’ve had a major interest in film history for some time, I would often tell people that my taste generally veered away from most anything produced by Hollywood—that I preferred independent and foreign films. I lived in Orange County for four years when doing my undergrad and developed a general disdain for the city.

And yet, here I am. Right in the heart of the American film industry, living in Los Angeles. Not only that—but I’m actually enjoying myself. I love this strange city and the multitudes it contains. It’s been wonderful to explore different areas, visit the numerous cinemas, and try some of the diverse local cuisine.

Our journey west towards California really began with a drive East, to stop in Baltimore for a week. The biggest event in my field was happening there, the annual, national meeting of the association of moving image archivists. Most everyone I know who worked in the field would be there, and going was part of a calculated bet, a bet that my wife and I would be able to move to LA without jobs and figure some sort of employment-situation after we got there. I was hoping that by going to the AMIA conference, that I would meet and chat with some film archivists who could help me find a job in the city where film preservation is most needed.

“We often wonder where all the films that are made and used a few times go to, and the questions come up in our minds, again and again: Are the manufacturers aware that they are making history?”

So goes an editorial published in the dull-sounding View and Film Index, from an issue in 1906. If people were aware of the need to preserve films even in the sixth year of the 20th century, why was the rest of this century nonetheless full of confusion about the importance of preserving film as a historic artifact? Why did so many films have to be lost? Why do museums, universities, and archives still struggle to find funds from an industry that seems endlessly profitable? Why is there so much need for film preservation and yet nearly no demand for film archivists?

Many think that film exists to create a fantasy structure, to provide escapist illusion—but this is a half-truth. Cinema, really, is the medium of disillusionment. But in order to disillusion us, it must continually generate illusions, dreams, and fantasies. Yet unlike literature, which begins from the blank page, cinema does not begin from the blank frame. As soon as a negative is exposed to light, it begins to reflect the reality outside of it. It gives us a mirror, disjointed from the everyday passage of time.

The novel need not return to the basic experience of life. Often it takes everydayness as its beginning and then builds upon it in spiraling, weaving metaphors and webbings of meanings—until one enters the sublime realm of ideas, rhetoric, and imaginings. But film, for all its flights, fancies and lies, must always continually return to the terrific mundane. Even in the fantasy-dreams of George Melies, one cannot seem to forget the fact that one is simply looking at people, who eat, drink, get bored, walk around, and sleep the same way anyone does. One can more easily forget these facts in literature, and must be deliberately reminded of them, even in a disillusioning parable such as Don Quixote.

Cinema disillusions us as an inevitability of its form. We are lured into the world of a film, the same way we are lured into the world of a dream. In drowsy darkness we see inexplicable images. It ends suddenly. The lights come on as the unreality dissolves away, we return to everyday life. Disillusionment is essential to cinematic narratives as it is essential in the form of its presentation. We see this especially in contemporary cinema, where audiences have become well-accustomed with the trickery inherent in filmmaking and where films often ground their sense of reality only in opposition to that which feels cinematic.

Los Angeles is, stereotypically, the place where the most movies are made. Not, perhaps, the best movies, but the most—with the highest budgets too. Or if not the most (India beats us many times over), then the most iconic. Regardless, because Hollywood is the home of so many films, it is also where the films die. For much of film history, studios saw no value at all in preserving their films. They would burn them, toss them in the ocean, chop them in half with an axe—anything to prevent their piracy and/or preservation. Film as an object has rarely been treated well in the city which is most famous for it. And though much progress has been made, it is still true. Preservation never seems to be anywhere near a top priority for studios or related institutions. When the Academy (of Oscars fame) axed entire departments related to preservation (in 2024, right as I was in my program), it was shocking for my field, but it was also indicative of a broader trend to shift focus from preservation. Though considering the recent mergers and great slowing of amount of films produced per year, the focus does not seem to be on production either.

But this does not change the fact that the films produced on film, actual, real film, often end up staying in LA. And there’s no denying that its actually a terrible place for them to be—the area can be incredibly hot and even humid, the exact opposite conditions that films should be stored. It’s the place where these dreams wither.

Sometimes it feels like our popular culture has become apprehensive and reactionary. Our politics moves at breakneck speed and is highly productive in cultural terms, with everyday feeling like there is some sort of new political event. Cinematic culture seems to move at a snail’s pace by comparison. Music often appears this way too.

But I really don’t think this is the case. It’s just the most prominent and powerful producers of culture which have slowed, and become reactionary. People find a way to make culture happen. No matter what. I am certain many of the greatest films made today rarely even grace the screens of arthouse cinemas.

I believe the montage might be the cinema’s greatest contribution to human understanding. I mean this in the full Eisenteinian sense, but this statement also holds up for the common understanding of the word. The scene in the movie where a character stays up all the night researching something—we enter montage. The period where a character enters a state of depression and isolation over many months—we enter montage. Two characters experience a blissful day without conflict—we, more often than not, enter montage.

Hitchcock rarely used this technique. His philosophy was that drama was “life with the boring bits cut out”. But montage is an arrangement of moments, typically of equal rate, put together like a temporal bouquet. A particular display of a general period of time.

Thinking about life as if it were a film is usually not healthy, though it may have been somewhat inevitable throughout the 20th century, the years where it dominated our imaginations. But here’s a case where cinema has given us something like a Frankl-esque therapeutic tool. If one imagines certain moments in their life as if they were passing through a montage, they may find it easy to approach them with levity. It’s a reminder of how we’ll remember moments after they pass, and by imposing that on the present, it can help one see that it is a moment. Or in Frankl’s terms, that it has all already happened once, and we are going through life the second time.

I remember with clarity a moment in the fifth grade where I was preparing a tri-fold presentation on the country of Britain. I put on Tycho’s album, A Walk and I imagined that moment as if it were a montage—and I finished it with great focus and levity. I have read many books this way. It is almost like the moment I cease imagining it as if I were in a montage that I feel the drag of everyday time. Which I find inherently discouraging. But perhaps this is another malady, rather than a virtue. I don’t know. What is the proper way to orient yourself towards the passage of time?

As I write this now, I am listening to “Sky (i)” by Bby Eco, and I am imagining myself finishing as I begin. I turn off the internet, I plug in my headphones, and I let time pass.

I watch movies and imagine life. I live life and imagine it’s a movie.

When dreams wither, where do they go?

Into the air? Into the ground?

They must go somewhere.

In Baltimore I met many others who work in my field, and a few of them were even kind enough to agree to meet up with me when I would eventually make my way out to Los Angeles.

It was a conference just as one imagines it. Full of talks, questions, conversations. But the final night had a mysterious event listed after the closing dinner. A local art collective was putting on an event and invited all the film archivists to come out to their venue to see their space, hear them play some music, and play an eclectic collection of films.

Over the convention, I made friends with many people, but no one was friendlier than the projectionists. In the field of film preservation, projectionists tend to have the most lively personalities among them—genuine enthusiasts, who care deeply about the nuts and bolts of presentation, and typically avoid overly intellectualizing films. I fell in particularly well with a group of folks, mostly made up with projectionists who work in Pennsylvania such as the Mahoning Drive In and the Ambler Theater.

Unsure of what exactly the event would even be, I trudged through the then-snowy streets of Baltimore to an address I had pulled up on my phone. When we arrived, it appeared as if we were simply in front of an apartment building, not a cinema, not an art space. Nothing of that sort. But we knocked on the door and were quickly let in. We snuck through crowded hallways of what seemed to be simultaneously a church within an apartment. The roof sloped, there was an altar, and stained glass. Projectionists were furiously setting up 8mm projectors to put images on both sides of the sloped ceiling, while also setting up instruments on the stage. They seemed eager to impress this group of archivists from all around the country... And impress us they did, it was a wonderful cacophony of projected images and ambient-ish music. Me and the group of projectionists were obviously very into it, but so were folks who I didn’t expect to show up--people higher up at film studios and prestigious non-profits and such. It was nice to see them in such a DIY space, nice to set aside all our discussions about best practices and simply witness people making culture happen. I think of all the pioneers of our field, it would be Langlois, who was known to project films in stairwells, who would have really gotten a kick out of it.

I know where many of the withering dreams are. They’re in Los Angeles. They’re in warehouses where the golden summers that the same films invented as a vision of American paradise rot away, crackling, bubbling and turning to dust. When these films were projected they may have seemed like eternal images. But they were not. When one puts up a an icon upon a wall, it may seem to be an eternal image, but it is not. An icon ages, and incorporates its age into itself. It is a reminder not of what it once was, but that what once was has become what is now. Though we must always desire to restore things to their original state, so that we may gain some fraction of historical understanding regarding it, the restoration betrays the object.

A film is a chemical product. It is bound together by humans and will inevitably come apart. But we imagine movies are not things. Yet they are.

They say that icons are windows into heaven. This may be true. But the window must remain on Earth. And on Earth, everything withers.

Do not be mistaken: young people want to work. In fact, all the young people I know want to work quite badly. It’s the jobs that have changed. Even a Master’s degree in many fields is in no way a direct pipeline to career success.

None of the jobs I applied for or officially interviewed for went much of anywhere. It was frustrating in the moment, it made me doubt the validity of my degree, my skills, my entire life decisions that had brought me to this point. But in reality, even in my incredibly niche field, publicly-posted jobs are still ridiculously competitive. I would often see who got the jobs I would apply for later on LinkedIn, and they often had much more experience than me. I’m talking, like, 10-20 years more experience! It felt hopeless to compete against such candidates, many of whom had been laid off from their previous jobs due to consolidation, government funding cuts, or even directly from the command of Elon Musk’s DOGE. And I have not even mentioned the jobs slashed by ever-improving AI, even in my field (metadata, for instance). It made me wonder if my skills were needed at all.

But I hoped that if I talked to enough people in my field, asked enough questions, and put myself in the right place—then I might just have to wait for the right opportunity to crop up. This turned out to be the correct strategy, and I got my current job in a very unusual way. In my last position, I took someone on as an intern. This intern was the one who introduced me to someone at the conference who eventually introduced me to other folks in Los Angeles—and it was them who put me in touch with a potential employer.

And now, after getting hired and getting tours of various other archives in Los Angeles, it’s become painfully obvious to me that my skills are needed, as much as ever. It’s just that many places aren’t hiring, partially due to an uncertain economic future, and archives are never the most obviously profitable part of a business.

But this journey to get a job also convinced me further that one should never, ever be a gatekeeper in their field. You should always put active effort into helping young people develop into professionals, where you can, and you don’t need to be high up to do this. Taking that intern on did not have an obvious, immediate “reward” for me, but I think that being nice to people will inspire them to be nice to you in turn—and will perhaps inspire them to introduce you to other nice people. Now is not the time to give up on our youth.

Speaking of youth, I have just replayed my favorite video game, Earthbound. I hope I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is probably the most influential piece of media on my taste. It’s one of those things I’m always going back to in my head, comparing other things to the aesthetics of the game. One of the reasons I’ve had a continual obsession with it, is because I adored the game before I could even play it. I watched videos of it, listened to the soundtrack religiously, and even read fan forums before ever actually playing it. Anyone who knows anything about the game could tell you the reasons why it’s been so inaccessible. Anyways, I was only able to start playing it around 2013-14, which was the perfect age for me, right at what I would consider the end of my childhood.

I love the design of the game, the characters, the areas in the world, and the battle sequences. Basically any game that feels influenced by it instantly clicks with me: Lisa, Undertale, Yume Nikki, Space Funeral, etc. But it’s not just that I like things which are influenced by it; anything I see which reminds me of it feels like home.

The backgrounds of the game resemble optical illusions, something I’ve been attracted to since I was a child. When I look at the album of Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective (my favorite band of the ‘00s-’10s), I see the background to a battle screen from the game:

When I first saw Hausu, I immediately fell in love with it because it felt like its aesthetics and narrative logic were perfectly in line with Earthbound.

Hausu contains that same rare balance of childish whimsy, absurdist humor, psychedelic visuals, nightmarish violence, and unabashed optimism.

It would be a forgivable mistake to think that I moved to where movies are made, from where movies go to die. After all, Los Angeles has Hollywood, and Rochester has a museum where they seal films into mausoleum-like structures for the indefinite future. But the opposite is really true: I moved from where film is made, to where it goes to die. Film, nearly all motion picture film now, is made in one place—Kodak in Rochester, NY. It is in Los Angeles where this film is used, and where movies are haphazardly strewn all about—in bedrooms, basements, and offices. Film starts dying, really, as soon as it is born. But we can at least give them as dignified and slow a death as possible.

The work of a film archivist is poetic in the abstract, but quite gritty in reality. I work in a large warehouse-like structure, the shelves stocked with films, many from the 1920s and 30s. It feels like I have access to a beautiful bank of human memory. Many of my days now are simply filled with me opening cans, often entirely unlabeled, and figuring out what is inside of them. It involves dealing with a lot of dust, a lot of chemical decomposition, and rust. These are not exactly the things that made me want to be an archivist, and I’m grateful for my studies, because it is a constant reminder of the what can be reaped when preservation is taken seriously. If I did not study preservation prior, I would not understand that the work I am doing today needs to be thought of in the scale of centuries. It may well be the case that here in 2026, I am working on cleaning up a film from 1926, so that people in 3026 can understand history a bit better. The poetry helps me work through the grit, the dust, even the discomfort.

Our move involved a drive, from Rochester to Los Angeles. We couldn’t afford a moving truck, so we simply packed out Subaru to the gills. But we also had to leave enough room for Pixel, our cat. This meant getting rid of a lot of stuff. The majority of what we had owned. I vividly rememeber that last day in our Rochester apartment, where I was grabbing anything that wasn’t fitting in the car, and that hadn’t been designated for storage and running across the street to throw them in the dumpster. The snow was brutal, interfering with my vision, as I’d wait for the street to clear to jog across the ice-packed road. I listened to Danny Brown’s Stardust and Bladee’s Cold Visions many times as I was horrified by how much stuff we had accumulated. I thought we had been living minimally, but when you have to venture out into the snow of Western New York in order to dispose of things, suddenly you realize that, yes, you have been living a life of needless vanity, consumerism, and mindless accumulation.

Theoretically, the concept of a piece of art which is simply pure, unabashed joy is the most appealing of all. Yes, it’s good to have work which reflects the dark aspects of reality, but shouldn’t art simply offer an escape? Yet, the narratives we seem to come back to again the most are ones which move a character from a state of naivete to one of maturity and bravery. This too is a form of disillusionment.

One of my favorite aspects of Earthbound is the way it cares for the experience of the player. It’s not just about the gameplay, or even the story, it’s also about the experience of spending time in Earthbound’s orbit. Video games are, of course, huge time sinks. Most game companies seem not to bat an eye when confronted with this fact, the same way social media companies willingly continued their designs after discovering they were addictive (a fact recently recognized by the law!) but no so with Shigesato Itoi et al. If you play the game for too many hours in a row, the protagonist’s father calls you and tells you that you “shouldn’t work too hard”. This is an uncommon practice for games even nowadays (barring things like Animal Crossing), which are still designed to extract as much attention from you as possible. By contrast, it simply feels like Earthbound cares about you, that it wants to give you an actually beneficial experience.

This is similarly reflected in the way that the game has a few key moments in it of what I’d call “forced reflection”. Another downside to playing video games is the way that they can encourage a rushed and hurried mindset. Games can leave your mind reeling and make the everyday perception of time feel comparatively dull. But Earthbound has a few moments in it, two in particular, which do not focus whatsoever on anything associated with traditional game mechanics, gameplay, narrative… Anything.

It first comes when, about halfway through the game’s narrative, a friendly Mr. Saturn offers you a cup of coffee. Typically, you’d expect this to heal your character. But instead, the game disappears, and the player is simply delivered text in front of an animated background.

The text tells you to take a moment to rest, appreciate how far you’ve come, and assures you that you’re doing the right thing. It seriously feels like being cared for by a higher power or something.

In the original Japanese it ends by saying something closer to, “May the goddess of good fortune smile upon you always.”

It reminds of moments in some of my favorite slow-paced films. Sequences that force the viewer to really sit with time, and reflect. It’s as if you’ve been duped into meditating. I could point to many such sequences, such as a few I just witnessed in my first viewing of Reygadas’ Japon, but it seems undeniable that Tarkovsky is the real innovator of these kind of sequence such as in Solaris, Andrei Rublev, and Nostalghia. The scene that’s always at the top of my mind in this regard, though, and the one that really puts me into a contemplative headspace is in Stalker.

They say that prayer is talking and that meditation is listening.

I’ll get to the prayer part later.

In Rochester is one of the only people who has read any of my novel so far. His name is Robert, and I first met him when I was cutting my teeth at the neighborhood deli. I’d serve him a sub, and notice he was excellently dressed--always with a color-coordinated jacket and a hat. One day I noticed he was reading a book about the Italian filmmaker Visconti, and I just had to say something. We quickly bonded over a few deli conversations, talking about theater, Doestoevsky, and Bergman.

When I began working as the manager of the Dryden theater, Robert would always come to the most interesting films we played, and our conversations continued. Eventually I got coffee with him and mentioned the novel I was writing. He expressed willingness to read the draft, which is always a nice offer, but rarely a sincere one. But I presumed his offer was genuine, not in the least because he mentioned his habit of memorizing entire poems. Surely, this was a reader actually willing to engage with an unfinished novel. And not a short one, at that.

When I met up with him for the last time before the move, when I was in the aggravating process of sorting through what to keep and what not to keep, he said something very wise.

“That’s the best part about moving,” he said to me at Bookeater, “getting rid of things.”

It’s strange that Earthbound brings me so much joy, though it is a a game that is all about the end of childish innocence. But I think this is the case for many great narratives. The pleasure of the “Shire” sequences comes from us knowing that they are a blissful prelude to the serious concerns of life, even in a fantasy setting.

The game truly does take a dark turn towards the end. Far too much happens to explain it succinctly—but the players’ characters (who are children) get their brains removed from their bodies and put into robots in order to travel back in time to kill an evil force called Giygas. What is Giygas? Throughout the game, you’re not quite sure if he’s more of a demon or an alien—the game’s blending of 50s-influenced sci-fi and a vague spirituality is one of its strong suits. Anyways, the game’s famous final sequence sees the protagonists passing through a disturbingly organ-y map in order to fight Giygas.

Throughout the extended final boss battle, one barely gets any clearer an idea of what the thing is, but it is depicted in a way which is genuinely quite scary—it gave me nightmares the first time I saw it. It feels jarringly, disproportionately dark compared to the rest of the game. And yet, it is this jarring left turn that brings me back to this game again and again.

As you fight Giygas, his form degenerates until it becomes incomprehensible and seizure-inducing. The music turns to noise and the battle just keeps going. The whole experience is designed to make you feel hopeless, as a player.

But eventually the player inevitably tries an option that has served little use throughout the game—one of your player characters has the ability to “Pray”. It’s usually does little good, just healing your party slightly, and up till now has probably only been used in pinches where the player thinks they are about to die.

In the context of the Giygas battle though, once you start using the “pray” ability, the game becomes very cinematic, and we get to see various characters from throughout the game who feel a sudden urge to play for the protagonists’ safety. It’s only through prayer that Giygas can be destroyed. It makes no reference to a God helping you or rescuing you—just prayer. It’s a powerful concept.

It was actually this final boss that served as my introduction to the game. I was around 10 or 11 years old when I discovered Earthbound through reading a webcomic called “Brawl in the Family” (which I discovered through searching for “Meta Knight” on Google Images—this is how one used to discover cool things on the internet) which made frequent references to Earthbound and to its sequel Mother 3 which was famously never released in the US. I wanted to learn more about Earthbound, and quickly found videos of the Giygas boss battle on YouTube. The whole thing fascinated me, and I wondered what sort of game led to such an intense, psychedelic, terrifying ending. Looking up more details about Giygas online will quickly bring anyone to the ever-popular theory about Giygas being a fetus. I won’t delve too deeply into it, but the basic concept is that you are traveling back in time in order to kill a great evil even before it is born. The thing that blew me away about it was the fact that there did genuinely seem to be the facade of a fetus hidden in Giygas’ character design:

Even more disturbing was the fact that the creator of the game, Shigesato Itoi, discussed that the inspiration for the game came from him watching (what he thought was) a rape scene in a film:

“In an interview on his website, Itoi describes how his inspiration for the final battle with Giygas in EarthBound resulted from a traumatic childhood event where he accidentally viewed the wrong movie at a theater, a Shintoho film entitled Kenpei to Barabara Shibijin. The film featured a murder scene near a river that Itoi mistook for a rape scene which affected him so much that his parents began to worry about his well-being.” (Wikipedia)

This was, in fact, one of the first times I had ever heard of “rape”. The concept was quite new to me as an 11 year old, and was intensely frightening to me.

The cursed, nightmarish qualities of the sequence were unforgettable for me. I had the experience many horror fans describe when they watched their first horror movies. Often they are exposed to it a bit too young, at first it terrified them and they hated it, but then they grew a lifelong fascination with it. But this was also one of the first times I had ever exposed myself to the analysis of symbolism in a piece of media. In many ways, this was the moment that I moved from a naive enjoyment of media to a more critical engagement with it. The end of a time where I was simply drawn to media that sparkled and kept me engaged, and started to actually think about it. The world was a serious place, and this could be reflected even in the media that brought me joy.

It would be many years until I actually played Earthbound, but I frequented fan websites about the game. It stuck in my head. Perhaps because it felt like the extremity of my childhood, its limit. When childish naivete withers away, what remains?

I went to Bookeater nearly every weekday over the last year in Rochester. It was my favorite cafe--it met all of my strict criteria for a cafe suitable for writing in: the tables weren’t wobbly, there was free wifi, and there were ample outlets for laptops. Not to mention a bookstore, a super nintendo available to play at any time (with Earthbound on it), friendly baristas, and a truly remarkable price for a black cup of coffee (which included free refills!) I included it in a scene in our little movie, Alex Can’t Find a Job, where our unemployed protagonist goes in, looking for an environment to focus in but is distracted by rambling Gen-Xers and Millenials who claim kids these days just don’t want to work.

If you have read anything I wrote over the last year, chances are that I wrote it at that cafe. My writing was so attached to my routine there that I have found it difficult to write outside of it. And my novel remains unfinished. Robert emailed me today, asking if I had sent it.

I had to say I’ve had writer’s block. I’ve had it ever since I moved.

A big part of it was the move, and the stress associated with it, of course.

But there has been another factor, a very unexpected one.

The release of and speculation over the meaning of the Epstein files has had a surprisingly negative effect on my creative life. That the content of these files has been highly upsetting and disturbing, should be no surprise. But I never would have thought it an obstacle to writing, to creativity. But it is as if my entire worldview has been inverted. The world really does contain a secretive elite who seek out debased and exploitative activities. In the words of Sam Kriss,

Six years ago, something happened to Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell in New York. I found it hard to reconcile with the basically sensible Marxist materialism I was using to understand the world. I thought social reality was essentially composed of surplus labour and the declining rate of profit, but Epstein seemed to suggest that there are things happening in the shadows that I had never imagined. In a way, it was like discovering, as a grown adult, that no, Santa Claus really is real. Santa’s implicit role is to be the guardian of the secret of the commodity-form. He hides the knowledge that all the wonderful presents are actually just a collection of exchange-values. The primordial forces of the world are fundamentally indifferent to little children, who tend not to actively participate in the labour or commodity markets. (Did you think it was a coincidence that Santa is a big guy with a big white beard, known for his impressive drinking abilities, and associated with the colour red?) Epstein’s secret is the opposite. Whoever it was pulling his strings, they were happy to let this failed maths teacher play around with their billions, pretending to be some kind of genius investor. Money is just a toy. Beyond a certain level it doesn’t really matter at all. The world really runs on stranger stuff. Magic wishes, sacrifices, the circuits of desire. Spooky flash photos of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump sharing verrucas in a hot tub. Somehow, this has to do with the fate of nations. War and revolution. Cities bombed into rubble in the lands of Armageddon. And children are not incidental; they’re at the ugly centre of the whole thing. (Kriss, 2025)

Trying to make sense of these things, to understand what it means for politics, for everyday life, for the film industry, is not only an exhausting mental activity but also one that involves a certain sort of creativity.

Let me explain. I have long been attracted to the zone of online media where conspiracy, lost media, and general eeriness all intermingle. Creepypasta was not just an obsession for me when I was young, it became a way of finding community online, of people who also obsessed over piecing together narratives from creepy media strewn throughout the internet. The epitome of this was the ARGs (artificial reality games), semi-interactable multi-media gameified narratives, like SCP, Everymanhybrid, etc. A lot of it felt quite dark and edgy at the time, but it now seems quite naive. Not to mention my fascination with horror media online was all begun by watching that video of Giygas.

The Epstein files, a release of searchable semi-redacted files online which reveal hidden narratives, and connections exposing the darkest sides of our culture? This would be the ultimate ARG, if only it were not real. There’s creativity, perhaps even enjoyment to be had from piecing together narratives through email correspondences and mysteriously oblique pictures of the world’s most famous people. Everyday there’s a new discovery, a new wrinkle, a new unraveling. The work of online self-styled sleuths is genuinely ten steps ahead of mainstream media, the house oversight committee.

But then I remember what it was all about, what all of this stuff was orbiting around. The undeniable, horrific reality of sex trafficking and pedophilia—and I feel ashamed to be a member of the human race.

How could any of this be real? How can it be that so many of the figures I looked up to as a young person--Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Noam Chomski—can be all involved with a world more degenerate than I previously thought humanly possible?

Not enough people have seen the video files. And I cannot blame them. One does not need to watch them to know they will be disturbing.

But when you do, there’s an undeniable reality that sets in. One can hear the phrase “solicitation of a minor” over and over until they become numb. But when you see videos of young girls dancing in front of Epstein’s desk on his private island, far away from anyone who could help them, you gain a modicum of understanding for what these words are really referring to.

Observe this video, which with the censorship added to protect the victim it depicts, barely captures anything, but the moment it captures tells us volumes about the person who shot it.

The way that a motion picture can capture a moment in time, the way that others can seemingly enter into that moment again by watching it, these things also inspire me to continue the work of film preservation. We can read about it, we can see images, but the videos can grant one a sense of immediate reality that is impossible through any other means. It is disillusioning in its uncinematic-ness. Video, too, is the medium of disillusionment.

But this is an overcrowded reality. And truth becomes quiet in a crowd.

I’ve just found out that a friend of mine was arrested (do I call him my friend now? What else would I call him? A person I knew?). He’s being charged with production, distribution and possession of child pornography and enticement of a minor. I can’t believe it. It feels too dark to be true. None of my friends saw anything like this coming. It wasn’t on accident, the victim was too young to be mistaken. On February 8th, he texted her saying:

“I really like you an [sic] am looking forward to hanging out tomorrow, but tbh I see this relationship ending in heartbreak for you, the age gap just too big to work out long term and I’m risking serious jail time that’ll start to weigh on me more."

How could he be so conscious of doing something like this, and still follow through? Even in the context of the entire country becoming increasingly aware and thinking about the implications of just this sort of crime?

Somewhere out there is at least one video, created by someone I know, committing one of the most morally reprehensible acts I can think of. It hurts me to even know it exists, but it is true.

Video can disillusion—it sometimes does not even need to be seen. In fact, perhaps the most disillusioning videos should be seen by no one—yet these are the ones which demand to be known.

It feels like the moment that I found out what Giygas was based on. Another layer of childish naivete, the inherent trust that people I am friends with do not wish to cause harm to young people, removed. There is real darkness in this world.

The film archive where I work is not far from where the Manson family lived. The beautiful landscapes around me are the same ones that surrounded those people in a murderous cult. It’s hard to imagine such things can neighbor each other in the same location.

Charles Manson moved to Los Angeles because he wanted to be famous. He wanted to be a musician, to be a star. His is the ultimate rejection of disillusionment. He could not accept the disillusionment of Los Angeles.

He lived less than a mile away from where this shot was filmed, in the first feature film Hollywood produced, The Squaw Man.

The Squaw Man was directed by Cecil B DeMille. He was not a good man, and in many ways he was the prototype for all the asshole film directors to come. The corruption and cruelty of Hollywood has been there since the beginning.

But we cannot only preserve the things that are unequivocally moral. I would venture to say that even the so-called “good book” contains few good deeds. In fact, it’s mostly people taking bad actions, and then the bad things which follow as a consequence.

Even in its earliest days, Hollywood turned away many people who wanted to be involved. Gatekeeping comes as easily as breathing in the film industry.

Disillusionment with Hollywood is part of Hollywood. The awakening from the dream is what defines the dream. The limits define the content.

We drove through the polar vortex which had come to bear down on Pennsylvania. Our Subaru got stuck in un-ploughed roads as we traveled through the Allegheny forrest. It’s hard to feel like it was real, as I sit in this cafe in Los Angeles, a cool breeze coming off of the beaches of Santa Monica, the sun beating down. Just a few months ago, we were stuck on the side of a hill in Pennsylvania, our car unable to move, my wife the only thing keeping me from losing my mind.

As we drove South-Westerly, things got warmer. We drove down to Frohna, Missouri, the town where my family of German immigrants started. My great grandmother there had 17 children.

Many of them moved to Los Angeles and then started a dairy farm called Alta Dena, which still exists today (though ownership is out of my family’s hands, after an unfortunate incident of embezzlement). Frohna neighbors Altenburg, both towns part of a community envisioned as a kind of Lutheran utopia. Not quite as radically conceived as anything like that of the Shakers as depicted in The Testament of Anne Lee. It was far more of a humble, realistic project. That region of Missouri was selected apparently because it resembled these Germans’ native Bavaria. It is truly a beautiful place, and the parts of the Stueve family that remain there were kind enough to house me and my wife. I laid in the bed my grandfather would sleep on as a child and I watched a documentary called “The New Saxon World” on my phone, which was about the history of the area. The documentary was made by Paul Moon, a talented filmmaker and someone I consider a mentor to me. His father was always known to me simply as “Dr. Moon”. He was one of the closest friends of the grandfather on my other side. Dr. Moon escaped North Korea to live in America and became a professor at the university where I got my undergraduate degree in English Literature. My grandfather and Paul’s father would teach a literature class there together, which still has a legacy in the English department. How absurdly poetic that Paul and I should be drawn together for completely separate reasons, our mutual interest in documentary filmmaking (we bonded over shared love for Herzog and Koyaanisqatsi). And how strange that he should have made a film about my other grandfather’s hometown.

I was told to take a picture of this tree. My grandmother remembers it vividly from when she was a child. It remains unchanged, outlasting us.

The first video I ever made was about my family, called “The Stueve Family Story.” I made it when I was 13, in my grandparents house. If you watch the video on Youtube, you can see the only comment on the video comes from my grandfather, 11 years ago, which reads: “what a wonderful history.”

The real reason we moved to Los Angeles was to be closer to family. My grandparents live in Monrovia, a part of Los Angeles seemingly preserved. Going to downtown Monrovia feels a bit like stepping into the Los Angeles of the 40s or 50s. There’s a sense of smallness there not many other places in this area.

I was struck recently by the profound fact that my grandparents have lived in the same house for over 60 years. I lived in the same apartment in Rochester for 3 years, which was the longest I had lived in one place since leaving home.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that my grandparents moved to California, bought a house, and have lived there ever since. It’s not a large house and it in fact used to be smaller. But it’s a house in LA county. The sort of money this house has accumulated through simply existing is probably more than I will ever be offered for any job. But there’s no use being resentful towards past generations, particularly within your own family.

Besides, my grandparents know that money does not make you happy. They’ve simply lived within their means their entire lives.

My grandfather has something like Alzheimer’s. Several people have tried to explain to me exactly what it is. But its effectively synonymous with that infamous disease. He has a hard time speaking, can barely move, and has faltering memory. He doesn’t know you’re in the same room as him until you’re within a foot or two of him.

For Christmas, my wife and I bought him a blanket as a present. Nobody else in the room could hear him say it, but he said to me in a broken voice, “I’m glad you’re here because I am going to be gone soon.”

In the backyard of my grandparent’s house is a pomelo tree. The fruits are large and yellow. They’re seems to be an ample supply of them whenever I visit them, and this has been true all throughout my life. Isn’t that alone some type of miracle, that a plant could produce food for one to eat every single day?

I always eat it the same way. Slice the fruit in half, sprinkle a thin layer of sugar on top and then dig out the triangular pieces of flesh with a spoon. After you finish, you can squeeze the juice out of the fruit and you are rewarded with a delicious drink at the end of your humble meal. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of visiting them, and for me its become a taste that is synonymous with California itself.

Now I bring those pomelos with me to work at the film archive, where I eat them in the hot California parking lot outside. As I eat fruit from a tree that has literally fed me all throughout my life, I consider the fact that my job, my field is defined by cleaning up the mess that people from the past have left us. Every film starts to decay after it is made, every fruit starts to rot once it falls from the tree.

But the trees, they outlast generations.

To have hope despite a lack of knowledge that things will work out is the very definition of hope. If we knew things were going to work out, then hope would not need to exist.

Where dreams wither, what remains?

Like most great adventure stories, at the end of Earthbound, almost everything is back to normal. The thing that has changed is you. You can walk around and talk to characters from the game. One of them, another one of those cartoonish Mr. Saturn characters, says something that I can’t help but feels like the embodiment of what it feels like to shed one’s childish understanding of the world: “I THINK NEW THINGS… DIFFICULT THINGS… FROM NOW…”

Moreover, advice around making indie films is often centered around how to make your first low budget film so that you can get a budget to make what you really want. A lot of this is part of a mythological idea of how the film industry works that has little to do with filmmaking as a practice. I want to be a filmmaker the same way most musicians want to be a musician—it’s a necessary creative outlet. There are many great musicians out there who only play to small local audiences and are content with that, that’s not only what I’m willing to settle for in my filmmaking life, but what has actually become my ideal.

And so I’ve picked some better role models in the realm of truly independent film. There’s actually plenty of writing on Substack about these sorts of filmmakers (the buzz word now is NōnDē) but my preferred subsection of films to look up to, I prefer to call Backyard Movies, films made by small-time filmmakers with their friends in local spots. (I wrote a whole piece about it last year.) One such filmmaking group I have been continuously inspired by in this zone is Motern Media. Matt Farley, the figurehead of the group, has a slim book he’s written called “The Motern Method,” which is full of advice which has particularly helped me develop an idea for myself of what indie filmmaking can be when you focus on doing it with your friends. And I’m happy to say that we’ve now applied this method in a little film production of our own, in a little film called “Alex Can’t Find a Job.”

But what is the Motern Method? Well, if I could sum it up (particularly as it pertains to filmmaking), I’d put it into the following pithy rules:

1. Try to make every idea you get

2. Reverse engineer projects based on what is accessible to you

3. Use your friends

4. Tell as many people about your projects as possible

5. Always finish a project that you start and always share it with others

Okay so, some of these rules sound insane, and they certainly contradict most conventional wisdom around creativity. Stephen King famously discourages the concept of even keeping a notebook of your ideas because, in King’s mind, if its a good idea then you’ll remember it. Matt Farley has the opposite view: if you don’t use the ideas that your brain gives you, then it will get mad at you and won’t give you anymore ideas.

Anyways, Farley’s book deserves a piece on its own, but much of what I found inspiring about this approach was the insistence that you already have what you need to make good movies: friends and a camera.

And aren’t no-budget films consistently more enjoyable when they’re clearly made by friends? Keep in mind I don’t mean the low-budget films I was talking about earlier, even El Mariachi had full a cast and crew. No, I’m talking about the sort of movie one makes because they have to and the only sort of cast or crew they can access are their friends who are willing to go along with their crazy ideas. Stuff like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You and, to give an older example, The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters.

Something I realized recently is that the no-budget films that embrace friendship and humor are not merely cowering away from attempting ‘serious’ filmmaking. Rather, art emerging from friendship is something that low budget filmmakers have access to that the big productions don’t.

Getting to the film that we made, it could hardly be scrappier. We did not have access to basic equipment, including mics and tripods. We just had a camera. Well—two cameras. One is my DSLR from the 2000s, a Lumix, the thing I’ve shot all my films on. And the other is a camera designed to film fish underwater that my buddy lent to me. I used it for a significant amount of the film, and it gave it a deliberately lo-fi look.

This is a technique I am particularly fond of—if you don’t have access to equipment to make your production look professional, make it look deliberately rough. It’s the equivalent of the fuzz that defines punk music. In this vein, I processed the footage pretty heavily to try and give it a unique look.

We didn’t have any access to actors. Most of my friends in Rochester had no acting experience. So the protagonist is played by our former roommate, Alex McCune (he has his own Substack) and the antagonist is played by our former neighbor, Addison Pitcher (he also has a Substack!). And we didn’t just use Alex because he was available—I wrote the whole script around him! Alex genuinely had a very hard time finding a job, like so many of my generation, and I realized this was a very simple narrative I had rarely seen depicted. I think if you ask your friends to basically play themselves in a film, you’ll basically always get a good performance. In fact, Alex would typically be pretty adverse to acting, but he totally pulled off this role. I was impressed with his range and commitment.

I too have experienced the brutal realities of job application in the AI-era job market and drew upon those depressing experiences in order to poke fun at the absurdity of the whole thing. I wrote the script mostly in one afternoon, by reverse engineering a plot based on what we had access to: our apartment, our neighbor’s apartment, the street, video game consoles, a coffee-shop I regularly attended, etc.

The film is very unserious and our main goal was to have fun making it. But the Motern method doesn’t just apply to production, it also demands that you actually show what you’ve made. So we had a little film premiere in our apartment. The only problem was, we were actually moving out of our apartment by then! But we followed through nonetheless. Our invites simply told guests to bring their own chairs. And so, on the morning before we left our apartment we packed it with 30 or so people, all friends of the folks in the film, and we had a ton of fun.

It was a modest premiere for a little movie, but it was just as satisfying as any of the professional accomplishments I had achieved. In fact, I was even more proud to play a short film that my wife made, in her directorial debut, called “Together We Fall Apart.”

I think putting on a premiere like this is actually, in many ways, the key to low budget filmmaking. It gives you something to look forward to, to aspire for, and it doesn’t involve any of the competitivity or toxicity that film festivals can sometimes have. It’s not about becoming the next big indie filmmaker—it’s about having fun with friends. Like seeing your friends band play at the local bar. And the beauty of this approach is: anyone can do it. All you need is a camera and some friends.

So, check out the short films we’ve made and after you’ve done that, go and make your own!

speaking of friends…

While I’m at it, I’d be remiss not to mention some films made by those involved with these little productions!

Jake Ryan, who plays the supportive but reprimanding friend is in this hilarious and surreal film, Next Generation: Sorplecum Poseltoy.

and has their own experimental films. I dig this one:

Jose Pereira, who plays the “security guard” in the cafe scene is an experimental filmmaker and has made his own surreal ode to Rochester, Phase V.

Noah Thulin, who did the sound and so much more for “Together We Fall Apart” is a well-established filmmaker. Here’s a recent film he made about Ukraine, with heavy influence from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

And the two Alexs in the film also made this other film with us, earlier in the year:

I have written pretty extensively about my experiences getting off of social media and using a flip phone, in “unliberated from boredom” and “I am not a luddite.”Last year I made a pretty big deal about quitting my social media, and “deleting my account.” My position has softened a bit since that strongly worded post, but that may be because I have spent a whole year not using any social media (aside from LinkedIn) and using a flip phone. So, if anything, returning to it temporarily will remind me of the harms.1

But I guess my big question is whether or not I can make use of one of these platforms and reap the benefits without accruing the harms. And seeing as I am moving across the country in a few weeks, it does seem like an especially good time to document my life, share/document details about the trip, and also to use it to meet new people.

So yesterday I made an instagram account again (@deepfriedliterature). I’m intending to only have it temporarily and I am going to outline some parameters for my own use as another sort of experiment.

With this in mind, I want to revisit this paragraph I wrote 2 years ago:

I somehow needed to show that I was going to play the game, but that I also was somehow “above” it. This urge, to ironically detach, was only further fueled by meme culture. There was a clear cultural counter movement online. Meme culture became a way to critique the mainstream while offering an alternative usage for social media. Instead of a way to connect with friends and family, social media used for memes became a way to ridicule anything and everything, alongside hordes of stranger you would never personally identify. I isolated myself through social media.

This is the main thing I need to avoid. By using so many social medias and becoming increasingly self-conscious, I rarely actually got any of the potential benefits from social media. I filled my feeds with memes and irony, I became a “lurker” and I neglected to actually keep up with messages my friends would send me. I want to change this with my return to IG. I plan on using in short spurts, but in *active* spurts. I actually want to share what’s going on in my life and I want to see what my friends are up to. I want to comment on my friend’s posts, show my support for them, and actually talk to them.

But I need to keep in mind everything I’ve learned. I now consciously know the benefits of spending time away from social media and screens, and I want to restrict my usage to less than a half hour a day. I also know that the majority of posts you see on IG are NOT from those you follow. I am determined to scroll past things from people I don’t follow. Another big reason for using this particular platform is due to the way it has transformed over the last 10 years from being a platform for sharing pictures of yourself to being perhaps the MAIN way events are promoted. This is very clear to me running a movie theater and a screening collective. People find out about events mostly through IG, so organizations focus on promoting them there. Sometimes they are only promoted there. So as I move to a new city and will be deliberately trying to integrate myself and meet new people, this does seem like a valuable tool with legitimate benefits.

These are my main goals for using Instagram this year: (1) no more than 30 mins a day, (2) don’t look at posts from accounts I don’t follow, (3) make the most of keeping up with friends, and actually use it to talk to them, (4) deliberately seek out pages posting local events to stay in the loop, (5) post frequently and don’t overthink the posts, just share my actual, real life (6) no scrolling on reels, (7) if you’re not having fun, close the app. And, of course, no using any of those other social media.

I’m going to actually try to have fun using social media. While numerous factors make this so much more difficult than before, it might just be possible... But I really don’t know! That’s why it’s an experiment. The main thing is that I absolutely cannot let this consume anymore of my time than necessary. You can, of course, expect me to report back here about my findings. Overall, I feel like I am in a completely different mental state from my using my flip phone and I simply do not feel tethered to smart phone technology anymore. We’ll see if using it again brings back old habit, or if I can genuinely find a new way to use it. It’s quite likely the benefits will only temporarily outweigh the problems, thus I want this to only be temporary.

Overall, I want to use the approach of my friend, who once told me he thinks of his social media as a scrapbook. When I used Facebook and saw his posts, they were among my favorites. He would document moments that I would never think about posting, not because they were embarrassing or something. But because thinking about social media in a different way.2

And it bears repeating, as I said in my first post on the subject, blogs have always been the superior alternative. And as I get settled into our new location westward I plan on again putting my creative energy into this blog, as the benefits of a blog have been unquestionable and the benefits of social media, always questionable.

I’ve also begun a screening group that is serving as a creative outlet that’s kind of the inversion of the Dryden. Whereas the Dryden is part of a prestigious institution and has rigorous standards for screenings, Rochester Film Otherworld is an informal screening collective in a warehouse. All the screenings are free, and everyone involved is a volunteer. The venue we’re partnering with is called Psychic Garden, and its typical audience has a very high tolerance for the weird and experimental—this too stands in stark contrast to the Dryden, which has plenty of variety but the core of the programming is classic Hollywood, and always will be.

Last night we had our first screening, and showed the films of Shaye St John. The alias of Eric Fournier, a man who made some very, very strange films featuring this character whose signature looks involves mannequin body parts. Shaye may be Incredibly creepy, nightmare-inducing at first but once one actually starts watching the films, it becomes clear very quickly that they are hilariously absurd, like if Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! were edited by Damon Packard. My friend Jose and I fully expected around 5 people to show up. But there was something like 30! Even more shocking—only one or two people walked out. For the most part, everyone seemed totally open to these films that are on the very outer limits of weird. We even had some local film festival programmers show up, and they were regularly keeling over in laughter.

The concept of the group is highly influenced Spectacle in NYC, which I had the pleasure of visiting earlier this year. An all volunteer-run microcinema that play films that are truly obscure, outsider, or just plain fascinating. It was a truly inspiring experience—and it was even more inspiring to learn that many of the folks involved in Spectacle are also involved in the prestige screening venues in NYC. The attitude at places the Dryden, MoMA, etc. is, of course, to source the highest quality version of any given film. But in the DIY and microcinema world, the attitude is to just put something interesting in front of a small crowd, using whatever version is available. And to be clear, I love both approaches, and both can coexist harmoniously.

So this is one area where I’ll be redirecting some of my energy for my remaining time in Rochester.

But the highest priority right now for me are the two AMIA presentations I have coming up in December. AMIA is the largest conference of film archivists, and this year it’s in Baltimore. I’ve been once before and it’s an incredibly inspiring experience, lots of knowledge being exchanged and connections made, and the overall vibe of the film preservation field is very open and friendly. I’m also hoping it will be a good opportunity to scope out LA-area employment opportunities before I head there the following week. The two presentations I’ll be doing are: “Do Commercial AI Models Understand Film Restoration?: An Investigation Into Models and Datasets” and ‘Remixing the Past: Creative Re-use of Archival Moving Image”. Happy to say I’m presenting alongside some inspiring folks in the field whose work I truly admire.

So, all the moving planning, projects and such on top of the day-to-day of my job adds up to not a whole lot of creative or mental energy left to expend on Lost in the Filmhouse. So I wanted to pick up a hobby that’s a bit more physical than mental, so I’m making good on my 2025 resolution to get into bookbinding. I had made a few non-adhesive bound softcovers before, but felt slightly disappointed in the results. Now I’ve finally entered the realm of hardcover binding and am delighted with the results. I’ve put together some of my short stories in a collection and am planning on binding at least a dozen copies, which should be a nice, long-lasting memento for some of my friends here in Rochester. And perhaps if I make enough, I could actually make them available for purchase, so you too can have one. But that’s a long term goal.

And if I’m going to work on mentally oriented things, I want to focus on my Youtube channel a bit more, since my channel is very close to being eligible for ad revenue, which would be a nice thing to help support us as we transition between locations and workplaces.

Speaking of which, I don’t charge for this blog, and I don’t plan on doing so anytime soon. If you enjoy the blog, my Youtube channel or the short films my wife and I have been making making, and you’d like to support us, I’ve set up a ko-fi so you can perhaps throw a few bucks our way.

In summation, you can expect less essay-type writing here for the next few months. I’m much more likely to write about something personal, or to jot some quick thoughts on a movie or book.

Either way, I’ll be back in full-force soon enough, and I’ll have plenty of new stuff to show you all. See you on the other side (of the country).

If we wish to trace the roots of what defines surrealist film, we must follow the river back to its source: to those who defined surrealism, the “Surrealists” themselves. Within the group spearheaded by Andre Breton, Surrealism was seen as an approach to art which aimed to reveal the inner workings of the subconscious, rather than attempting to explain reality within the confines of rational storytelling, “realism was also the fetishism of logical procedures, which were in fact incapable of solving the authentic problems of existence” (Durozoi 68). The techniques associated early on with the Surrealist movement, such as automatism, gave way to wider notions of an approach which mainly featured irrational and shocking juxtapositions which deliberately defied realism, a technique which became known as the “process of dissociation” or “principle of displacement” (Lyon). Within the scope of visual arts such as painting and sculpture this can be seen in its most simplistic form when two seemingly unrelated images are combined into one piece, such as Dali’s combination of a lobster and a telephone in the piece called, “Lobster Telephone”. The two unconnected objects are brought together in a way which defies logic, and forces observers to think in terms of what the symbols mean oneirically rather than rationally. In film, this technique takes the form of irrational juxtaposition of shots, which involve more than pure images or symbols, but also involve the displacement of space and time; this technique will be referred to as “oneiric intercutting”.

Bunuel

A key example of oneiric intercutting can be seen in the early work Dali and Bunuel did together in the short film Un Chien Andalou and particularly in the feature length L’age D’or. The opening scene of Un Chien Andalou is a definitive encapsulation of the oneiric intercut, as the audience sees a woman’s eyeball cut open by a man played by Bunuel. The image would be deliberately brutal, even sadistic, if it weren’t for the inclusion of dreamlike editing techniques, as the film intercuts shots of a cloud “cutting” across the moon in the night sky, and replaces the young woman’s eye with that of a cow’s. Within a few seconds, the film leaps from a realistic scene to a surrealistic one, and this is due to the oneiric logic underpinning the way the shots interlink. The rest of the film largely plays out as one surrealist sequence, where each event is linked to the next through a purely oneiric connection, such as the fade from a woman’s armpit hair to a sea urchin on the beach.

The pair’s next and final film made in collaboration was L’age D’or which expanded the dreamlike interlinking of scenes to a feature length film, unfolding again as a single surrealist sequence (with the exception of a genre-shifting prologue and epilogue), which plays out as a sort-of surrealist parody of a bourgeois love tale. Rather than a typical upper-class love story full of scenes of dialogue and pleasant set pieces, the film often interrupts domestic scenes with violent and/or shocking psychosexual images. The film’s prologue itself serves as a type of surreal juxtaposition with the rest of the film, which is a documentary scene about scorpion biology. This has, in a literal sense, no rational connection to the rest of the film, but shocks the audience immediately into a dreamlike state when the film transitions to the narrative section with the use of a title card simply saying, “some hours later”, miraculously linking the documentary with the film’s narrative. The film contains four main shifts in setting: the beach, the city streets of Paris (referred to as ‘Imperial Rome’), the protagonist’s lover’s home, and the bourgeois party in the film’s final fourth. The settings are linked oneirically, such as the lover’s home being encountered (a scene transition by way of a fade) only through the male protagonist seeing a similar image to her in a storefront.

The love story itself is made apparent through intercutting, as the lovers “meet” each other through oneiric visions; by intercutting between the street scenes with the protagonist, and the domestic scenes of the lover, the film obscures any suggestion of a defined physical space, creating a juxtaposition of scenes. This type of juxtaposition is a feature of surrealist film which other mediums cannot capture, and can only be achieved through editing. This innovation provided by Bunuel and Dali’s early collaborations became perhaps the most definitive trait of a surrealist film, as would be expanded upon in Jodorowsky and Maddin. The distinct purpose of this spatial juxtaposition culminates in the bourgeois party scene, the film’s rather long “finale”.

Here the interspatial lovers finally meet, and their sexual advances are frustrated by constant surreal disruptions. The film’s “climax” occurs when the protagonist is kept from having sex with his lover during an outdoor concert due to a call from the “minister” (a character not yet seen till this point). While her lover is away, the woman sucks on the toe of a statue, an image intercut with images of the outdoor concert. The clashing of erotic imagery with borgeois art is achieved through an advanced form of oneiric intercutting, quite possibly the pinnacle of the film’s achievements in progressing surreal editing techniques. This intercutting is taken to another extreme in the following scene where the protagonist and the minister have a shouting match over the phone, which is overlaid with archival footage of wartime images. The scene culminates in the inexplicably surreal juxtaposition of the minister shooting himself in the head, followed by an image of him sticking to the ceiling of his office. This scene appears to be making a political commentary, yet its spatial and temporal ambiguity frustrate any literal, logical meaning, forcing the viewer to place the “climactic” scene in an entirely ambiguous place within the plot, as if it were a non sequitur moment within a dream.

Jodorowsky

Surrealism developed over time, becoming more analogous to a genre rather than a movement, and vastly different cultural influences became involved in surrealistic filmmaking. While Bunuel’s filmmaking was strictly that of a European psychological flavor, surrealist art spread abroad as well, and particularly became influential in the film industries of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Particularly significant was the Panic Movement, which was begun by Alejandro Jodorowky (a Latin American), Fernando Arrabal (a European), and Roland Topor (an Eastern European). The three began the movement (which was deliberately influenced by Bunuel) in Paris in the ‘60s with the intent of emphasizing shocking, destructive elements of surrealism, in reaction to the original surrealist movement, which by that time had lost its vigor. The movement was mainly concentrated within the realm of theater, however the chaotic nature of their collective identity left its mark on each of their respective careers within film in the coming decades, with Arrabal creating transgressive surrealist social satires in Viva La Muerte and I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse; Topor contributing his surreal illustrations to Rene Leloux’s landmark sci-fi surrealist film Fantastic Planet; and Jodorowsky creating his own idiosyncratic form of film surrealism, fusing esoteric mysticism, social commentary, and magical realism into his two surrealist epics of the 70s, El Topo and The Holy Mountain.

Jodorowsky originally immigrated to France from Chile with the intent of “reviving surrealism” as he told Andre Breton in 1953 (Richardson 136). It would be about a decade before Jodorowsky would truly live up to his ambitions, but by the time Jodorowsky created El Topo, he had established himself as a new surrealist voice, one distinct from the original movement, but fully formed and cohesively fusing disparate elements from the Western genre and the psychedelia of 60s counterculture, all while still maintaining the original intent of surrealism, to reveal the logic of the subconscious. In The Holy Mountain in particular, there can be seen a massive jump from the cultural context of L’age D’or, instead of reacting to the pretensions of the upper class, Jodorowsky reacts to the inhumane nature of consumerism and the commodification of religion.

The Holy Mountain’s oneiric intercutting took on a vastly different form from that of a more “classical Surrealist” film such as L’age D’or. While the film is filled with spatial and temporal ambiguity and little character development as in Bunuel’s early work, there is also a distinctly defined world. The world of The Holy Mountain is fantastical: full of strange, violent characters and images. Jodorowsky links settings which seem unrelated through a consistent cast of characters (unlike L’age D’or). The setting seems half magical realist, full of supernatural things presented as everyday, and half surrealist, full of things which reflect the subconscious mind. But what ultimately retains the film’s reputation as surrealist is indeed its editing. The film’s structure, however obscure or bizarre, is not formless, but rather well-defined.

The film begins by following a Christ-like figure, called the thief, as he wanders what appears to be the streets of some Latin American city and experiences strange events which reflect his inner desires and fears, such as being replicated into numerous plastic Jesus models. He eventually meets a spiritual guru (played by Jodorowsky) who initiates a bizarre, surrealist training montage. The guru plans on taking the thief on a spiritual quest; the film then splinters into short vignettes, based on seven different characters who all describe their bizarre daily routines in a way which lacks any distinct setting in regards to time or place. Finally, the characters embark on their spiritual quest to the holy mountain and have many surreal, spiritual encounters along the way.

The opening half hour best encapsulates the legacy of Bunuel’s filmmaking within The Holy Mountain. It plays out much like a single surreal sequence, with the only consistency between images being the thief as he wanders about observing the absurd, disgusting things in the world around him. The scenes of frogs dressed as conquistadors, Roman centurions abducting the thief, and a group of naked children with green genitals are all linked through pure oneiric intercutting, splicing together massively different locations, characters, and time settings. If this opening surrealist sequence is contained within the thief’s mind, then he somehow escapes himself when he finds a guru, called “the alchemist” who initiates two extended sequences of oneiric intercutting. The first sequence is the training montage, consisting of tasks such as turning excrement into gold, and breaking a slab of stone with an axe; the second is the collection of character introduction vignettes. Both these sections have absolutely no rational logic linking the various themes and images, the individual sections which are ordered according to juxtaposing scenes rather than organizing them in order to form a movement of “causality” (Santos 64). The only thing bringing a massive collection of surrealist, psychedelic setpieces together is the oneiric intercut, forcing the viewer to accept a constant flow of shocking, “panic movement”-like imagery as if having a strange nightmare.

The final section of the film properly fuses film surrealism with the yogic new age spiritualism of the 60s and 70s, and entirely resists any distinct feeling of time or place. As the characters prepare for and embark on their spiritual quest, there is a near-constant intercutting of surreal imagery or actions which are notably not represented as “exterior” to the characters’ minds (distancing this section from magical realism), but as distinctly “interior” to the respective characters. This relatively more typical usage of dreamlike imagery is still quantifiably surrealist, due to the images’ irrational nature. Images such as an elderly woman in a tree full of slaughtered chickens, while being a clear hallucination by a single character, is still only linked to the film through the use of an oneiric intercut and refuses to be explained through no other means than dream logic.

Maddin

Surrealism’s influence on cinema morphed into a new form within postmodern North American film, becoming further removed from psychedelic counterculture and actually permeating the mainstream to some extent. With filmmakers such as David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, and Darren Aronofsky adopting elements of surrealism into enigmatic, mysterious narratives which turned their focus once again into the psychological, surrealism’s influence lingered in the realm of popular culture as well as independent cinema. Shows like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks used genuine surrealist techniques, contained within a more traditional narrative in order to push the boundaries of a genre, like that of a murder mystery.

However, no other filmmaker in the late 20th and early 21st century quite embodied the original surrealist approach to filmmaking like Guy Maddin. Maddin’s films obsess over an outdated mode of silent-era filmmaking, and old, Freudian understandings of culture. His style emulates the rapid editing of silent-era Hollywood films, and incorporates imagery which seems to build directly on classical surrealism, especially L’age D’or (Beard 7). In films like Archangel, My Winnipeg, and Careful he cultivated a near-perfect emulation of outdated editing techniques, including extensive usage of intertitles and rapid intercutting. While these films undeniably epitomize oneiric intercutting, Maddin pushed his style to a new extreme in the 2010s. Deliberately using digital photography and emulating filmic qualities through extensive post-production processes, Maddin created a surrealist epic in: The Forbidden Room.

The film is oneiric intercutting taken to its extreme; it is structured as many interlinking vignettes which constantly interrupt and abruptly transition between each other, creating a bewildering experience in which not only the individual scenes frequently intercut in bizarre irrational ways, but the film itself takes on the form of a single uninterrupted dream with seemingly infinite non-sequiturs and diversions edited within. Even beyond these qualities, Maddin managed to forge an entirely new approach to surreal editing in which he fuses filmic and digital techniques with a form of datamoshing which deliberately emulates the appearance of decomposing film. Maddin’s love for these “degraded” images spawns from the concept of them being previously used, even “loved” by those in the past (Church 240). By combining the effects of filmic degradation, with that of the digital, this technique allows Maddin to create an indefinite amount of images on the screen at once, taking on the formless quality of half-remembered dreams. It’s as if the films within The Forbidden Room have been around since before they were even filmed.

The film begins similarly to L’age D’or, in that the opening is styled as a documentary, in this case a tutorial for bathing. This scene then transitions, pushing through the bath waters, to an underwater submarine, a classical Bunuel-style scene transition. The film's transitions soon become increasingly absurd, such as the film entering the dream of a volcano, showing a story within the x-ray of a broken pelvis, or a story told by sentient, black bananas. While the film stays remarkably consistent with its complex structure of stories-within-stories, the transitions between stories are never rationally motivated, but motivated by subconscious connections of images and bizarre juxtapositions between scenes which seemingly have no logical connections between each other. Through this process, Maddin reflexively reimagines film history (each story is based off an unmade film), forcing the viewer to consider to what extent movies have influenced our dreams, and how much our dreams have influenced our movies.

Throughout film history the Surrealist movement has taken on various influences, and the two have ultimately become somewhat inseparable from each other. Surrealism's persistent influence within the realm of film points towards the true nature of filmmaking itself as an oneiric artform. The tendency to create stories which follow the logic of dreams rather than reality lends itself to the structure of a film-viewing experience. Movies themselves seem to try to lull the viewer into a dreamlike state, where we are passive observers, unable to interfere with the occurrences we are witnessing, yet nonetheless somehow participating in the process of interpreting and restructuring them once they are over. The experience of trying to remember and make sense of a film like L’age D’or, The Holy Mountain, or The Forbidden Room is much like trying to remember a dream. We are often left with images or scenes which impress us and leave their mark on our subconscious, and we try to reconstruct the films in our minds, ultimately creating our own film within our minds separate from the original work. In truth, this happens with any film, but it is only when oneiric editing is employed when our attention is drawn to this bizarre quality of film, and it is only surrealist film which seems to suggest the film that we are left with in our minds is the truer version.

Works Cited

Beard, William. Into the Past : The Cinema of Guy Maddin. University of Toronto Press,

Scholarly Publishing Division, 2010.

Church, David. Playing with Memories : Essays on Guy Maddin. University of Manitoba Press,

2009. EBSCOhost.

Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement / History of the Surrealist Movement. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 2002.

Forbidden Room, The. Directed by Guy Maddin, Kino Lorber, 2015.

Holy Mountain, The. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, ABKCO Films, 1973.

L’Age D’Or. Directed by Luis Bunuel, Corinth Films, 1930.

Lyon, Elisabeth H. “Luis Bunuel: The Process of Dissociation in Three Films.” Cinema Journal,

vol. 13, no. 1, 1973, pp. 45–48. JSTOR.

Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema. Berg Publishers, 2006. EBSCOhost.

Santos, Alessandra. The Holy Mountain. WallFlower Press, 2017. EBSCOhost.

Anyways, I knew that we had this film in a our archive and that it had never been played in the theater.

In America it is still pretty obscure, but I wanted to make sure we got a decent turnout to check it out and spread the gospel of Zeman's cinema. this meant I would want to choose a subject for the overall series would be popular. After mulling it over for a while, I realized one of my favorite aspects of the film was the innovative usage of stop motion animation alongside live action footage. I went forward with Stop motion as the main subject in the hopes that it would appeal to our more cinephilic audience member for whom the craftsmanship and illusionism of stop motion is the main appeal, but I also hoped I could draw a broader base of people--because stop motion remains popular with the general public, and even with children! And if I could get even a few more kids at our theater watching classic films, then I'd feel more than satisfied.

Our screening of King King just a few months ago seemed to confirm my thesis. Looking out at an audience of hundreds, I realized that there was really only one reason people were coming out to see it: the big monkey. Sure, some people are there because its a landmark of film history, because of Fay Wray's legendary status, or for the score, but ultimately it was the stop motion animation of an ape that made this film enduringly relevant and entertaining.

This brought back a memory from my childhood, when I first watched a Ray Harryhausen film. It was 2010 and I had seen trailers for the remake of Clash of the Titans. I had a budding interest in Greek mythology at the time (is it too much to say that mythology was *in vogue* in the early 10s?) but I was also aware of the existence of an older version of the film. A friend and I obtained a copy and watched it and laughed at how "bad" the effects were. But as we settled in, it became clear that the effects were not, in fact, bad. It was the rest of the movie that was bad! Sure, a stop motion creation never looks quite real, but that only made it more attractive to a 9-year-old Tim. I similarly appreciated Aardman films and only a few years later watched Laika's stuff and felt a particular Oregonian pride for that studio's excellence.

So the inclusion of at least one of Ray Harryhausen's films would be a must. This has sent me on a quest, wherein I have actually been watching Harryhausen's whole filmography. As far as I remember, Clash of the Titans was the only one I saw until about a month ago. Since then, I've watched almost all of them. And its been the perfect time in my life to pick them up. At some point during my Master's program in film preservation, I feel like a sort of switch flipped in my brain. I used to evaluate films so harshly, seeking out the absolute best ones and obsessing over the production details of "masterful" directors. This resulted in having a somewhat snooty approach to film history: there were the "normal" films and then there were the "exceptions:". Russian film history only mattered to me insofar as it related to Tarkovsky; German film only mattered to me insofar as it related to Herzog. And my love for these great directors has in no way diminished. But when you encounter film history in a different way, where you look at the whole rather than the exceptions, it doesn't just become about what movies you like. After all, I'm not seeking to become a critic, so having snobbish taste offers me no reward. The way I try to think about film viewing now is: I am not seeking to like any given movie, I am seeking to understand it. Even movies I don't particularly like or that I think aren't very good according to my particular persuasion can be fascinating, illuminating, and can help me understand film history at least one-movie's-worth more.

The reason I'm bringing all this up in regards to Ray Harryhausen is because I am watching these films for entirely different reasons than I used to watch films. Harryhausen did not direct any of these films and often his influence over the film is basically restricted to select sequences. In his writing, Harryhausen describes himself as basically working quietly in the closet of some corner of a film studio, where nobody bothered him. They give him the film, he works his (slow) magic, and it goes off to the optical printer. Harryhausen would be involved in other, various ways (as an "associate producer") and would, for instance, help location scout and select where specific sequences would be filmed so that he could plot out his stop motion accordingly.

But none of these movies are really Harryhausen's movies. He is not an auteur, not in Truffaut's sense of the word. Many of the films outside of the Harryhausen stop motion stuff are quite generic or unremarkable. But that's okay, I'm not looking to like them--I'm looking to understand them.

Examples? Well, when it comes to something like The Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms, the plot itself could hardly be more dull, as it is almost entirely devoted to people debating whether or not the titular monster is real.

But the animation of the Beast is absolutely remarkable and represents an important step from King Kong towers the full-blown kaiju genre. In fact, the production of Godzilla was apparently directly influenced by this film.

Similarly, It Came From the Sea has some great Harryhausen animation, while the plot with the humans in this one can tell us quite a bit about the gender politics of the time, with a truly stilted love triangle at its center. This film wasn't worth watching because I liked it, but because it improved my understanding of film history.

The Harryhausen films really hit their stride when become full-blown genre pictures. The fantasy ones (Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad film) have an indescribably cozy feel, while his sci-fi effort, The First Men in the Moon delivers the goods in terms of wacky and fun space travel. That's perhaps the most underrated of his films.

In my stop motion wanderings, I am struck by the contrast between Harryhausen and Zeman. All these films are worth watching for technical reasons, but I do think Zeman's have an immediacy and enduring charm that the Harryhausen ones lack. This is because they diverge in terms of style. While Harryhausen was the absolute master of making stop motion look as tangible as possible, blurring the (matte) lines between human and dinosaur and so on, Zeman took the opposite route. He knows many of his effects, especially ones that employ stop-motion, will never look real. So he makes the rest of the world look fake. It gives the films a sense of heightened artificiality that makes them feels far more removed from time. Both approaches have their virtues, however, and both have bred different filmmaking philosophies. Harryhausen is the great forbearer of the sorts of populist fantasy films that George Lucas/Phil Tippet and Peter Jackson would make; Zeman meanwhile is still a key point of inspiration for highly aestheticized and surrealist directors such as Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam.

A figure whose historical function is similar to Ray Harryhausen, but who is often overlooked, is that of George Pal. While Harryhausen's approach was patented as "Dynamation", Pal's animations were registered as "Puppetoons". I have yet to dive quite as deep into his catalog, but I adore his puppet animations such as “The 5000 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins”.

He also worked in the realm of blending stop motion with live action, and this is perhaps best represented in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, a film with a rather conventionally directed frame narrative, with fantastical vignettes ("tales") that are the work of Pal.

The sequence in the middle of the film where a woodworker's puppets come to life is truly something to marvel at. It is a quite literal insertion of his signature Puppetoon animation into a Hollywood feature.

But Pal also encroaches on Harryhausen's territory in the film's final tale, where a clumsy, Pancho-esque knight battles with a stop motion dragon. It's self-consciously goofy ion a way that Harryhausen's works often aren't.

George Pal then sits between these two greats of stop motion effects, his films look more grounded and real while often embracing stop-motion's inherent cartoonishness as a virtue rather than as an obstacle. It's worth noting that all three were special effects maestros who produced all sorts of effects besides stop-motion ones, and its commonly thought that George Pal's masterpiece is The Time Machine. That one's a true effect extravaganza, though it contains little stop-motion. Pal is a tad less influential, but among his acolytes are Joe Dante. This makes perfect sense, as Dante's films are all about bringing cartoon logic into the realm of the real world and comically depicting the ways they clash. Dante's most Pal-esque work is Small Soldiers, which is very nearly a love letter to American cinema's rich history of stop motion effects--though it actually ends up being a document of the transitional period to digital as it cuts between stop motion and CGI effects constantly. Rewatching this film in 2025, its impossible not to be delighted at teh sight of stop motion toys and then to be repulsed by the way they are replaced by rubbery CGI monstrosities at random.

But we've largely focused on films which incorporate stop motion effects rather than fully stop motion films. There are very few stop motion features compared to the amount of 2D animated features that have been produced throughout the last century, meaning each one is something of a rare cinematic event. When it comes to short films, there are naturally far more examples. These films largely come from two sources: studios devoted to stop motion animation and passionate individuals spending months or years slaving away at a passion project. There's a few studios well known for stop motion, a few of which still exist as bastions of the filmmaking tradition: Rankin/Bass, Aardman, and Laika--I like Wallace and Gromit and Kubo and the Two Strings as much as the next guy, though that won't be the focus of this article.

A disproportionate amount of great stop motion films come from the Czech. This is due to the highly influential film studio, Bratři v triku, co-founded by famed animator Jiří Trnka. The tradition was maintained through influential programs at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

The kind of stop motion film that is the result of a passion project, typically by an individual, is the reason that I love stop motion so much. Stop motion holds a sort of paradoxical position—it is both one of the most accessible forms of filmmaking and one of the most difficult. Often, stop motion is one of the most costly techniques possible, but it can also be achieved through sheer devotion. The sort of stop motion film I am talking about can sometimes take years to make. In the case of Junk Head (2017), it took 7 years. For Blood Tea and Red String (2006), it took 13 years. And, finally, in the case of Mad God (2022), it took 30!

The sort of attitude required to make such a thing is totally different from that of one making a typical feature. Often with a movie, one is concerned with making the production as quick as possible and making it as marketable as possible--attractive actors, big names, lavish production values, and so on. But stop motion is always appealing, but never quite marketable enough to justify the ridiculous work it requires. Aside from voice work, the features that are fully animated are always going to be cutting themselves off from one of film's most profitable aspects. All this to say, these are films made by people who know it's not going to be a profitable venture.

And is it a coincidence that a lot of these animators seem to be genuinely decent human beings? I think not. I think working diligently on creating little, imaginative worlds, makes one of a kinder, more thoughtful human being. There's something very grandpa-like with a lot of these folks. Kind of like the woodworker from the Brothers Grimm movie, these are people who work long, lonely hours, often with the explicit intent of bringing joy and excitement to children. One of the reasons I keep coming back to Karel Zeman as a favorite director is because there seems to be an underlying kindness in his films. He even famously said:

I’m on a journey to discover the beauty of the fairy tale and I want to stay on that path, trying to find better ways to capture it on film. And I have only one wish – to delight the eyes and heart of every child.

Finally, there is that most special of stop motion techniques: Claymation. A technique which makes stop motion even harder to do, and even more impressive when it is pulled off. But I'm going to explore that particular area in an essay that will follow up this one. While this essay focused on the joys of stop motion and my adoration for the men who achieved it, there's something I haven't addressed yet about stop-motion--it often looks kinda creepy. Unnerving. Uncanny. I will explore the dark side of stop motion in my upcoming essay, "The Dread of Clay".

Ari Aster's new film, Eddington, is a thriller rooted in three traditions of Hollywood filmmaking: the western, the small town psychological thriller, and the political satire film. Much has been made over the film's politics already, specifically its ambiguity. And many critics have written about the film as a neo-western. But while these are significant aspects to the film, they are somewhat incidental and, I believe, the film is truly structured around the small town psychological thriller formula. It is precisely in this capacity that it fails to live up to its narrative potential.

Ari Aster has become one of the most popular directors in independent film in the last decade, known primarily as the foremost figure in a "new wave" of horror film. Referred to variously as "elevated horror" or "art horror", the movement is defined by its embrace of horror tropes within the confines of arthouse narrative cinema. While there had been prominent horror films fusing the "low brow" horror fare with "high brow" psychological drama, films like Ari Aster's Hereditary represented a shift in cinematic culture, where horror and genre fare could become the highest profile film of its time, both in critical and financial means. Hereditary was such a massive financial success, grossing $87.8 million on a $10 million budget, that it meant A24 would now be giving him blank checks from that point on. A24, as a studio and distributor, had other auteur directors associated with it, but Aster and the A24 brand became nearly interchangeable. His second film, Midsommar, was a similarly successful horror film. But since Midsommar, Aster has seemed desperate to break his form and use his craftsmanship outside of horror.

His third film, Beau is Afraid, had a large budget and went the way of the surrealist picaresque. The budget was so large, in fact, and these A24-produced films are becoming so prominent that I'm not sure they should be referred to as "independent" anymore–but I'll save any further thoughts on the shifting definition of the "studio system" in the 20s for another time. It was a tremendously bold film and was accordingly divisive, though, in my opinion, it is probably the best thing he's done–and Beau will make for a helpful point of contrast when discussing Eddington.

Eddington is probably the first high profile film to genuinely tackle the subject of the COVID lock downs of 2020. These were maddening, deranged times, so its only fitting that one of the most prominent horror directors working today would take a stab. I do not bristle at the idea of making a COVID movie as some might, even though it seems like nobody can make a good movie out of the subject yet. In fact, the premise on paper is quite brilliant. When lockdown begins in a small New Mexico town, the local sheriff refuses to follow the government mandated protocols, coming into conflict with the local mayor who is defending the decisions. The sheriff then decides to run for mayor himself, and things degenerate from there. The film tackles many of the memorable cultural moments of this recent era, including the black lives matter protests following the death of George Floyd and the effects that COVID had on right-wing politics.

A small town in the South was probably the most obvious choice for Aster, though he could have set this COVID tale anywhere. It seemingly makes sense to tell the narrative from the perspective of those living far away from Washington in order to demonstrate how national politics infiltrates local communities like a virus, separating people and sowing hatred. But I think setting Eddington in a small town was the worst decision Aster could have made. He clearly does not understand what it is like to live in a small town.

Small towns, as a setting, are often reached for by filmmakers in times of political strife. This is because small towns can easily be construed as insular, monocultural communities where an outside force infiltrates and disrupts the harmony. This was, tellingly, a favorite setting of Cold War era science fiction. With the proliferation of spying and intelligence operations, there came recurrent narratives of the small town where strange visitors appear and disrupt normalcy and a sense of reality. Take the strong fears around spying and infiltration alongside mounting "red scare" fear-mongering, and you get sci-fi narratives which also see the aliens infiltrating our bodies ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), and the paranoia that any one of us could be the outsider. The most illustrative examples of this trope involves shape-shifting aliens, such as in the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” where an alien that appears human turns all the neighbors in a small town against each other and the increasing paranoia causes them to devolve into a riot.

Eddington similarly sees a stranger come into town, an intruder which divides and infuriates. If you think I am referring to COVID metaphorically, you'd only be half right, because the film does quite literally begin with a stranger coming into town and sowing discord. A homeless man, sick both physically and mentally arrives and nobody knows how to deal with him. The man is clearly a sort of personification of COVID and his depiction inspires no pathos or indication of humanity. Instead, in what has become a recurring narrative device for Aster, the antagonistic forces of his films are devoid of humanity and slowly strip the main characters of theirs. Higher powers, be they supernatural, psychological, or simply viral, manipulate humans who can only struggle against a fate entirely outside of their control. Aster tends towards a very deterministic perspective, not unlike that of Stanley Kubrick. One can imagine Aster and Kubrick alike gazing down at their characters struggling against their fate like rats in a maze–and I question whether or not they get a sick pleasure out of it.

Let's return to the psychology of a small town. One of the reasons that some of the aforementioned suspense pictures work so well is that their depictions of small towns ring true. Small towns really are somewhat insular, people really do know nearly everyone else, though they are typically far more internally diverse than these films claim. And, yes, in times of political strife, the political divisions of a small town may begin to imitate those of the nation's–yet, the moments these small towns are reduced to being merely a micro version of America itself, the effect is broken. Those who have not lived in small town suppose a uniformity and flatness which is simply not the case. The very smallness of a small town renders the most mundane of details and landmarks full of character and color. Aster seems to genuinely think that these New Mexico residents live in a cultural void which is waiting to be filled with political currents.

The most irritating aspect of Eddington is that nearly every obvious politically motivated narrative beat which you would assume would be too obvious is speedily depicted. I am reminded of a review for Jordan Peele's Get Out where the reviewers remarked that the film could have so easily been so stupid in its obviousness if Peele had set his racially charged horror film in the South for instance, and made the film's antagonistic family dumb, racist, Southern hicks. Peele is intelligent enough to have done the opposite: the villains are a well-educated, Northern family which thinks of themselves as against racism. Such intelligence is not on display in Eddington, where the most obvious and ugly political stereotypes are simply flaunted on screen. This does not mean the plot itself is without cleverness or fascinations. In fact some aspects of the plot construction are clever enough that the film's characterizations operate as orange juice to the proverbial brushed teeth.

To drive the point home: we have a small troupe of policeman (3 for the whole town which makes no sense) who oppose the COVID regulations and are unsympathetic towards the protestors, a latino mayor who only talks in terms of identity politics, a Jared Leto stand-in, and a crew of white kids who recently taken to caring about racial politics and who are ridiculed throughout the film. The most interesting and nuanced character is perhaps Officer Butterfly Jimenez, whose treatment in the film is, quite frankly, cruel.

The cartoonishly stereotypical characters brings me to another famous, fictional small town: South Park. And narrative logic of Aster's Eddington is legitimately reminiscent of that infamous sitcom. Each character represents a stand-in for a political current and they clash until reaching a humorous conclusion. Such a formula works well enough in less-than-half-hour format, but not in a feature. I don't wish to be reductive in this comparison, though I would insist it stands. Even more than in its characterizations than in the way it fast forwards through the political history of the pandemic. Overnight, all the conservatives become conspiracy theorists. Then George Floyd dies and overnight the liberal Gen-Zers in the town become crazed anti-racists. It's not merely preposterous, it's the laziest way to make a film about real-world events. Not to mention many of the film's events, such as a "riot" the young people perpetrate in the small downtown suggest that this film simply should have been set in a city.

One of the elements needed for a great small town psychological thriller which Aster is unable to obtain is that of the continual ratcheting up of suspense. To observe how successful employment of this technique, we should of course look to Hitchcock. In his great film, Shadow of a Doubt, a small town is disrupted not by an exterior force but by a returning one. The protagonist's uncle, Charlie, has returned from New York for dubious reasons, which are slowly unraveled as the protagonist suspects he is in fact a serial killer on the run. Hitchcock always lets us stew in the tension and avoids shocking us too much early on. Aster's film revel in shock and his horror films are defined by the way that they seem to outdo themselves and become increasingly shocking and terrifying. But such a structure does not jive with this narrative, as Aster makes things far too shocking far too early on–what could be the film's climax happens halfway through. By contrast, Hitchcock's film about a serial killer does contain a depiction of anything resembling violence until its final scenes.

That's not to say that you can't shock us and keep us hooked at the same time. We see this done successfully in Zach Cregger's excellent new film, Weapons (which takes place in a community with an ambiguous scale). Weapons begins with an intriguing premise and is told in a non-linear fashion, so the film's most shocking elements and their details are parsed out in small chunks as we follow several different story lines. The film's ultimate reveal that its premise is caused by supernatural forces (a reveal not dissimilar to Hereditary) is executed beautifully, without over-explaining or saving all of its reveal until the end. On the contrary, in a Hitchcockian fashion, Cregger sets up every aspect of the film deliberately so that we know exactly what will happen at the film's end, which makes it less shocking, yet no less suspenseful.

But Aster wants to shock us. So halfway through his film he has the sheriff kill the mayor and frame the killing as perpetrated by Antifa. Where can the film go from here? Where can it go, besides increasingly crass political characterizations? The film exits the gritty, realistic political satire it was becoming and simply turns into something with all the nuance of an 80s action film. The radical leftists infiltrate the town in a private jet and drone bomb the police force. Then our protagonist grabs a machine gun from a store and shoots into the town randomly to try to kill the leftists. If Ari Aster was not beholden to the need to have moments of shocking violence, then he could have intelligently played out the nuanced consequences of the mayor's killing rather than enter a realm of pure fantasy.

I do not subject to the film's tendency to depict both sides of the political spectrum as crazed and bloodthirsty. The film is not simply "centrist" as many politically-minded film critics claim it to be. Rather, it is depicting modern American political division itself as a type of psychosis. And insofar as the film attempts to capture this psychosis, it succeeds. But it's a case of writing what you know. Ari Aster, who grew up in New York City and in Santa Fe, seemingly does not attempt to understand the benefits of a small town and so cannot accurately depict its faults. Other small town thrillers, from the Coen Brothers' Fargo to Daniel Scheinert's The Death of Dick Long depict the local flavor and charm of a small town without sacrificing any of the tension of dread. Aster's Beau is Afraid (especially its opening scenes) excelled at depicting the chaos and strangeness of city life. Why? Because Aster understands cities. He does not understand small towns.

I can understand the urge to make a small town a microcosm of American politics. It's again a sort of everlasting trope. But to take that approach and recreate beat for beat the shifting political currents of like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram through 2020 is ridiculous. Aster doesn't give Eddington any local flavor or charm, the way the Coens or Daniel Scheinert do, in fact, he seems to actively display an animosity for the idiots that must live in red states. This doesn't feel like a New Mexico nightmare of the lockdown era, it feels like the imaginative frontier that a New York Times journalist would conjure up of a "red" state. It's a media-informed vision of "low information voters". It would be understandable if one walked away from Eddington thinking that Aster genuinely sees such people as nothing more than violent idiots.

Just because our politics have become increasingly stupid does not mean our satires must be equally stupid. Many of the greatest political satires of the 60s and 70s, (Network, for instance) similarly self implode their own political positions and reveal the madness and incomprehensibility of modern society, but they did not need to resort to constant shock value to get their point across. Aster's bold decision to make the metaphoric horror of the psychological thriller into literal horror and thus to muddy the two genres has served him well until this point. But the western, the political satire, and the small town psychological thriller all require nuance and subtlety. It's not that Aster is not capable of such things, it is that he refuses them.

But's been just about a year and a half since I made that decision. When I pull out my flip phone, many people are still surprised by it, and even some friends and family have forgotten I have it, and ask me how long I'm going to keep this act up—whether it's been genuinely helpful, whether it’s doable for them, or whether the whole thing is just plain unsustainable. Well, considering it's been long enough to let this experiment play out a bit, I figured it was time to provide some reflection on all these steps I have done to make my life more digitally minimal. Minimally digital? Digitally minimalist? Something like that.

First of all, the things that have been positives. The flip phone I use, the Cat S22, is not a "dumb phone", really. It's a phone of moderate intelligence. It runs Android and therefore I can basically get any app I need. So, yes, there have been plenty of circumstances where I have actually used it as I would a smart phone when I needed to. The most regular need to use the phone this way is Google maps. I'm a zoomer and have quite frankly never used a real map lol. That's maybe something I should fix eventually, but when I need to drive somewhere and need directions quickly, I simply have got to have Google maps. So I use my flip phone the exact same way I'd use my old smart phone in that case. And in case you're wondering, yes, it handles Google maps fine. It's just got a delay when you pull up directions but once you actually start the navigation, it works quite well.

The other habit that has gone pretty much unchanged is the fact that I do use my phone to listen to music and to podcasts. Since writing that first essay, I have gotten off of Spotify. This decision was largely due to how little they pay creators and how they’re handling AI. This is the video that tipped me over the edge:

I now use Tidal. I am satisfied enough with it. I do sometimes miss the large amount of playlists I had on Spotify, but it's also sort of fun to start from scratch again. Plus, I didn't delete my Spotify account so I can always go back and import some of those playlists or find albums who's names I've forgotten, and so on. Plus, one of my favorite bands, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard just pulled all their stuff from Spotify but I can still easily access it on Tidal. So that's nice.

But aside from these areas, using the flip phone has completely changed my approach to phone usage. I was very much into texting, group chats, and even online chat rooms when I had my smart phone, but I had to massively scale back my messaging habit on my flip phone. I stropped using Facebook messenger and then was unable to access it once I deleted all my Meta accounts at the beginning of this year. that eliminates IG as a messaging platform as well. I mainly try to use plain old SMS text messages nowadays, but I also have Telegram and WhatsApp so I can talk to select friends, mainly international ones. I also still have Discord, but it barely runs on the flip phone so I only really access it on my laptop. I honestly miss the frequent use of Discord than I miss most social media, but it is nonetheless a massive time sink, so it has been an additional source of free time.

My habits with texting itself have changed. Because the phone's storage is only so big and leaving conversations lingering in my inbox quickly becomes overwhelming, I've begun actually regularly going through all my texts, closing the loop on any dangling conversations or questions and archiving or deleting the messages afterwards. As part of my digital minimalism, I want to reduce the need to feel like I have to check my email and text all the time. And by maintaining a practice of actually clearing both inboxes, it eliminates the artificial sense of business that these digital technologies can give you. Not to mention the fact that I don't need to worry about the business of social media now.

I actually call people now. Usually one person at least a day. My close family members are frequent recipients of these random calls, but so are many of my friends. While many of my closest friends of course return my calls, it's also been a good excuse to call friends I don't regularly talk to and catch up with them about how their lives are going--and since I don't see their social media updates, we tend to have a lot to talk about! It's given me a way to deepen friendships with some unexpected people, and I think calling people shows them that I really do care to hear how they're doing. (I'm even thinking about making a literal list of people I call regularly and everyday go down this list, calling one person. I would try to call everyone till I finish, then start the list again. It's a good idea, I think, and if you are a friend of mine and want to be added, shoot me a text.)

Of course, my productivity has shot up since making this change in my life. That's not particularly surprising, as I have tons more free time to pursue my interests and hobbies. When I am bored, I can pick up a book to read (I've read 28 this year). And that's been a great way to use my mental energy, as I can find time to engage with all sorts of books I would not have time to read otherwise. I'll always be reading a novel or two, but I made my through "A History of Judaism" which felt like a pretty big accomplishment.

My writing habits have largely improved, one result of this is, of course, this blog. For a while, I had a one-essay-per-week streak going and that was definitely only possible through my digital minimalism. When you eliminate distracting amusements, writing itself becomes a form of entertainment. When I write an essay, I feel like I've cleaned house in my brain. Like I've sorted out my thoughts, got them out of my head. And writing fiction feels almost like a mental game of sorts. I'm still working my way through this novel I am writing (I try to write 1k words per day, 4 days a week), called "A Work of Mad Discord". I am now in the third act and am tying all the plot threads together. I've also had time to restart my Youtube channel where I somewhat regularly make video essays and the like. As proof of my productivity, here are the numbers.

Since getting a flip phone, I have:

- Written and published 61 posts for this blog (including this one)

- Written 296 pages / 99,267 words of my novel

- Written 5 articles for FilmObsessive

- Made 10 YouTube videos

- Completed a 40 min short film, finished editing a 2 hour experimental film, and have begun work on another short

Another area it's helped in terms of productivity is my actual job (I manage a repertory cinema). It's hard enough to focus on work and stay on task when you have a position like mine where you're constantly doing hundreds of little tasks for all sorts of different reasons, I think I'd be a mess at work if I allowed myself to also have a smartphone in the mix. I've been consciously attempting to optimize my work as this is my first time working a full time job for an extended period of time. And it's really paid off. I keep track of all the tasks I have to work through, and I regularly find myself completing the list, rather than procrastinating and letting a backlog grow. That gives me time to explore other facets of my job beyond fulfilling my obligations. By this I mean professional development opportunities, such as curating a film series. In November, we'll be screening a series I curated called "Stop Motion as an Artform".

So it's definitely helped me be more productive--no question about that. And yet, not all the changes have been positive.

remembering things

In *Lost Highway*'s famous opening sequence, a couple discovers they're being spied on. When they have the police around, they ask the protagonist, played by Bill Pullman, if they own any cameras:

I can't help but feel like Bill Pullman in this scene. And not because I hate technology, but because certain types of technology change certain ways of thinking. By not having a smartphone, it means I don't have a high quality camera on me at all times. And that's a massive change for someone who had an iPhone in high school, an iPod in middle school, and even a 3DS before then. This means that much of my life has been visually documented, through photos and videos I have taken all throughout my life.

Not having a smartphone, it feels like the last is a sort of memory hole. When I think back on my memories, I can conjure them as usual, but there are far less ways for me to remind myself of them. I end up "remembering them in my own way". There's something poetic about that, sure, but it also fills me with a sort of dread. It makes me sad to think I could have collected some of those moments I experienced in a more permanent way, if only to revisit them later. It somehow makes everyday life feel a bit less real. Smartphone technology constructs an alternate reality for us, including our sense of self as developed through our memories. Living without this stuff, it feels like I'm depriving myself of a certain sort of reality that so many people share. I've heard about friends getting married, having children, and so on, but I haven't seen their pictures. If I tell someone about a trip I had, it's unlikely I can show them what I saw, because I probably didn't take any pictures. It feels strange. Memories surely used to be a largely oral entity and even experiencing a smidgen of what that used to be like has given me a deep appreciation for photography technology.

A lot of this has to do with what a "normal" life should look like. Normalcy nowadays includes in its definition the self-documentation we do with our phones. And the documenting piece is not the problem, I think. So, if I can recreate that capacity of the smartphone without reverting back, I'd love to.

But, on the other hand, there's something nice about not taking out my phone to try and film everything. Obviously, it's become very socially acceptable to do so, but even among those who use their phones frequently, there seems to be an underlying resentment towards how they can make a genuine moment feel less genuine. I mean, what else should we take from this moment in a Nick Cave concert where he tells a crowd to "put their fucking phones away" and then that same crowd rejoices? It's almost as if people are waiting for the excuse to be liberated from the pressure to constantly document everything.

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the question

The big question I've been asked by many friends is: will I switch back to a smartphone?

And to be honest? I'm considering it. Largely due to the fact that I would love to have a portable camera like that again. But there are other options for that. It would be neat to get a camera like the DJI Osmo Pocket. Though I'd have to save up for a while (it’s not cheap), I like the idea of having a device devoted to this specific purpose that I could use for everything from casually filming a bonfire at the beach to shooting a short film with it. But if I did revert back, it would honestly just be for this reason.

Which is surprising. I thought I'd miss social media a whole lot more. I thought I'd really miss the group chats, the memes, the content. And to some extent, I do. But none of those things are nearly as fulfilling for me as getting some writing done, reading a great book then calling a friend to talk about it, or going for a long walk distraction free.

I think it's worth saying, though, that whatever I've gained through this experiment, I will not readily lose. Even if I get a smartphone again, I will be using it in a wholly different way. I will not simply revert back to my old habits, but make use of the new ones I've built through using a flip phone. And maybe that's the way people should be thinking about these smartphone alternatives. It's not necessarily a question of whether or not to "give them up forever", but what tools you can make use of to build better habits. Maybe "training" yourself on a flip phone for a year or so to curb the compulsive behaviors smartphones induce is exactly how one should approach the question of digital minimalism.

So whether you're thinking of getting a flip phone, a dumb phone, one of those overpriced light phones, or if you're just looking to scale back on screen time--heed my advice. Not all functions of the smartphone are equally helpful. The cameras on smartphones really are such a useful tool for self-documentation. But X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and so on... Throw them away. You won't regret it.

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The end of the 1950s and the early 60s saw the beginning of perhaps the most famous film movement of all time, the French new wave. And The 400 Blows was right at the heart of this cultural revolution. Now, I think there's a common notion that the French New Wave consisted of young people breaking free of the studios and making low budget independent films. And when one pictures the French New Wave, they'll likely think about radical experimentation in editing and cinematography. But The 400 Blows, though it is often seen as the movement's starting point, challenges this conception of film history.

So where did the French New Wave come from? Really, it actually came as the result of film preservation. Henri Langlois established the Cinematheque Francais in 1935 where he amassed a large collection of films, French or otherwise. The screenings of these films in the 40s and 50s were legendary and he was in fact so passionate about screening them that he would screen multiple films at the same time in his small building, allegedly even screening films in the stairwell. The young film fans that congregated here were to eventually establish the French New Wave. They became acquainted not only with the the history of French film but other nation's films, such as those from Germany, Japan, and America.

The director of The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut, became involved with this group and began a career as a film critic writing for the famous journal Cashiers Du Cinema. Truffaut became known for his scathing critiques of contemporary French film, and through his writing it became clear that this wasn't criticism for the sake of criticism, but a sort of training ground for an aspiring filmmaker. It helped him determine what sort of films he wanted to see made.

So, did Truffaut then go out and make a film on his own without a studio? Not exactly. The story of how The 400 Blows got made is one familiar to film historians: it was a game of who knows who.

Truffaut met a young woman who was working at the Venice Film Festival and fell in love. Truffaut was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1957 to 1965 and it was through her that he knew her father, who was a major film distributor. It was because of this relationship that the film was funded and distributed.

Truffaut was involved in the creation of one of the other major founding films of the French New Wave, Breathless, a film for which he was the original writer. When we watch Breathless, its pretty easy to see why this is radical stuff. There's jump cutting, unusual pacing, and moments of jarring experimentation. But one finds very few of these sorts of qualities in the The 400 Blows. The revolutionary element of this film was to make filmmaking more personal, not less. It is a film which simply and elegantly depicts the struggle of childhood: the desire to be noticed and cared for by adults, the uncertainty of what to do with your life, the constant urge to break away from the monotony of school and conventional society and simply become the sort of drifter that is valorized in American cinema... The film truly is an autobiographical depiction of Truffaut's childhood in Paris, and Truffaut continued to make films with this same actor playing a version of Truffaut, Jean Pierre Leaud as Antione Doinel over the next 20 years.

Returning to The 400 Blows, however, the film does such a good job at depicting childhood that people often label it a "universal story of childhood" and credit this quality for the film's endurance. But this is not the case, The 400 Blows is not a universal story of childhood at all. It is, in fact, a very particular story about Truffaut's childhood. I personally do not recognize my childhood of Truffaut's at all. And yet it is painfully relatable when I watch it. How can this be? Well, it reminds me of a phrase I learned as an undergrad: "You do not find the particular through the universal; you find the universal through the particular." In other words, it is The 400 Blows' very remoteness from my childhood, that makes it remarkably relatable. It is because it is so different, that when I recognize myself in Doinel, that I realize that there truly are universal aspects to the human existence. We all are unfairly blamed for things we do not do, we all maintain a private, interior life where we fancy ourselves outlaws and rebels, and we all desire to have heroes and role models to look up to and we latch onto these certain figures. For Doinel, this happens to be the French author Balzac. For me, when I first watched this film at an age not too distant from the age of Doinel in the film, it became Francois Truffaut. But if you watch the subsequent Doinel films, you will see that we should be careful of revering Truffaut too much, as the making of The 400 Blows launched Truffaut into a film career, and Truffaut's immersion in the film industry does indeed change him, not always for the better.

So the 400 Blows, for me, represents a moment of innocence for cinema. Truffaut was granted a dream scenario in which he received the funding for such a film, that he was able to make with little influence, and for many of the actors involved, this was their first major performance. It was not only a childhood on film, but it granted film itself another childhood of sorts, the opportunity to reset the priorities of the cinema, from stardom and spectacle to everyday life.

The recent emergence of the term "clanker" has been amusing, but it is also a valuable indicator of the current status of popular culture's ongoing reactions to developments in artificial intelligence. In terms of how culture seems to be processing the presence of so-called AI technology in our everyday lives, people seem to skip a few chapters in the typical sci-fi narrative about this subject. When one sees an instance where they are required to talk to a robot instead of a human, the reaction leaps right out of that of the utopian ("wow! Technology is amazing!") and straight into that of the dystopian ("I hate robots, this technology is making everything worse”). Thus the emergence of "clanker”—a derogatory slang term for robots/AI/LLMs. A slur for the non-human things crowding our lives. Clankers.

Surely you've encountered a clanker. Many websites now have their own GPT-styled AI bots pop up right on the homepage in a way you are not able to ignore. Of course there's the old robo calls, a phenomenon that has expanded into the realm of random fake hot people trying to message you all the time with openers like, "Hey! It's been a while." or "I'm so lonely :("

The negative reactions to moments of interfacing with clankers make sense to me. I have a general nausea associated with anything using generative imagery or paragraphs written in GPT speak. And I think that's the case for the majority of people—not the minority. While many find it less intrusive than other such instances, I am perhaps the most perturbed by the single GPT-speak answers that so many websites respond to any query with. Google has done this for a while; all my favorite alternative search engines have too (Ecosia and DuckDuckGo); even social media like Reddit have started doing it. It's becoming increasingly clear that this thing:

…Is the new format for most interactions with the internet.

But consider and contrast this cultural moment where we've begun to call these things clankers with other dreaded narratives around AI. One of the recurring tropes associated with sci-fi narratives about AI is the so-called "singularity". A belief/worry that there will be a point where robots become sentient and therefore able to dominate the human race, if they so wish. But maybe what we should have really worried about is the clankularity.

What I mean by this is that what seems like the more plausible and immediate dystopia is a world where most any question, action, or interaction a human pursues in the digital realm will be mitigated by these AIs. What happens, then, is a total collapse of distinction between sources. As this great AI arms race is underway, the leader is often determined by who has the largest, beefiest dataset to train their AI on. Gigantic amounts of information are mixed together and squeezed accordingly to the approximate need of a user. Much like processed meat, the source of the information becomes largely indiscernible. And much like processed meat, consuming this sort of thing is bad for you in a pernicious and long-term way.

Though search engines like Google attempt to "cite their sources". we have to consider the long-term effects of this. If this is the place where people now get their information, then they will regurgitate this information in an increasingly watered-down form. Not to mention the slew of issues around LLMs consuming content they’ve generated as well.

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What I'm suggesting is not all too dissimilar from the "dead internet theory". The idea that there will eventually be so many bots online that you will not interact with any other humans when you go online. This theory, if we don't just entertain its most extreme form, is basically being confirmed nowadays. According to the 2025 Imperva “Bad Bot Report”, “automated traffic overtook human activity for the first time in ten years, making up more than half (51%) of all internet traffic last year. This trend has been driven, for the most part, by the rapid adoption of AI and LLMs".1 So it is possible that the majority of things you see online are now generated by AI, made by bots, or are otherwise the product of using these tools.

But I have concerns beyond the existential dread that a dead internet might produce. Once all digital interactions are flattened into clanker interactions, then the average person will probably give up on trying to distinguish where information is coming from. We've already begun to see negative effects on our cognition from relying on tools like Chat GPT to do our tasks. We've also already begun to see words enter the lexicon through the errors of these models. My favorite example of this is the phenomenon of the term, “vegetative electron microscopy".

The usage of this term originates from a scanned academic paper being misinterpreted and accidentally being used in the ChatGPT training data.

This nonsense phrase then was used as if it were legitimate, with the implication of course that academic writers have quickly adopting using ChatGPT to write their papers:

The upshot? As of today, “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal, and Elsevier issued a correction for another.

[…]

Publishers have responded inconsistently when notified of papers including vegetative electron microscopy. Some have retracted affected papers, while others defended them. Elsevier notably attempted to justify the term’s validity before eventually issuing a correction.2

Here we see the disturbing trait of AI accidentally inventing a term, and then humans attempting to inject meaning into it after the fact. I figure this only one especially visible and egregious example, but we will likely see much cultural retcon-ing of AI slop happen in the next few years.

So, we can fear the so-called singularity if we want to, but I'm afraid we're on the verge of the clankularity—I don't think we have to worry about robots gaining human souls so much as we have to worry about the point at which we begin to see the world through their eyes… Or, uh, photo-receptors. I meant photo-receptors.

I’m sick of lists of books. Reading lists, top tens, flowcharts, curriculums, canons, counter-canons, the lot. Pathetic activity. Someone could write out the name of every single book I really love, ranked impeccably, with no omissions and no interpolations, and I’d spit cold venom in their face. I think the only way to read with dignity is to read organically, genealogically, backwards, by touch. Not running down a list, but excavating, following the seams where words bleed into each other.1

A bit harsh, don't you think? I understand the joys of browsing bookshelves perfectly well, but there's no reason a list hinders you from doing so. It just gives you helpful reference points. On the other hand, I understand the exhaustion and frustration of lists of "important" things being repetitive, reductive, and even regressive. When one makes themselves beholden to a list of, say, important books they must read, they do shut themselves off from exploration.

In fact, I really agree with that principle. Dr. Ruth J. Simmons had a better way of articulating this view:

I'm much less convinced than many others that there is a prescriptive list of books that you must read. I'm more convinced that it is the reading widely that matters more than anything else not somebody a list of things that people have said these are the things to read, no. I don't buy that at all.2

In both of these cases, we can see that the principle of reading widely is held in opposition to the concept of organizing books in hierarchical lists.

Finally, in an even more strongly worded condemnation, here's what Dr. Hans-Georg Moeller has to say:

Listicles function like rating and ranking mechanisms that have been established everywhere. University rankings rating agencies in the finance industry personal ranking systems in the service industry like uber drivers, airbnb hosts, and so forth. You can't even go to university nowadays that is not already prejudiced through its ranking. You can't go to a restaurant and simply taste the food anymore, because you're judging it in terms of the rankings you've seen. Listicles represent just a simple form of creating such prejudice like rating and ranking systems listicles are an instrument of cultivating and spreading prejudice.3

Geez. You'd think that the whole concept of a list were sinful. That lists were born out of the worst of human impulses: prejudice, hatred, and the need to compare and discriminate. Hating on list-making is a bit of an in-vogue idea, I suppose.

But when I think about lists, even the hierarchical, best-of-all-time ones, I cannot help but link it with the joys of my whole film viewing and literature reading journey.

In many ways, my whole obsession with film kicked off with an encounter with lists—two to be precise. One was the IMDB top 250, and the other was Roger Ebert's top ten published in 2012 (which was one year before he died). For whatever reason, I became obsessed with these lists around 2013 and 2014, right when I was wrapping up middle school. As a kid who already enjoyed movies, it was eye opening to read these lists and realize just how few of the highly rated classics I had seen. For a 13 year old Tim just beginning to develop his interests, such lists were not constraining at all, but were rather more like a frontier, a way of me appreciating how far I had yet to go in life, how many great films lay in my future.

I quickly began a practice where I would make my own "favorite movie" lists. But even then I was certain that my tastes would shift and change as I got older. So I made these lists with the knowledge that I was not trying to make a definitive list, not in terms of film history and not even in terms of my personal life. Instead, the list, for me, became a snapshot of not only tastes, but my mentality at a given point in time. I don't remember when I made the decision exactly, but when I turned 14 I resolved to make a list of my favorite movies, every year around my birthday. The point was less the glorification of the films, and it became a way of measuring myself--much like the way parents mark a child's growth on the side of a door and date it.

Looking back at that first list, at age 14, I am both embarrassed and impressed with myself. Topping the list is The Elephant Man, which was the only Lynch film I'd seen up to that point, followed by Schindler's List, The Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight, all which show how much the IMDB 250 did to help guide my early film viewing experiences.

The Elephant Man remained in the top spot for a while, until it was displaced by The Graduate when I was 16. This was a film I watched largely out of my budding love for Wes Anderson. And it was this film, along with a few Hitchcock movies, The Conversation and 2001 that really opened me up to the idea of actually watching and studying classic films. I was also highly influenced by my viewing of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The 400 Blows that year which began to open up my world.

But the film that really exploded my film viewing paradigm up until that point was Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which then topped the list when I turned 17. The reasons are too numerous to state here, but the main ones were: the film's spiritual feel, the on location shooting, and the poetic, fragmented plot.

When I saw the shot in the Aguirre's first scene where the camera's lens actually gets wet from the actors trudging through the real muds of the Amazon, I felt as if I had stumbled into a different cinematic dimension.

I had no idea films could look or feel like this, or that they could be emotionally satisfying while avoiding nearly all of the typical conventions of cinema. This film remained my absolute favorite until Tarkovsky's Stalker topped it when I turned 21, a position it has maintained ever since.

Even just looking at my #1 pick on these lists tells you a story about not only my changing tastes but the continual development of my whole philosophy and disposition. The lists that begged me to watch the "greatest" films of all time, led me to a supremely helpful personal practice, one that tells me just as much about myself at any given age as a journal entry would. Plus, it has been helpful whenever I have to navigate any sort of question about what my "favorite" films are.

Though I have similar habits around literature and music (and to some extent, videogames), my consistent creation of my list of favorite movies provides me with my own strongest case for the pleasures and virtues of list-making.

But I'd argue even further and say that lists such as these are not merely a luxury but a necessity of life. What is the role of a curator of a museum but an extension of this same list-making habit? While we might argue for the opposite ideal (let everyone peruse all the holdings of every museum!) this is terribly unpractical, and might even be considered a waste of time. While it can be tough to disentangle the urge to be elitist with the urge to provide people with a legitimately helpful list of things which may be more worth their time than other things.

The solution is not less lists but more. I hope everyone makes their own idiosyncratic list of their favorite movies, books, restaurants, etc. It will not only capture a moment of your own progression through life, but also of a certain cultural moment.

Looking at the list I made this very year, I begin to learn a lot about myself. I notice that I am no longer at the point of my life when I am simply seeking out the craziest or epic or most transcendent cinematic experiences. Rather, I have begun to really embrace films which give me a sense of peace and which address issues of meaning.

One can see quite a few films with rather low stakes, My Dinner With Andre, Old Joy, A Canterbury Tale, and Perfect Days all follow low stakes situations but end up in a place of quiet profundity. I am still perpetually drawn towards the surreal and strange, an element of my film taste which continues to grow from my early exposure to Bunuel, thus Everything Everywhere, The Hourglass Sanatorium, and The Color of Pomegranates all make appearances. But I also, quite simply, now seek out films which make me happy. It’s quite fascinating to think Schindler’s List was in my top 5 beforehand, but now I have The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, a delightfully cartoonish and imaginative romp.

Though one might suspect the inverse, in the case of my cinematic journey, my appreciation of Baron Munchausen is a sort of sign of maturity, and Schindler’s List was a type of rite of passage.

And it surely shows a lot about the time the list was made in. I mean, how’s Everything Everywhere All At Once going to age, ten years from now? On the Letterboxd top 250, it’s already dropped from the #1 spot to #190! I might look back at my 2025 self and cringe at such a selection, as I do when I remember when Master of Disguise was once my favorite (this was the pre-list era…) but I doubt it. Even if everyone hates Everything Everywhere by 2040, I think I’ll look back fondly at my lists and perhaps even miss this God-forsaken decade.

Ultimately, though, I’m led back to my #3 film this year, Ikiru. A profound film by Akira Kurosawa which follows a dying man as he decides to devote his final days to constructing a playground for children. It’s one of the truest depictions of death ever put on screen, it realizes and demonstrates the fact that one lives on in the physical world through their effects. While I’d hope to do something as noble as construct a playground one day, these lists are another way of showing “I was here”—though they are far more ephemeral. It’s no coincidence that one of the ways I try to connect with a friend of mine who died is through listening to his playlists.

It’s helpful to remember that lists can simply encapsulate all the books or movies you’ve read without the need to rank them all. A powerful recent example is a man named Dan Pelzer who kept an ongoing list of all the books he read in his life (a modest 3,599!) and you can now look at this list at what-dan-read.com and it’s wonderful to think I can connect with this man and his thoughts through a big, glorious list—a man I never would have known about otherwise.

In fact, I can’t help but think that lists such as these are ultimately just another way of showing that we have made another trip around the sun. Trees have rings that develop, humans make top 10 lists. It’s our way of marking the passage of time. And what could be more human than the silly adjectives we append? We claim to make lists of the greatest books or movies or albums of all time? There’s no way to see this as anything but a joke—though it is a poetic joke. There is no all time, of course, because we are in the midst of it! It’s just as preposterous to debate the elitism of such a concept as to label the concept as such. It was all humorous to begin with. Humorously human, that is.

Suppose a scenario: if I found myself in the far flung future, on some distant planet, looking for any signs that humans had been there previously, I could surely look for a flag or a footprint or roasted meat. But nothing would convince me of the presence of humans over some alien species than seeing a top 10 list scrawled on the exteaterrestrial sands.

However, I think obsessing over Kubrick, as many young film students are wont to do, can do more harm than good. His work is worth being admired but not imitated. I don't simply mean this in terms of his infamously cruel production techniques, but also in terms of the entire narrative arc of his career—admittedly, this is largely due to not-entirely-authentic depictions of his career. Much like in my essay about Hitchock, Slapstick Expressionism, I am going to insist that we must see some sort of continuity between a director's early work and their later work which feels as if it has been made by a capital-a Auteur.

Consider the early films: Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, even his early for-hire docu-shorts. These films are not merely Kubrick practicing before he finally gets enough resources to make a true Kubrick film. No, they are a glimpse into a different sort of Kubrick film, into the sorts of movies he had to make when he didn't have access to large soundstages, exorbitant budgets, and actors who would put up with an indefinite amount of takes. I think the real key here is Killer's Kiss, which embodies the opposite of everything that Kubrick became: it's a film that was shot largely on-the-fly in the real streets of New York, with a far more collaborative spirit, and even a jazzy score.

But even his first features, Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss was made with a larger budget than most (truly) independent filmmakers can scape together for a production in their lifetime: adjusted for inflation, Kubrick borrowed $474,000 from his wealthy uncle who owned several pharmacies for his first film. Even though that film was a total flop, he was able to make Killer's Kiss with a slightly higher budget, one he put together from multiple sources, including a pharmacist who fronted most of the cost initially. Already this early in his career, there is very little of a "lesson" to be learned for aspiring filmmakers today, unless you too know wealthy pharmacists willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for your project. It's not as unrelatable as a director who began their career within a filmmaking family (say Sophia Coppola or Xavier Dolan), but these are simply resources that the average person does not have access to. This is no Hundreds of Beavers or Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (two recent examples of true low-budget excellence).

Killer's Kiss is nonetheless considered a shoestring affair. Kubrick wrote, directed, and shot the whole thing himself. Observe the sequences below and feel the sort of frenetic, improvised energy present in the film that simply does not permeate his later works at all.

The film is not great, and yet it is perhaps his most important to watch as an aspiring filmmaker. We get to see Kubrick trying his best to create beautiful visuals without being able to control all the variables. Perhaps the most famous shot in the film, the most "Kubrickian" is a moment of seemingly accidental beauty, where the lighting in this particular stairwell happens to have a Hopper-esque effect.

But there are several other wonderful moments, such as this surprisingly cartoonish shot of the protagonist checking in on some fish.

And check out this tracking shot, wherein the camera was filming from the back of a pickup truck. The effect is brilliant.

It's evident that he's still getting his sea legs here, but its also clear that there's a quality present in this film that he lost as he rose to greater power. It's dynamic, it's improvised, it's the kind of film you have to make when the world is not your oyster. In fact, Killer's Kiss feels almost like a crime thriller directed by John Cassavetes. Especially when we consider the film was shot on an Eyemo, a springwound camera which only holds 100 feet of film at a time, meaning Kubrick could only afford to get so many takes of a given scene. He was a dynamic filmmaker here because the conditions demanded it. He later became a rigid filmmaker because conditions allowed it.

So how did Kubrick get so much control of his films later in his career? Well, his reputation became renowned enough that he could make demands of the studios, rather than the other way around. Through Kubrick grew up in America, after his filmmaking career took off, he moved to England bought a manor and insisted that any studio he worked with fund his film projects to be made in Britain. Keep in mind, he had his own production studio (known variously as “Stanley Kubrick Productions”, “Hawk Studios”, etc.) but got funding for his films from companies like MGM. In the case of something like 2001, he got MGM to fund it, filmed it in the UK with all the tax breaks that came with it and These are things basically no other filmmaker gets to do. It's probably better to think of Kubrick's later films as the result of cinematic nobility, rather than simple filmmaking genius.

As Kubrick was able to make greater demands from studios, he was able to violate all sorts of norms and customs on film sets. And it became a feedback loop—why is Kubrick so cruel to his actors and crew? Why, it's because he's a genius! How do you know he's a genius? Oh, well, he doesn't behave like a normal director—look at how many takes he has his actors do! So by the time we get to Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was basically able to take all of these supposed trademarks of his “genius” to the extreme.

Kubrick shot the entirety of Eyes Wide Shut in England, though the film is set in New York. For me, there's a note of tragedy here. Even though he is an absolute technician of the cinema by this point, he had also become increasingly detached from physical reality in his work. He went from a photographer-turned-filmmaker shooting on the fly through the streets of New York to recreating the streets of New York by having one of the most famous actors at the time walk on a treadmill in front of rear projection.

And some of the sets which directly recreate New York’s streets are Borgesian in their attempt to map New York in a studio:

Kubrick was terrified of flying, so instead of traveling to New York City to shoot in Greenwich Village, he built a top-secret replica of the neighborhood at England's Pinewood Studios. A set designer was sent to measure the exact width of the streets and distance between newspaper stands.

This level of obsession and desire to completely control an environment reminds me of Kaufman's brilliant depiction of an overly perfectionist director in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, which I've written about before in "The Myth of the Controlled Environment":

Then there is the fascinating case of Synecdoche, New York in which a gigantic piece of art becomes a controlled environment emulating an entire city as well as the day-to-day life of the person creating the environment. The fascinating thing about this meta film is that it encounters much the same problem that modern physics has: one has to account for themselves in the environment as well.

But in contrast to both Kaufman and the protagonist he depicts, Kubrick doesn't seem very interested in putting himself in his art, as he prefers to put himself and the audience in the role of the detached observer. One could argue Kubrick's gaze is highly deterministic and harkens back to a far more machinic view of the physical world.1

There's no hint of the improvisation or scrappy spirit of Killer's Kiss by this point, as every minute detail of the film was constructed and rehearsed meticulously. Kubrick was already famous for doing a ludicrous amount of takes in order to create authentic tension and upset on set. In Eyes Wide Shut, his application of this technique is downright arbitrary if not abusive. Harvey Keitel was originally supposed to be in the film but dropped out after Kubrick tried to make him do dozens of takes of walking through a door. Things were all the worse for Tom Cruise in the lead role, who was infamously forced to redo a take of him walking through a door 95 times.2 The filming was so stressful and demanding of Cruise that he developed an ulcer, but decided to keep it secret from Kubrick. That's not to mention the toll that the film surely took on the marriage between the two leads, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick worked extensively and intimately with the couple in a film about sexual jealousy. One of the central plot points of the film is a sexual jealousy that Cruise's character develops when his wife tells him of her sexual fantasy of a naval officer. In perhaps the ultimate example of overpreparation, Kubrick filmed an entire scene he did not intend to use, simply in order to get a rise out of Cruise:

To achieve that expression on Cruise, Kubrick barred the actor from the set as he filmed the theoretical sex scene for six days. Legend says that Kidman and Gary Goba posed in over 50 positions during that week of shooting and that Kubrick ordered that Kidman not reveal any details to her husband during that time. Contemplate the inner smile stretched across the director’s brain (Kubrick certainly wouldn’t expose it on his face) as he massaged genuine hurt through simulation. When reports surfaced saying just as much, Cruise rapidly retorted that he and Kidman were in love with their creative overlord.3

Contrast this with the fact that in Killer's Kiss, when Kubrick needed a ballerina for a flashback sequence, he employed his wife at the time, Ruth Sobotka. She is not a stunningly great dancer, but the sequence feels so sweet when you know this bit of production history. And when I watch that scene in Eyes Wide Shut, well… it feels like it’s the opposite of sweet. Especially considering their decade-long marriage ended 2 years after production wrapped.

The psychological toying of his leads plus the elaborate production caused the film become the longest continuous shoot in history, at 400 days/15 months! From my perspective, this is not what great filmmaking looks like. I have far more admiration for filmmakers which can seemingly pull a great movie out of nothing, rather than a sort of cinematic dictator who can get any demand he makes met. And to address the elephant in the room when it comes to Eyes Wide Shut—these production details tend to get glossed over as people focus on him as a noble truth-seeker exposing the sex crimes of the elite who some of the more conspiratorially-minded claim was murdered for it (which in our current Epstein era, well… I wouldn’t be the first to observe that the sex party in Eyes Wide Shut seems completely justified—even comparatively tame to the details that came out during Epstein’s prosecution). And while Kubrick certainly doesn’t seem guilty of being anything like these sex criminals, it’s worth remembering that he was not a muckraker or something and that his 18-bedroom home doesn’t look that different from the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut. He wasn’t a little guy critiquing the elites from the outside.

So if you consider yourself an aspiring filmmaker or storyteller of another sort, Kubrick's films are only worth drawing inspiration from within limits. Martin Scorsese is famous for saying he watches Kubrick's films with the sound off, in order to study the genius of his cinematography and editing. And yes, on a formal level, there's plenty to admire.

But lest you find yourself in the shoes of countless film students—saddled with the desire to "become the next Kubrick", you'd do yourself a favor to mean it in the Killer's Kiss sense, rather than the Eyes Wide Shut sense. Neither you nor just about anyone else, gets to make films like Stanley Kubrick. Not necessarily because he was a genius but because he was rich. Just remember that this was a guy who bought a mansion in a foreign country and was able to demand the film industry come to him. The average filmmaker only gets the opportunity to either make low budget fare with creative control but that does not guarantee a promise of success, or to work on commercial sets and have to meet the demands set for you by your employer.

Besides, do you really want to become like Kubrick? I don't. I'd much rather make friends through my filmmaking than victims. Is ‘victim’ a stretch? Well, he certainly made enemies out of his collaborators. Consider his relationship to Malcolm McDowell after A Clockwork Orange:

Kubrick actively swindled him out of earning additional money after A Clockwork Orange had soared to over $100million at the box office. McDowell had been told he was entitled to a percentage of the profits, only for the filmmaker to deceive him.

“He was supposed to pass on 2.5% of the movie, which he never did,” he said. “When I was told this by the head people at Warner Bros when it was a huge hit, and they said, ‘Well, you’re going to be a very rich young man’. I said, ‘Really? Why’s that?’. They went, ‘Well, with the 2.5% we passed on to Stanley for you’. And I went, ‘Well, I never got it.'”

Warner Bros put it down to Kubrick being Kubrick, but McDowell was incensed. “Why would he do that?” he continued. “It’s so ungenerous and so mean when he’s had every fucking fibre of my being.” The actor was so enraged he never spoke to him ever again, referring to the 2.5% of the profits he’d been promised from A Clockwork Orange never materialising as Kubrick having “betrayed” him.4

Though he was a highly successful filmmaker, his world became increasingly insular and detached from society. For me, Kubrick represents all the ideals of filmmaking I wish not to pursue… And I hope you don’t either, lest we forget that the questions of what you want to achieve and what sort of person you want to be are permanently intertwined.

I promise this is not a stretch

It is hard to overestimate Hitchcock's knowledge of early film. He described himself as an avid moviegoer even from a young age, "I was very keen on pictures", he said in that famous interview with Truffaut, "very often I went to first nights by myself. From the age of sixteen I read film journals. Not fan or fun magazines, but always professional and trade papers." Not only was it remarkable for such a young person to educate themselves on an industry, it was a remarkable time for a young person to be invested in film culture—he would have been 16 years old in 1915, one of the most important years for the development of the medium. It was the year Birth of a Nation was released, as well as Cecil B. Demille's The Cheat, mystery and crime themed serials were in full force, such as those of Louis Feuillad, and the three great silent comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd) were about to come into the height of their powers as filmmakers.

He would have seen many, if not all, of the films by these greats of slapstick comedy. While dramas were slowly but steadily adapting the form of the feature film to their needs, it seemed as if the silent comedians cracked the "code" far quicker in terms of how to take full advantage of cinema's idiosyncrasies. What I mean by this is that while many "serious" filmmakers were still figuring out how best to adapt stories and techniques from the theater and the novel to the screen and seemed to defer towards a type of filmed theater by default, figures such as Keaton raced ahead with their cameras, utilizing trick photography, dynamic camera movement, and almost purely visual storytelling. While Hitchcock did not correspond with these comedians directly, silent-era slapstick has much more in common with Hitchcock's concept of "suspense" than the crime dramas (crime procedurals, etc.) of the time do. To put a finer point on it, when discussing this early part of his life, Hitchcock would always emphasize that he had little in interest in the British films of the time and learned primarily from watching American films.

But let's consider the other side of the equation first. Hitchcock influenced by German expressionism? isn't that a bit of a stretch? Is it not the result of film studies supposing the primacy of ideas over the practical considerations of a profitable industry? While I am one to be wary of the ridiculous mashing of two unrelated bits of art history, this was not a conclusion I drew, but a historical fact I have encountered in Hitchcock's biography.

In his 20s, Hitchcock's career in film production began not in the UK, but in Germany. Hitchcock came to Babelsberg in Germany to work as an assistant director. But he soon rubbed shoulders with the thriving (but short-lived) German expressionist moment, "when Hitchcock arrived there, FW Murnau was filming his silent meisterwerk, Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), and this young English wannabe leapt at the chance to watch the great German auteur at work."1 Not only was Hitchcock an admirer of this era of German cinema as it was occurring, he received, as it were, a front row seat to it. Apparently, Murnau was something of a short-term mentor figure to young Hitchcock, "What you see on the set does not matter," Murnau told him. "All that matters is what you see on the screen." Hitchcock lapped up Murnau's advice."2

From painting shadows into film sets, to elaborate visual jokes: both of these early expressions of film explored those things which were idiosyncratic to the cinema. (One other major early expression of pure cinematics was the Soviet montage, an era which also had lasting influence on Hitchcock, though I will not touch it here). Hitchcock similarly, even from his earliest films, seemed entirely focused on how he could not only capture a story with a camera, but express it through the usage of a camera. Even his first sound film uses the microphone as an expressionistic device.

As far as the slapstick element goes, it is, of course, hardly associated with suspense— but when it comes to Hitchcock's ideas of suspense, it really should be. Slapstick, as a genre, was the zone where many of Hitchcock's signature elements already existed. As noted earlier, Hitchcock is generally not one for detective stories or gangster films or things we associate with the "crime" genre, which is typically what we mean when we speak of suspense pictures.

But the elements of Hitchcock's wonderful world, tales of mistaken identity, chase sequences in exotic locations, and flirtatious, perverse innuendoes... We will have to look at the slapstick greats to discover the progenitors of a Hitchcockian suspense. If there is one point that Hitchcock absolutely belabors in his interviews with Truffaut, it is the concept that suspense is not about shock. Therefore it has little to do with mystery, wondering who committed what crime and so on. Suspense occurs when everything is laid out for the audience, when there is a perfectly clear conflict. The clearer the conflict the greater the anxiety we feel while we are waiting for it to resolve. In fact, it is not mystery that defines Hitchcockian suspense, but waiting. After all this is what suspense means, in the colloquial sense. We say we are in suspense when someone hasn't finished their story and becomes engaged in some other conversation. It is only natural then to plead, "What happens next?!" This is exactly the effect Hitchcock sought to achieve. But it is this element of anticipation, of waiting for the result to occur, that can just as easily make one laugh as it can make you squirm in your seat.

I think you can see these elements in all three of the great slapstick comedians—the three being Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Chaplin loved cases of mistaken identity, as we can see in the famous scene in Modern Times. Chaplin tries to get someone's attention by waving a red flag and accidentally causes a strike to occur. He is then arrested as a revolutionary.

This is a case of mistaken identity taken to almost fantastical heights, which is the exact sort of thing Hitchcock loved to use as an inciting incident. Harold Lloyd's most famous film is just as much of a suspense film as it is a comedy. In Safety Last, Lloyd attempts to scale a building. The obstacles he encounters as he is climbing the building are often cartoonish, always comic; but the film thrusts us back into feelings of legitimate suspense whenever Lloyd is teetering on the edge of some window—we laugh and squirm at the same time. Between comedy and suspense—the adjoining substance—is slapstick.

But we can see this in no better place than in the works of Buster Keaton. Practically all of his great works contain strong elements of suspense when it comes down to it. We can see this clearly in The General, where Keaton is in a situation similar to Harold Lloyd's, except he is on a train. And it's worth noting that this film's most famous moment, or at least the one that is most commonly shared as a gif, is not so much a comedic one as it is a suspenseful one. Keaton chucks a piece of wood to knock off a piece of wood from the tracks. A simple thing at first, but the closer you examine this moment, the more nervous you get. It was a genuinely dangerous stunt that could have risked ruining an entire train, no less Keaton's seemingly feeble body.

Briefly indulge me in a direct comparison of slapstick comedy and suspense. The most well-known example Hitchcock gives to explain his conception of suspense comes from his film Sabotage. This famous "bus sequence" will pair nicely with an extended sequence from Keaton's Seven Chances.

In Sabotage, we have a young boy who has been given what he thinks are film reels. He takes the bus in order to get to deliver the film. Little does he know, the package contains a bomb intended to detonate where he will deliver the film. The bus sequence sees the boy in the bus, unknowingly spending his last moments before the bomb explodes.

In Seven Chances, Buster Keaton needs to marry a wife by a specific date and time in order to be awarded a large inheritance. After some failed attempts, Keaton's character advertises a specific time for any interested bride-to-be to meet him at a church. Both sequences constantly cut back to clocks as they get closer and closer to the designated time where we know something will happen.

What these two films have in common, is a sense of slapstick—what is to happen is obvious, and we await its result impatiently. Slapstick in its purest form is not a clown with a bag full of gags trying to make us giggle; no, pure slapstick needs only a pitifully normal person thrust into a preposterous situation—it is the old gag of stepping on the rake, except we see the rake clearly ahead of time. Slapstick is seeing some poor shmuck stuck in a room full of mousetraps, and suspense is laughing at his realization that we will have to walk on the mousetraps in order to make it to the exit. In this sense, there is nothing really separating slapstick from suspense. The difference is tone, but the slapstick gag remains the same.

the key text: Number 17

I think we can find elements of slapstick expressionism in all sorts of Hitchcock's work: from North By Northwest to Psycho. But I believe the best place is to look is further back, to the moment where he was on the cusp of figuring out his perfect suspense film formula, one of his least loved titles: Number 17.

Before Number 17, Hitcock’s biggest hits thus far were his first three thrillers: The Lodger, Blackmail, and Murder!. The Lodger featured the direct influence of German expressionism, simply conforming that style to fit the timbre of the London setting. It was terribly serious and psychological as many of the German films were. In Blackmail, Hitch continued to blend these German techniques with a crime story. The film's opening anticipates the tropes of the film noir genre: we see two grizzled detectives lumber up shadowy stairs, we see them enter a criminal's room through a mirror, & so on.3 There are a few darkly comedic moments in Blackmail that are of significance, particularly a famous moment of early sound cinema where a woman wracked with guilt over killing a rapist hears a woman's gossip mentioning the murder with a knife devolve into a repeated shouting of the word "knife!"—showing the protagonist's interior world externalized in the film's soundtrack. An effective way to carry the German expressionist techniques into the sound age.4 Finally, Murder! is a mystery film with strongly expressionist tendencies and some darkly humorous dialogue. All these thriller films were excellent, especially for the time, but none were fully Hitchcockian yet.

This is partially because, during this period of the young director pumping out 15 films in 5 years, he also made numerous films in other genres. Significantly, he had attempted a few comedies, such as The Farmer's Wife and Champagne. Both of these films are rather feeble, but they have moments of visual creativity that shine through. While many historians and fans simply discard with these films as failures on the whole, I think it is better to consider them as a proving ground of sorts. By the time he reaches Number 17, Hitchcock fully blends his attempts to make thrillers with his comedies, and the result is, in many ways, his signature style.

Number 17 is not a great film—but it is perhaps the definitive slapstick expressionist film. The movie's opening scene is torn straight from Gothic and expressionist aesthetics, as a camera dreamily enters into a shadow-laden mansion. Like so many great expressionist works (think The Old Dark House), the deeper the characters go in this mysterious house, the more it becomes like penetrating deeper into a troubled, criminal psyche. But this film is not terribly dark or intense, in fact, the film features such a strong dose of preposterous slapstick that it is almost bothersome. Leon M. Lion's depiction of "Ben" feels almost ridiculously out of place. But really I think this is a foretaste of the Hitchcock style to come. In Number 17, it simply feels asymmetrical, since nearly all of the film's comedic effect is shouldered on a single character actor. In Hitchcock's later work, he perfectly blends the comedy with the rest of the film, often giving every character their own humorous or witty angle. Really, Number 17 is a suitable example because the slapstick and expressionism in it are, at first, nearly like oil and water—but they are both really, totally present. It makes sense, when one considers the source material was a burlesque play, but was filmed as if it were a Fritz Lang flick.

But the definitive moment of slapstick expressionism comes later, in a moment where the film suddenly leaps from being Hitchcock-directed B-movie fare, to being a true proto-Wes Anderson flick. It is no longer oil and water anymore—it is a perfect mixture. At the end of the pulpy plot, two criminals hop onto a train to try and escape with a precious diamond necklace. A chase scene, of course, ensues with the protagonist on their tails. But the train the whole scene takes place on is evidently a miniature—undeniably so. Something strange then happens, we are thrust out of the typical mode of thinking about Hitchcock as a master of racketing up suspense towards a stressful finale, and we realize he's also a master of a different sort.5 The sequence is almost cute in execution, and while it is not suspenseful it is pure cinematic delight. We realize the quaintness of the cinematic illusion and we simply have fun with it, much like the way we do when watching a film like The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Phoenician Scheme which are replete with miniatures and intentionally fake special effects.

externalizing slapstick psyche

We arrive, finally, at slapstick expressionism when we get the combination of situations where something will obviously go wrong with the style of externalizing character's psyches. Clowns are comedians who externalize their emotion, they wear the cruelty of the world on their faces. Hitchcock takes the clown's makeup and paints a world with it; in Hitchcock's universe, everything is delightfully cruel. Hitchcock's slapstick expressionism lays everything out in an obvious way, and it is this obviousness that allows for a symmetry between the cinematic world and the character's psyches. In order to retain maximal suspense, our protagonists must be feeling exactly what the audience is feeling, they must be as transparent as glass. His style of expressionism shows us why he returned several times throughout his career to the form of the psychodrama. But part of why Spellbound and Marnie don't work as well as his other films is that they entirely lose the element of obviousness, they rely on some central psychological mystery and, most offensively to our modern sensibilities, presume these psychological problems can be solved. Gregory Peck in Spellbound and Tippi Hedren in Marnie aren't transparent to the audience, we don't know what they're really thinking. Anything unobvious is unnecessary in Hithcock's own calculus, and so nuance is bloat. This psychodrama approach worked once, in a certain sense, in Psycho. While that masterpiece subverts Hitchcock's own formula in numerous ways, and I don't have time to parse all these subversions here… suffice to say, I think one of the reasons Psycho works so well is that it dials the slapstick and the expressionism up. What could be closer to expressionism in its fullest sense than the Bates motel—a shadowy, unrealistic setting modelled after Norman Bates' own psyche? Of course, nearly everyone who watches the film already knows about the shower scene beforehand, and are nonetheless frightened and thrilled when it occurs. But audiences are typically puzzled when we get the second killing scene—it's the sort of thing which would come to be considered a mood breaker in other horror film—I speak of the scene where a detective is stabbed and stumbles down the stairs backwards. The camera follows this character's face as he has lost his balance. Its a cartoonish, ridiculous scene.

And I think audiences nowadays assume it is unintentionally funny—but in reality, this is pure Hitchcock. It’s a gag. A gag that is poetic and expressive.

I could go on and on about all the examples of slapstick expressionism in Hitchcock's filmography, but I think a better way to proceed is to observe how Hitchcock influenced a slapstick expressionist filmmaker today, that of Wes Anderson.

The Hitchcock-Anderson connection is little discussed, largely, I think, because we are apt to put Hitchcock in the "thriller" box which apparently is not allowed to have much to do with the expressionist comedies the likes of Anderson is known for. His cinematic settings are almost exclusively highly unrealistic and peculiar. They are playful, childlike arrangements of various objects. To say they externalize the emotions of the films' characters is insufficient; the films’ production design often operates as extensions of the characters. The room of a Wes Anderson character has their personality spewed all over it. Even though the brightness and pastel colors of a Wes Anderson film are quite literally the visual antonym of the murky streets of German expressionism or noir, it is really the same principle that is behind both. And it is Hitchcock can provide us with the missing aesthetic link.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, perhaps the best film Wes Anderson will ever make, is also Anderson at his most Hitchcockian. It is a wrong man plot that resembles the The 39 Steps-North By Northwest variety... a man on the run with a McGuffin, extended chase sequences, likeable villains, and a variety of visually stunning locations strung together by happenstance. In fact, the setting of the The Grand Budapest Hotel's fictional country strongly resembles the pseudo-Swiss setting in the first part of 1930's The Man Who Knew Too Much and the fictional culture and country in The Lady Vanishes. In fact, it is in these earlier British masterpieces that we find the most resonance between Hitchcock's filmmaking and Anderson's.

A telling moment in The Grand Budapest Hotel points directly towards Hitchcock's influence: the museum chase scene. This is an idea Hitchcock returned to multiple times in his filmography, first in Blackmail, where a criminal is chased through the British Museum, and lastly in Torn Curtain. The signature Hitchcockian chase sequence is one where a man slowly realizes that he is being followed, where he hears the echoing footsteps behind him, and then sees an expressionist shadow on the wall. The chase scene is on: the audience knows it and and the protagonist knows it. But the suspense is heightened by the way that the protagonist attempts to conceal the fact they are aware they are being chased. If they start running too fast, they acknowledge the chase and will have to make a desperate run for it, but if they act as if nothing unusual is happening, the one doing the chasing is sure to catchup... It is an idea both hilarious and heart-pounding. It is this exact sort of scene that is recreated in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Jeff Goldblum flees a villainous Willem Defoe through various aestheticized exhibits. The scene is remarkably similar to the aforementioned Hitchcock ones. I thought that this was an original observation, but there’s actually a quite good video essay already up on Youtube about this:

Hitchcock took the influences of the German expressionists and the American slapsticks and twisted them together into something original. His filmmaking style has proved influential, if somewhat misunderstood. Although it may be obvious that the likes of David Fincher are taking pages from Hitchcock's book... We should expand our vision of Hitchcock's influence to recognize that he remains a constant inspiration even outside the zone of the thriller genre.

I think we can see this, too, with how Hitchcock's last films turned out. After making a stream of box office failures: Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Hitchcock was forced to scale his films back substantially. His films would no longer have star power to fuel interest in them; but at the same time, working outside of major studios in the 70s meant little to no censorship. While this late period could warrant its own essay, the key thing here is that his final film, Family Plot, is highly unserious, even silly. It genuinely felt as if Hitchcock were headed in a new direction. A jewel thieving couple is being chased down by a fortune teller and and her cab driving boyfriend, not to catch them for their crimes, but to inform them of a family inheritance they are entitled to. It’s a sort of inversion of his whole wrong man plot formula.

It's a surprising selection of story for Hitchcock's last feature, and it makes little sense if we think of him as a creator of thrillers. In reality, it is the culmination of his style of slapstick expressionism. Bruce Dern stumbles around graveyards with a comical pipe in his mouth, a macabre dungeon plays a key plot point, and the crime plot is so quaint that its hardly suspenseful. If this was the last film Hitchcock made, and if it is at all indicative of his personal storytelling ambitions, we should pause when we think of him as the "master of suspense", for we forget how adorable his filmmaking could really be. And perhaps we are, conversely, too quick to think of Anderson’s filmmaking as merely adorable.

But from my perspective, it's quite the logistical challenge. It consumes a lot of time and energy. Last year I wrote about my experience helping organize the festival in an essay called, "Films That Explode", and I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it again. But throughout the past year I became absolutely determined to stay in my position for round two. If I just passed it off to someone else, then they'd have a similar struggle and probably be discouraged from staying in the position. So I was determined to try and help improve things as I was able to (mostly in terms of ticketing and organizing employees and volunteers). So I did it all over again, and it paid off. It was much more manageable, most of the ideas I had paid off, and I had more time to actually meet the people who came out to the festival, all of which were lovely.

I feel like this principle has paid off elsewhere, like when I went for my Master's after my undergrad. Or like my current work on my second novel. I kind of had to get the first one out of the way in order to figure out how writing a novel works. And now, I'm doing the job search thing for the second time and am being much more strategic than I was the first time around.

Anyways, Nitrate Picture Show was responsible for my lack of writing lately. Or, more properly, it is responsible for me not finishing essays. I'm still as full of ideas as ever, but finishing essays requires a lot more mental energy and focus than starting them! I'm hoping to make up for my tardiness by publishing several essays at the end of June. Will I get back up to my rate of 4 essays per month? Perhaps.

So I'd like to take a second here to offer a few life updates and discuss some things that I've been working on and thinking about recently.

Radio appearances (?!)

I had a short story of mine read recently on the radio! The local Rochester station, WAYO, has a new segment where they read horror short stories. I've never really wrote proper horror stories, but I figured Hemiplegium was spooky enough to justify being submitted. You can check out the recording of the live reading here.

While I’m at it, I was also on the radio to chat about the legacy of David Lynch, which you can see here.

Adventures in projection

Though I've been working at the Dryden Theatre for over a year and we show 35mm film prints nearly every night, I've only recently actually gotten involved with the nightly film projection. It was just a matter of taking initiative, I realized, after a conversation with a friend helped me realize that it was totally possible for me to get involved. It's been a real blast, starting to project. A few highlights in terms of films I've helped project are: Yi Yi, The Philadelphia Story, and The Getaway.

Learning 35mm projection mostly has to do with threading the projector and learning how to do changeovers. The threading depends largely on the particular projector you're working with, so even if you might "know" how to project, it can feel like starting all over when you start threading a new projector. It's a pretty humbling experience, because even though I have a degree in this stuff, and lots of experience with projecting 16mm, film projection is much more like learning to drive a car. You've simply go to do it to learn how it works. And this is even truer for changeovers.

One of my favorite parts of film projection and inspection is seeing the little labels that say "inspected by" or "projected by" and recognizing the names of all the incredible people that have worked in this theater before me. For instance, just last night I saw labels signed by the current projectionist for The Academy (the Oscars one lol), Ben Tucker, and one by Kyle Westphal, co-founder of the Chicago Film Society. And then, considering most of our film collection belonged to the theatre's founder, James Card, he surely laid his hands on many of the prints, certainly the ones from the pre-60s. So, last night's film, The Philadelphia Story, (which was struck from the negative!) has passed through so many interesting people's hands and that mere fact reminds me of how magical this theater is.

But in terms of 16mm projection, I recently got a Kodak Pageant projector locally and a feature film (for $20!) on Ebay, called Inspector Maigret Sets a Trap. It's a decent French detective film. I had the privilege to do a screening of this for my friends, which was truly rewarding. Just 3 years ago, the only film print I had (consciously) viewed was a 35mm print of Spirited Away at the Portland Art Museum when I was in middle school and now, I have enough experience to do private film screenings at home. Though finding affordable prints of 16mm films is its own hobby.

Essay writing

I've been working on a few essays, like I said, but have struggled to see them totally through. One's going to be about the controversial last film of our festival and the Nazi era of German filmmaking, which will probably be called "Do Fascists Dream Fascist Dreams?"

We've also been screening tons of Stanley Kubrick films which has me thinking about how his earlier films relate to the figure he eventually began. Particularly, how his later films, great though they be, can hinder aspiring filmmakers if they imbibe them too cavalierly. Working title for that one is "Stanley Kubrick Teaches You All the Wrong Lessons About Filmmaking".

Then there's this essay which has been sitting around for a while waiting to be completed called "Slapstick Expressionism" which is about some very particular qualities in Hitchcock's filmmaking which I believe to be some of the key influences on Wes Anderson's whole thing. And my recent viewing of The Phoenician Scheme only offered more evidence!

Hopefully all of these will be coming your way soon.

Filmmaking

A fun project I've been working on for a while pretty casually with my roommate and wife is a comedic short film called "Alex Can't Find a Job". It's about the state of the job search in 2025, which is truly a completely different beast than what job searches used to be like. Here’s the concept:

Alex has a degree in computer science, but enters the job market just as automation is eating away all his potential career opportunities. After being mysteriously hired for a job through Craigslist, he begins to question where the job came from.

It's a super lo-fi production, obviously. Check out some screenshots below.

Novelizing

I've mentioned the fact that I've been working on a new novel several times on this blog. The working title is A Work of Mad Discord.

I'm now finishing up part 2 of 3. Each part has 10 chapters and I'm working on chapter 20 now. I'm not exactly sure how long it will end up being, but it's already well over the "minimum" word count to be considered a novel (the first part is 67k words). I'm pretty apprehensive about oversharing when I'm working on something like this, but I've made enough progress that I'm pretty sure sharing details about it won't discourage me from finishing.

The concept in one sentence is:

Tech oligarchs get involved in the art museum world.

The longer synopsis is as follows:

In the near future, modern art has become stale and technology once unimaginably futuristic has rendered life a drag. William L. Hamlin is a young tech CEO who has more money then he knows what to do with, and decides it’s time somebody restored the world of art museums to their former glory. Ellie Hampton, a young college graduate in search of an occupation, accidentally becomes one of my main organizers of this new museum. But she’s not sure about Hamlin’s intentions–does he really want to celebrate today’s great artists, or is this project politically motivated? Things only become more complicated as Hamlin decides to build the museum in Ellie’s Oregonian hometown and makes the central exhibit feature an artist who is despised there.

Anyways, that's all I'll say about it for now. When I finish it, I'm determined to try my hand at the traditional publishing route. Not because I'm desperate to make this my career or for the prestige, but just because I know I'll never be satisfied with myself if I don't give it a try at least once. If I bounce it around for a while and nobody's interested, you can expect a self-published version to pop up somewhere, somehow. Regardless, the process of writing it has been rewarding enough to justify the time and energy it takes whether or not it will end up on bookshelves.

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A whim is a wonderful thing—to get one, to act on one, or to remember one. A whim does not quite have the same anatomy as an idea, though I've spent much my life misconstruing the two. But the two are likewise products of our imaginations. Full-sized ideas rarely arrive unannounced. They are often hibernating within us and we discover them while conversing with others or engaging in self-reflection. Ideas are much larger entities: you have a big idea about how you want your life to go, or one about morality; some ideas are so large that putting words to them is like trying to cover an elephant with a blanket. We discover ideas within our imagination, while whims occasionally topple out the excesses of our psyche, more like a fruit than a vegetable. We confuse the two when we talk about something like "story ideas". When we think of an idea for a short story or novel, we misclassify it—these are usually mere whims. That's why you'll forget them if you don't write them down.

I do not mean to demean the whim, not at all. Life would be dull if we didn't get little ideas—I should go for a walk by the river, I should write a poem about salmonberries, I should call someone. But these little ideas are fragile, and if we don't treat them well, they'll dissipate. If we picture ideas and whims as things coming from the outside, then we can imagine that we would need our heads to be potential habitats. We need to prepare our minds to be habitable for any thoughts that might enter it, so that they may develop healthily.

This is one of the issues with externalizing our thoughts immediately through digital technology. All our thoughts aren't fully formed, or, worse yet, we train ourselves to think Tweet-length thoughts. You can't keep a cat in a drawer, but you can keep a hamster; you can't keep a hamster in a bag, but you can keep an ant. Our age is not repulsed by whimsy because it is too intelligent for it, but because the whimsical feels slow-paced and naïve in comparison to digitized thoughts at hyperspeed. The sort of playfulness we associate with whimsy is inherently disjointed from the cultural moment, which is precisely why someone drunk on microwasting their time cannot recognize its value.

One has to prepare themselves for whims to arrive, and when they do, one must treat them gently. The thing about a whim is that it is often disconnected from a larger network of meaning. People who don't have any background in nor who plan to get involved in filmmaking will get "movie ideas". (Trust me, tell someone you make short films and watch them tell you their 13 feature length film ideas.) These are really whims, disconnected from any real set of ideas on how to follow through.

An act like writing is fundamentally a whimsical act. You are putting yourself in a space where whims are allowed to come and be nurtured. When I sit down to write, it is far less like building based off a set of blueprints (even if I have an outline) and is far more like setting up a bird feeder. I set out with a concept, often based on a whimsical thought (i.e. "Inventing a style is paradoxical") and then it is as if I find the place in my imagination where this thought came from, and I set up a bird feeder—I create a space where whims are allowed to come and stay for a little while. I think this is why so many great pieces of art are hard to retain, and why re-reading your favorite novel results in you discovering all sorts of new thoughts. Something like a novel is not an idea, it's a home—and inside that home lives many thoughts. Some big, mostly small.

For a long time, I was thinking about creativity the wrong way. I thought that consuming enough great movies would turn me into a great filmmaker. This general inclination is not wrong—I think it is rare that great art emerges from an individual who is unwilling to take a good look at what has made long-lasting art work in the past. But I really became fixated on the idea that having good "taste" would at all translate into having a compelling artistic "style."

To be precise, when I use the term style, I am referring to a (somewhat naïve) idea of the artist as able to create a wholly original approach to art. Something about their aesthetic or technique which makes them revolutionary, influential, and important. And when I talk about taste, I mean it in the context of criticism, that one attains greater discernment for what makes any given piece of art "work" as they engage in more and more of it.

I think this is the case for a lot of young people, I think they get stuck on this idea that they need an original style and that the way to achieve that is through obtaining the "best" taste in X medium possible. This is not really a noble ambition, it's more of a trap.

Perhaps it's more widespread with filmmakers than most—I'm not sure—as a young film fan one is almost inevitably drawn to a few, select "great", "masterful" directors. Hitchcock, Scorsese, Tarantino, Lynch. Insert your favorite. But just watching the famous films made by these famous filmmakers risks giving you the wrong impression: that a director's "trademarks" is what makes their work great. That David Lynch is a great director because he uses a signature mix of dark ambient music, surreal otherworldly characterizations, and unpredictable storylines. None of these things are weaknesses, of course, but none of them are the things that make his art work, they're simply the style we've come to associate with him—a pattern in his creativity. But once we can identify a style, we've already externalized one's creativity and it becomes a style that can be applied elsewhere, it is precisely at this point that something becomes deindividualized.

In particular, I became convinced that if I developed a really, really good taste in movies, if I had seen all of the greatest-movies-ever-made that I'll have my third filmmaking eye open and I'd invent my own style and everyone would recognize me as a cinematic genius. Again, I was thinking about it all wrong. I was thinking about style wrong. AND I was thinking about taste wrong.

First of all, I developed a preoccupation with developing the "best taste" which really means the most impressive taste. By this I mean that I wanted to be able to one-up anybody in a conversation about movies. I hope that I was not unbearable in this, as I tried to respect that certain people will simply enjoy "normal" movies and that's fine, no use in being condescending. But if they said that their favorite director was, say, Takashi Miike: well, it was game on. The little film taste gremlin in my brain started kicking in. Have you seen any Tarkovsky? Thoughts on the Czechoslovakian New Wave? You've gotta check out Hard to Be a God! Etc, Etc...

I began to be drawn towards the idea of challenging cinema. Of long, epic, experimental, disturbing, boundary-pushing, philosophical, complicated cinema. I was in search of films that I could watch and hear people say, in response, "whoa this looks crazy" or "I can't believe you've watched that". To be honest, I think I had a secret hope that someday somebody would be so impressed by my patrician taste that I'd get a job because of it. Ha. Ha. But the thing is I really do like those sorts of movies, I wasn't bluffing. I wasn't just watching Satantango to have said I watched it. I was seeking a mind-bowing experience. And sometimes I got them. but the thing about these sorts of "masterpiece" films is that they only tend to be representative of one type of pleasure you can get from cinema. (This clearly ties in to notions of canonicity which I've written about in my essay "this-ever fraying pantheon".)

But there's a further issue, because, what's the real benefit to this activity? Well, it may be fun in its own right, as debating what the "best" thing in any category tends to be. But it does not benefit you the way young, naïve Tim hoped it might. It's not a cheat code to understanding film history because often these exceptional film are exceptions and if you've only watched the films of Ingmar Bergman for instance, you won't necessarily know much about the history of film in Sweden. If you want to understand film history you also have to intake all sorts of unremarkable films as well.

But this viewing habit won't, in particular, help you invent a style. Besides, inventing a style is not the point of art.

Think about it like this. What makes for a distinguished and delicious form of food? I'd argue it is as simple as an awareness of what ingredients one has access to and knowing how to use them. One does not create a great food by sitting around and fantasizing about possible foods based on the ones they've eaten, but by gaining experience in cooking. Once you start cooking you realize that you don't have limitless access to ingredients, and certain local ingredients will be better in your region than others and vice versa. And then it is through a combination of know-how and taste that you're able to make an exceptional food.

You still have to select the ingredients, yes, and that's where there is some validity to the idea that one must obtain good taste first. But you need to be an omnivore. You need to be willing to try all sorts of flavors, to experience all the possibilities of a medium you can. And then you pick and choose what can help you.

But you can't put the cart before the horse. What I mean by this is that you don't become an "original" artist before you become an artist. What happens when we think this way is a misplacement of the concept of originality.

In terms of writing, for instance, you might find that you'd really like your "style" to include dialogue imitating that of some specific writer. But when you start writing your dialogue, you find that if you deliberately try to write dialogue imitating Tarantino (God forbid) that everyone sees right through it. But when you start writing dialogue more frequently and you practice it, you might find that the lines inspired by things you've actually heard people say in real life sound better than your faux-Tarantino ones. To be frank and simple: trying to make your own distinct style rather than developing one through practice risks your work having a distinct dorkiness about it. (There’s some weird similarity between a Tarantino knock off and an overpriced burger place, isn’t there?)

Nobody's truly original—and that doesn't mean you should just "remix" other artists work (steal like Warhol! steal like Tarantino! only gets you so far). It means that you exist in context, and that what we call "originality" really just means that a work is coming from a milieu we're not familiar with. We might think the French New Wave filmmakers were total innovators, until we realize that most of their techniques they learned from watching classic French films. But the reason Godard and Truffaut's films don't come across as an imitation is because they let their influences bleed into their work organically and because they mixed it with the social and cultural milieu of their day.

In particular, they were cinematic omnivores, and were just as inspired by the films they did like as the ones they didn't—Francois Truffaut was a critic after all. But Truffaut's film The 400 Blows didn't change the course of film history because he proved he had the best taste and had seen the most masterpieces of anyone—no, it is because he took his own life story and tried to put in on screen. In working though how to depict his own childhood, he incorporated elements of the French Poetic Realism movement and American/Hitchcockian filmmaking sensibilities. This unique blend of influences grew out of working with the material, rather than synthesizing it beforehand.

So where does this attitude come from? I would argue it originates from the concept of the elevator pitch (which, again, is more common in the film world). You're supposed to pitch your work as "X meets X"—it's like 12 Angry Men but on a cruise liner and filmed in the style of Kubrick. You start talking this way in hopes you can get people interested in your work. But something happens when you learn this trick and then you descend deep into the underworld of hipsterdom: you start choosing more obscure reference points in order to impress people. It's Akira but in the style of Chantal Akerman. Satyajit Ray meets Ari Aster—but it’s about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Ernst Lubitsch psychological thriller meets Edgar G. Ulmer slapstick with a *sprinkle of Frank Capra!* But the more you play this game the further you get from the whole point of creativity: self-expression. It becomes about the coolest reference points. The extra bonus is if you're referencing a 14 hour movie or a 900 page novel or philosophical treatise or whatever.

So it's really the same trap as the "what is my style" question. It becomes about cleverness rather than problem solving. Because when you get down in the weeds, all creativity is problem solving. So, in the case of Truffaut's 400 Blows, you might need to film a scene for your coming of age film where a young boy steals a typewriter and you film it like you're Hitchcock simply because that's the way that's become natural to film it—not because you went around Paris with the elevator pitch: "It's like Jean Vigo meets Neo-Realism with Hitchcockian elements."

So discard with the question altogether. You don’t have a style. You certainly don’t have one before you actively make stuff, but even if you are a prolific writer or artist, just remind yourself: you don’t have a style. Whatever you make will be distinct, if you’re not merely trying to imitate others. And maybe after the fact people will be able to say something is “[your name]esque” but, really, that’ll just be one aspect of your work that has been extracted. As soon as your name becomes a style, it’s no longer yours anymore.

Quatermass and the Pit

We're all familiar with Doctor Who, even in America, but how many of us have Dr. Quatermass on our radars? Not many, I'm guessing. The iconic British character of Bernard Quatermass apparently precedes Doctor Who and was, in fact, one of the main influences on that long-running show. Quatermass originally appeared in sci-fi serials on the BBC, and would have been a pretty well-established fixture in British pop culture by the time Quatermass and the Pit was made. I became aware of this film, weirdly enough, from theorist/philosopher Mark Fisher's book The Weird and the Eerie. I had never heard of the character of Quatermass but it seemed like this film was a standout example.

The film is essentially about a "pit" that is dug beneath London to expand the tube. At first, they find skeletal remains, then a whole alien ship, and eventually aliens themselves—in one form or another. The film's strength really lies in its slow-build. I really enjoyed how much it built up the mystery of the buried ship, and it was compelling to see all the different theories characters come up with to explain it away. In particular, one of the colonels involved in the investigation claims it must be a piece of Nazi propaganda leftover from the war. The way the film shifts from the terror of political memory to a sort of cosmic unknown is quite fascinating.

After excavating the ship, they find corpses of aliens that appear like gigantic bugs. The structure they're in and the design of the bugs was genuinely quite freaky. But the film really hits a sweet spot for me when there's a sequence of a character testing out power tools on the metal material of the ship which causes some sort of psychokinetic phenomenon to occur. He runs around London in terror as he causes objects to fly around. A priest even sees this and insists it cannot be explained away by science. This point where there is undeniable freaky, supernatural stuff going on but it hasn't been raised to the level of the-world-at-stake was quite perfect.

But... They do indeed go for the-world-at-stake angle. And that's okay. The finale is pretty good. There's a psychokinetic storm of sorts and one of the aliens has a gigantic ghost like presence. They're able to stop it from destroying the world via some preposterous combination of electricity and human sacrifice. The ending is a bit Hollywood, but the whole thing is definitely worth the watch.

In case, you haven't guessed, seeing as this film was made in 1967, it is often considered one of the primary influences on Alien, and it seems like Quatermass generally influenced the developed the development of sci-horror greatly. In particular, there's a connection to the Alien prequel Prometheus, as in The Pit, Quatermass proposes the theory that these aliens affected the development of human evolution, that they were super intelligent creatures who aided in the development of human intelligence. If you've seen the later Alien films, this does indeed sound a lot like "The Engineers". Not only that, but Quatermass also suggests that these aliens explain the origin of human myths about demons and that humans have dormant psychic powers, which explains all sorts of other supernatural phenomena. I love ambitious worldbuilding like this, it reminds me of how freely sci-fi can explore these concepts. Needless, to say, this was a very interesting watch and I plan on checking out some of the earlier Quatermass stuff eventually.

Victims of Sin

Mexican film—it's an area of film history I am woefully undereducated on. My exposure to the Mexican film industry has been pretty much limited to the films Luis Bunuel made there. While those are some fascinating work Los Olividados, it doesn't change the fact that I've only watched Mexican film because a surrealist from Spain made them! But this film, Victims of Sin (1951) recently came to my attention, and I decided to check it out. The golden age of Mexican cinema is generally considered to last from 1936 to 1956, an era in which comedies, musicals, and crime thrillers were produced with considerable glamour and technique. But one of the most unique elements of this era was the "Rumeberas" film, a very particular genre which is influenced by a mixture of Afro-Caribbean musical numbers, noir filmmaking techniques, and Catholic-influenced moralism. Basically, what this means in practice, is films that are about "rumberas" dancers who are typically morally disgraced in some sort of noir-like plot, and who morally redeem themselves, sometimes through dancing.

Victims of Sin seems to me like the exemplary Rumeberas film. It stars Ninón Sevilla in the central rumberas role, who has incredible charisma and compelling dancing skills. One night, in the club she headlines, the nightclub owner insists that his girlfriend throws the baby she's just had (literally) in the trash. Sevilla rescues the baby, but this gets her kicked out of the club. She struggles to raise the child alone and eventually gets married to the owner of a rival nightclub. The film gets surprisingly violent and dramatic, in several plot turns I will not spoil here. The dance scenes are fantastic, there's some remarkable camera work and production design and it's neat to see a noir-type film centered around a strong-willed mother. This was one among many famous rumbera films, which I presume remain popular in Mexico. But Victims of Sin recently got a 4k restoration released by Criterion, so now it's reaching a broader audience.

Nowhere

Gregg Araki is a director I've meant to watch for a while. I very much associate his work with the indie filmmaking boom of the 90s, though some of his most popular films were actually made in the 2000s (i.e. The Mysterious Skin), so when the movie theater down the road said it was playing Nowhere (1990), I knew I had to check it out. Araki's style is quite the hodgepodge, it feels like it has one foot in postmodernism but also has a lot in common with airhead commercial comedies of the 90s/00s.

Nowhere follows a group of teenagers in an intersecting episodic as they all eventually converge at a party. Lots of people make comparisons to Dazed and Confused but this is honestly only a structural similarity. Unlike the nostalgic glaze covering everything in Dazed, Nowhere sees all its characters as tragic, even pitiable, and makes their lives so hyperbolically messed up that it really is making fun of the whole adolescent period of life. At first I wasn't sure of the tone, but as it went on it became clear that the film is primarily a comedy, of the John Waters-sort, and that helped me really enjoy it. The film has some of the most preposterous depiction of sexuality I've ever seen, but in its gratuitousness there is a sort-of hidden sincere feeling of longing for love. It makes the film seem sweet even though it is so indulgent and explicit.

Caverns

I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in high school and loved it—of course. Last year, I made my way through Ken Kesey's epic, Sometimes a Great Notion and was positively blown away. That might be one of my favorite books now. I really enjoy Kesey's writing style and his distinctly Oregonian perspective.

When I dug a bit further in his bibliography, I discovered this book, Caverns. It has a curious story behind it. Kesey got together a class of writers and co-wrote a novel all together, making Caverns a book with 14 authors! When I heard about this, I knew I had to get my hands on the novel.

The risk, of course, with writing a book in this way, is that it will end up a jumbled mess of conflicting perspectives. Luckily, it feels cohesive in terms of authorial voice, as in the writing feels like its coming from a single, unified voice, rather than 14 of them. But as part of the writing process, he had everyone in the class develop a character, and they built the plot around that. That's probably a pretty good strategy, but having 14 people all develop characters for a novel that's ultimately 300-something pages means it's absolutely overstuffed with characters. I simply could not keep track of who they all were or why I should care. Funny enough this characteristic is similar to the writing habits of Thomas Pynchon whose V. I just read (soon to be the subject of its own post, probably) but I think Pynchon makes it work partially because he ties his characters so strongly to his many intersecting plot lines. So even if I can't remember the details and names of all the characters, I can have an idea of each plot line and the the types of characters contained in them. Caverns has an incredibly simple plotline, combine that with numerous characters, and it makes for, well, a jumbled mess.

The story is that a guy who just got let out of prison is leading a group of journalists, priests, hippies, youths, and Mormons to a cavern whose cave paintings would redefine human history. Well, they all pile into a bus to pursue it and a great deal of the book takes the form of a road trip. Kesey is famous for his own "tripping" ventures, as he had a bus called Further he brought his "merry pranksters" along in, taking acid and helping to invent the Grateful Dead or something something.

This is the side of Kesey I'm far less interested in, to be honest. Part of what amazes me about Cuckoo's Nest and Great Notion is the fascinating contrast between his intelligent, literary prose and his ur-hippie lifestyle. In Caverns these two elements feel intermingled, but it's 1990 and him and his students are imagining a much lamer version of the Merry Pranksters.

That said, it is a relatively successful experiment even if there is plenty to critique. Co-writing a book with 13 other people is a tremendous feat, and this was quite the boon for aspiring writer grad students, I'm sure. Mostly, the book serves as testament to what an exciting teacher Kesey must have been, but little more.

Some Early Lubitsch

Lubitsch is the saucy, sophisticated director that is a favorite among film academics. I think that's because his films, like Trouble in Paradise and The Shop Around the Corner display all the strengths of classical Hollywood, along with a sort-of playful intellectual edge. He's the perfect director for those tired of overly serious arthouse and those tired of impersonal studio system fare.

But his early work tends to remain illusory. Lubtisch began his career in Germany, as a comedic actor, and then as a serious director. The Doll is the film people tend to watch as a representation of this era, and that's really a tremendous film, containing much of what we think of as Lubitschness. The films that precede Doll are a good deal different from what we think of as his style. The theater I manage, the Dryden, has recently played a few of these early films and I've got to see a fair bit of them.

We played The Pride of the Firm (1914) and When I Was Dead (1916) as a double feature, both which feature him as a lead actor, but only one of which was directed by him. It's surprising to see the acting he must have been known for in the 1910s, as he really hams it up. He's emphasizing his rubbery in a face which I couldn't help but think of as the 10s equivalent of Jim Carey. Sorry. The film that he directed, When I Was Dead (also called Where is My Treasure? sometimes, but that’s an awful title!) is actually good fun. It's the ole plot of faking your own death and then spying on your everyone to see what they say about you. It's pretty silly, frivolous stuff, but fun to see him doing straight up slapstick.

Madame DuBarry (1919) is one of a few big historical spectacle films he did in the, alongside the like of The Loves of Pharoah. Dubarry is about the French revolution, and centers around the real historical figure of Jeanne Bécu. She was a prostitute who entangled herself in the lives and the politics of major figures in France pre-revolution. In the film she's depicted as a tragic woman who is representative of both the indulgence of the French aristocracy and their persecution during the terrors. The film naturally ends with a guillotine sequence, which is definitely the most well-done bit. Overall, the film comes across as pretty dry and generic and pales in comparison to other silent epics depicting the French revolution, such as Orphans of the Storm (1921) (which I highly recommend). But it's pretty mind boggling to think that Lubitsch, the pervert-sophisticate himself, would have been known for such films.

Lubitsch moved over to Hollywood in 1922, and he made two wonderful films in 1924, Forbidden Paradise, which combines the costume drama with his humor and whimsy, and The Marriage Circle which is a love triangle plot on steroids, more of a love quadrangle, really. I only saw bits of those films (I had work to do) so I can't speak about them at length--but both were pretty wonderful and are worth checking out.

Bruno Schulz

A project that I intended to be a smaller, quicker thing is my video about The Hourglass Santorium (1973). This is a 70s Polish surrealist film that I hold near and dear to my heart. I first saw it back in 2018 and loved its kaleidoscopic, dreamy imagery even though I had not a clue what to make of it. Over the past few years I gathered that it was based on the fiction of Bruno Schulz, who is a favorite-author's-favorite-author kind of guy. So for the past few years I wanted to get my hands on a copy of his work. I recently read through the Penguin collection of his short stories, and revisited the film, in anticipation of the video I wanted to make.

The writing is curious and strange, but after I started doing more digging around the history of the film and the books, things started to click into place. I'm excited to finish that video soon enough, but while I'm talking about Schulz here, I wanted to emphasize how great his writing is.

"The cats were even further removed from the light. Their perfection was frightening. Enclosed in the precision and efficiency of their bodies, they did not know either fault or deviation. They would descend for a moment into the depths of their being, then becoming immobile within their soft fur, solemnly and threateningly serious, while their eyes became round like moons, sucking the visible into their fiery craters. But a moment later, thrown back to the surface, they would yawn away their vacuity, disenchanted and without illusions. In their lives full of self-sufficient grace, there was no place for any alternative. Bored by this prison of perfection, seized with spleen, they spat with their wrinkled lips, while their broad, striped faces expressed an abstract cruelty."

Pretty incredible stuff, using the cat as a launching off point for a wide-ranging discussion on such fundamental things in life as perfection feeling like a prison and the cycle of introspection and venturing outside of your private world. You can imagine he has numerous such wonderful passages. I highly recommend the Penguin edition of The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories I'll be talking about Schulz a good deal more soon enough, though...

The film is based on an oral legend which is thought to have been developed around the first centuries AD. The film attempts near-total accuracy with its production design, costumes, and depiction of regional customs. We see people build igloos. We see them eat raw seal meat. And there are even mysterious shaman characters.

The fact that this is based on an oral legend and that its trying to adapt it faithfully naturally means a whole lot of it is going to go right over the average viewers head. And I am the average viewer! So I was in a state of awe, confusion, and fascination for nearly the whole runtime. Luckily, though, the plot is pretty linear. The narrative involves intertangled romantic situations which eventually result in the main character, Atanarjuat fleeing his hometown of Igloolik. He eventually comes back and has a big confrontation with those who crossed him. The moment where he runs away from his persecutors while naked is perhaps the film’s most iconic scene. The combination of nudity and a barren landscape lends itself to feeling truly surreal.

The plot’s simple enough, but there's so much texture and depth here that I really only felt like I was skimming the surface when I was watching the film. It is especially hard to interpret scenes involving shamanistic practices. But this only makes the whole thing more intriguing. It can be nice to feel a bit lost, to not know what all the practices or the cultural significant actions mean. Apparently, the shamanistic stuff was a struggle for many working on the film too, as the vast majority of the Inuit are now Christian including the cast and crew of the film. A student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bernard Saladin D'Anglure helped with consultation on the film, and he relied on historical research to try and make the depictions of shamanistic practices accurate. This research was based mostly on the European historical accounts of the practices, but luckily there was also screenwriter Paul Apak Angilirq who took up interviewing elders to ask them about the pre-colonial religious beliefs as well as social practices.

Of particular interest to me, though, is the fact that the ending is altered from the original myth. In the original story, Atanarjuat comes back and kills the men who chased him out of the village in an act of cathartic vengeance. The film ends with Atanarjuat establishing his dominance, but insisting that the bad blood be forgiven and that they all move on. Kunuk has said that it is likely the influence of Christianity that made ending the story with forgiveness feel more right.

The performances all feel very non-professional, which I mean as a compliment. The actors are quite natural in how they interact with one another, and the fact that they are totally immersed in their environment makes a huge difference.

The filmmaking itself is very Herzogian. And I don't mean that because of the Indigenous cast, but because of the camerawork. The camera itself is a prosumer digital camera, giving the impression of documentary-like realism. But the way the camera hovers, moves around a scene, creates uncanny close-ups... It really evokes all the best qualities of Werner Herzog's work.

The film came out in 2001 and was apparently a huge hit in Canada. A fact that makes me joyous to no end. It's completely worth checking out, I loved everything about it and I'm shocked I only heard about it for the first time less than a month ago! Maybe this has become standard viewing in anthropology classes or something, which might keep its reputation in the margins, in a certain way. But it really is a tremendous work of art. Zacharias Kunuk, the film's director, has gone on to make many more films, most of which seem to receive very little attention... But I'm eager to check out more of his work.

Ultimately, the only thing I can compare the experience of watching it to is the Malian classic, Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen. Yeelen is the only other film I’ve seen or heard of that seems to have been directly adapted from oral legend. Of course, many of humanity’s favorite stories began as oral legends, but oftentimes a film will be depicting a literary account of that legend, not adapting the oral legend itself. Specifically, in the case of Yeelen is based on “the 13th-century legend about Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Malian empire.” Yeelen also captures pre-colonial (in this case, pre-Muslim) religious practices, as it depicts people with magical powers battling, which are often referred to in descriptions of the film as “wizards” though I imagine could also be referred to as “shamans”.

The fact that its based on an oral legend and that it tries to accurately recreate pre-colonial religious practices makes the experience quite similar to that of Atanarjuat. It’s of course easy to say that you’re not the intended audience, which is true enough, but the only audience which would probably fully comprehend Yeelen is Malians from the 1200s and in the case of Atanarjuat, Inuits from the first millennium… But there’s another similarity between these two films. They are iconic within the niche confines of arthouse film history, but the respective directors’ other works often remain unexplored. Which makes it possible that these remarkable films might be reduced to anthropological curios, rather than exemplary works by great cinematic artists.

I wrote another piece for FilmObsessive. This one takes a look at a filmmaker and a movement that are primarily known through, and associated with, YouTube. This might seem a bit strange, as I mostly focus on film history in my writing, but in the process of writing about and digging into so-called “Backyard Movies” I came across “Folk Filmmaking”, which is a movement of microbudget filmmakers who choose to put their work up online for free.

Joel Haver’s the big name in this movement, and he pursued a unique project in 2024 where he made 12 movies in 12 months. This a preposterous concept, but he truly, actually pulled it off. In this essay for FilmObsessive, I dive into all 12 of these films. You can check it out here.

Haver’s been a bit of an obsession for me, and you can expect me to make a guide to his filmography soon enough, over on my YouTube channel.

I’ve been falling behind on my one-post-per-week pace on this blog during April, mostly due to more of my time being taken up by helping with the organizing of the upcoming Nitrate Picture Show, and my novel (working title: A Work of Mad Discord), but I think I’ll be able to get back on pace soon enough. Stay tuned for some incoming rambling on Inuit cinema, Stanely Kubrick, and Polish Surrealism.