I always thought it was a dumb question to ask people what animal they would want to be in another life. And I thought it was even stupider when people wanted to be anything other than a human again if given the choice. But now, I wouldn’t be too mad if I was reincarnated as a jellyfish. I could see myself enjoying life as a transparent, immortal, hermaphrodite blob. I don’t know if jellyfish enjoy things. I don’t feel like learning that much about them, but they seem interesting. I’m positive a plethora of bad articles already exists about how they’re the perfect creature that are far superior to humans because they just go with the flow or something. I’m not going to paraphrase their life cycle because I don’t feel like learning about it that deeply nor do I have anything insightful to say about it. It’s just cool and I’d give it a try.
At the pool today, I heard a woman’s voice singing opera from over the fence. A jellyfish couldn’t have heard that. It felt almost surreal to hear this beautiful, faceless voice when no one else was around to hear it with me. Before it really registered, my brain was already contemplating how I could climb onto the gazebo roof to see who it was, or I could at least try peeking over the fence. I just stood up in the water and listened before returning to my laps.
I used to be scared of swimming alone for fear of a shark spontaneously appearing in the pool and then proceeding to eat me. Maybe it was because of Finding Nemo and that chase scene through the naval mines. But whenever my brother would get out of the pool, I’d get out too a couple minutes behind him. I was scared of sharks and vampires and the dark for the longest time. I was reading an illustrated children’s copy of Dracula I had gotten from the library and there was this terrifying vampire woman with a pale blue face that took up an entire page, so I made myself kiss it as a way to conquer my fear. I still turned around whenever I was in front of the mirror though.
I don’t know how old I was, but as a kid, I made myself a time capsule. On the bottom of the wooden box, I wrote to only open it on my birthday in the year 2030. I wrote it in pen. I remember I forgot to paint one side of the lid. It bothered me for a long time whenever I’d see it because I always meant to go back and fix it. The only thing I actually remember putting in there was a small article about polyps, like an actual small piece of paper. It might’ve been one of those informational cards you could tear out of a kid’s science magazine. My aunt got my me and my brother a subscription to Ranger Rick for Christmas one year, I believe. I don’t think that’s where it came from actually. And maybe I put a small stuffed animal in there too. It wasn’t a very big box.
For the first time in forever, it feels like I am not writing for anyone.
The most important director of the last century died on this day one year ago. In very French fashion, he was relieved by assisted suicide around the same time that I ended up going to sleep early that morning. The day after was a Wednesday, meaning I had to wake up earlier than usual for my directed study meeting with Todd. He usually kicked me out ten minutes before the hour, so he could gather his notes before History of Video Art at 11 (which I was also in). I’m waiting on a bench in the middle of the hallway before class starts in room 356. Todd comes out of his office around the corner and tells me Godard had just died. It really is difficult—just as a mental exercise—to conceive of such a monumental figure no longer living: a man who was still making films as an octogenarian. But, I didn’t cry; I didn’t know him. It’s odd to think about it. The most important mentor in my academic and artistic life was now informing me that the greatest influence on my passion for cinema had just died. Godard was next to his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, the woman who collaborated with him for decades, and partly responsible for him adopting a more matured, experimental, and feminist edge that is not as pronounced in his New Wave canon. I don’t think you can ask for a greater death. He was tired and had nothing left to say, so he left: no funeral, no body but the unrivaled body of work he left.
Last September was a good time for me. I had just started working my first real job, I was watching great movies, and the 26th is probably still the best day of my life. A year ago, I felt on top of the world. I was confident, committed to not taking shit, and ruthlessly dedicated to my studies in a final semester with an absolutely stacked course lineup. Right now, I’m not doing so awesome, but I’m still good. I believe I may have developed a sort of litmus test to see how I’m faring mentally at any given time, but it can’t be employed too often or it won’t have an effect. It’s an old poem I wrote. It was selected to be included in a book of other students’ poetry, so every time I find this book and remember I have it, I open it to page 158 and read it a few times. (I’m able to remember the number because Cartoon Network was channel 58 on Bright House.) And so, two years before last year, I was in my old bedroom, I took A Celebration of Poets off the shelf, opened it, and I broke down. “How have I gotten to this point?” This gay little poem from the mind of a nine-year old made me cry.
I used to be ashamed when I was younger that a stupid poem I had written about rainbows in a fourth grade writing workshop was the one that my teachers thought was worthy of publication. I would’ve told you I had better. But now, how could I be ashamed of myself at all? I was a little kid. I wrote only what came to mind. I am proud of it. (Although, reading the one below mine kinda puts my poem to shame a little bit, haha.) I couldn’t believe how much it impacted me. It’s one of the finest things I’ve ever written or read; I wasn’t trying at all, and after 11 years, I remembered how honest I could be. But at that point, what did any of us know about love or loneliness or metaphor? Absolutely nothing.
So, every once in a while, when I take the time to read it, it means something completely different to me. When I read it now, I smile to myself and remember all the rainbows that have came and went. Sometimes I weigh the options to myself about the best thing I’ve ever written and I think the running joke I’ve always made turned out to be true. Maybe I did peak in elementary school.
See for yourself.
Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings. RIP le Fou (1930-2022)
Three tapes, 60 minutes each. That’s all we had going into this trip. I’m sure you can see, as time passes onscreen, how we interacted with and staged time differently as illustrated in the changing relationships between the images from tape to tape. In my mind, I was always going to go back and cut out “bad” takes or repetitive imagery to create a better rhythm—something that would feel more intentional, more elevated or artistic to whoever happened to watch. When I got back home and I ran back all three tapes and converted them from analog to digital, I did not want to cut anything out. (Although not a clear-cut conversion outright, since Digital8 is already itself an odd hybrid of analog 8mm recording mechanisms plus a digital encoding codec in order to write the image-sound signals to guarantee clearer results for both, and therefore, allowing “digital images to be recorded on . . . tape.”) I realized something so obvious when I was marveling at the flow of images and each of our competing and complimenting approaches to moving image form on my first playback through these events I had just lived. Everything we did was intentional. If that red button was pressed, even by accident, it nonetheless created an impression (rather than an index) of our living and goings-on in Tampa, on the train, in Philadelphia, in New York, and then back again.
Surely, I could have crafted a tighter narrative, centered on any number of things, and certainly that was my goal at first: the best candidate for a singular protagonist being Matthew with the most definable arc, or more explicitly paralleling or reframing juxtapositions between all three cities, or adding the guiding voice of god through narration or subtitles, or whatever. From there, I could have whittled down what we had shot, but the in-camera feel would have been lost. Although I was often shooting, and reshooting, with the after-the-fact edit in mind, in which I would pick which of the two shots of the same thing were better, I instead opted to keep in both. It is important that each tape can hold around 60 minutes because that is what we knew from the beginning we had to work with. Digital8 processes only give you, as we found out, a little over an hour of allotted time to record on a 120-minute 8mm videotape. So, although I was thinking of the edit (both cutting out “bad” takes on my computer and the in-camera question of how the previously recorded shot would line up with the one I was looking at through the viewfinder), it was still all up to the camera. I am wholly subservient to it. I surrender to the image cult in my rejection of further endless digital manipulation at the hands of my hands relying on Premiere Pro. The result was only to be revealed to me once I was back home alone.
With her idea of the “possessive spectator,” Laura Mulvey in Death 24x a Second, essentially argues (and I agree, albeit less inclined toward the psychoanalytic), digital cinema and its associated systems of perpetually evolving sign exchange and spectatorship enhance, make more convenient the desire for “cinematic repetition compulsion.” With nonlinear video editing software and chapters on DVD/Blu-ray menus and the easily accessible array of other electronic aids, the digital viewer—often alone, or at least in the shared isolation of their homes—can manipulate the sequencing, speed, or any number of adjustable settings and sliders of varying technical complexities if they only learn how. Now, I do not think this kind of digital spectatorship is a bad thing, I cannot stand (most of) that old-timey scholarly fearmongering over digital cinema with no credit given to its innovation and unique aesthetic capabilities. I stand in stark opposition to that line of thinking. However, her model for a more thoughtful, “pensive” form of spectatorship—one more acutely aware of time and what is past and the stillness of the image that digital technologies now reveal as always beneath the rush of images with the press of a button—would be welcome simply for the fact that it is different and new and it is about time we had something different and new. Or maybe, I actually don’t agree. The possessive is no less new, and better yet, it is already here. Why are we trying to legitimate the digital by means of the index? If digital video is more akin to a “sub-genre of painting,” why are we still clinging to the old rules of legitimation? Be possessive, be fetishistic, join the winning side of objects over subjects, that is, images.
On the one hand, yes, I am lazy and wanted to get this project done and over with minimal effort, so I could focus on others that will require a greater deal of my time and energy, but also the idea of having a project that relied on in-camera editing was recently planted in my head by my old professor; this set of tapes was the perfect candidate. Plus, I think it’s funny to completely eschew the ethos of meticulous planning that often comes with working in-camera, generally a film camera. Ironically, cameras with digital capabilities presented a less costly and mentally exhausting alternative industrial model to filmmakers who were burning money whenever film was rolling, making the once necessitated economics of the in-camera model largely obsolete for penny pinching purposes. We just did it anyway, playing with an outmoded form on an outmoded camera that contributed to outmoding the very style I adopted for our tapes.
Yet, I feel editing in this sense seems too active a verb, which also highlights my concern with the term moviemaker or the more refined, academic alternative, imagemaker. We don’t make images or bring them about, we have no control over them. We can manipulate them to our will, but we live in a world comprised almost entirely of images, and they do not care about us. We did not create the image of the image in our image, but our image in the image of the image. And so, I have felt for some time it is more accurate to describe such a profession or passion as imagefinding, its devotees, imagefinders—like the camera: viewfinder. I have no control over the camera, so I relinquish the imagined power I hold over it in the final cut. Let it be. The digital hailed as democratizing is too much about control. I do not handle a camcorder because of “nostalgic vibes,” but for this reason. It may seem sloppy or amateurish, but I think it is much more beneficial to the viewer to see it as is—to see the readjustment mid-shot after clearly whoever was behind the camera had a lightbulb moment they wanted to test out, or they try a couple times to get a shot, but it doesn’t quite turn out, the camera button might have gotten stuck and the shot lasted too long, the composition that looked good with the naked eye just didn’t translate well, etc.
Instead of curating the frames (by conjuring up an overarching story or removing filler or editing according to any thematic), I made it about the lack, the refusal to trim the excess, precisely because none of it is. We all contributed to its organization and submitted ourselves to the object-apparatus, so why would I get to choose what passes the final say after the fact? When you edit in-camera on the street, whether shooting on Super8 film or 8mm videotape, you know you have this much space to fill over this much time. And that’s it. We filled that space with little room for much else. For seven days, we were only thinking in minutes and seconds.
Realistically, this movie is not gonna be done before I leave, and it might never be completed at all. Two nights ago, we got to the Theatre Centre after sunset, ready for a night of getting down to business, and the door to the room was locked—both of them. It looks like they caught on to what we were doing or starting actually taking precaution due to the recent arrival of the summer session freshman. Classes are back in order, and we are running out of time. Now, we can’t shoot during the day and if the doors are locked at night, we’re screwed. I really do not like that a part of me was relieved to learn that we may never be able to get back in there and get the job done. Something about avoiding embarrassment or failing to meet (my own) expectations? I don’t know, but I am still determined to finish it. I’ll go back tomorrow to check the doors and see if there’s anything at all that I can do. Yet, we did not pack up and go home that easily.
We took the bus back to my room to get a few things, then got on another to go right back. On Saturday night (early Sunday morning), we had another idea—a much less costly, shorter form idea, the kind that could be done in one night. And so, in the bathroom of that same building that is trying to evict our guerrilla-style presence, where we house our props and equipment in a locker after every shoot, we got right back to work on something new. It involved me covered in the remains of my Publix Deli smoked ribs dinner and the fake blood I had already purchased for Dark Chamber, wearing nothing but my white Party City mask and my underwear.
While setting up and recording, it was touch-and-go for a while there. It was Monday, so faculty were still in the building. We’d hear voices or footsteps and scramble to hide, which would’ve done absolutely zero good because we had my clothes and the contents of my backpack strewn everywhere as set dressing. At one point, we waited silently in complete darkness for about 25 minutes to make sure no one would stumble upon us, resuming again at midnight. My hands and arms were still covered in bits of meat and fake blood that I didn’t want to wash off just to put back on again, and I’m still wearing nothing but tighty-whities. The shot had to be one continuous take with the only light source a flashlight, so it took some effort to get everything to fall into place, enough for us to be satisfied.
Maybe about two hours later, when we had finally got the take that we were happy with, as I’m scrubbing the shower floor to remove any trace of the stinking meat and blood, a janitor walks in. I just drew a diagram of the bathroom, which I’ll include, just to highlight how lucky it was that I happened to be in the shower with the water running. He was startled first by my friend standing by the sinks, and hearing the water running, did not venture toward the showers or the toilets. He cleaned the sinks only, then left. I never saw him. If he would’ve just peaked his head around the corner, he would’ve seen a box of bones and the start of a blood trail that I was working backward to expunge. My friend came over and told me we were no longer alone, so I asked him to go bring me someone’s body wash from an open locker to make it look like I was really showering. He left soon after. I couldn’t stop laughing at how incredibly dumbfounded this poor guy must have felt to walk into a bathroom that reeks of hours-old meat in the middle of the night. Aside from the eyewitness, we erased our shenanigans from the walls and floors as best and as quickly as we could. I shoved my stuff back in my bag, closed up the rest in our locker, put on a bathrobe over my soaked underwear, and we skated home. I edited the video yesterday and it’s basically finished, aside from whatever final adjustments we feel we need to make before publishing it. I’m no Fellini (in fact, I think I prefer Antonioni as my go-to Italian auteur), but the eight-and-a-halfth night of production was surely a surreal one—can’t be too mad at that.
I finally got my phone again, so I can finally go ahead and transcribe the eighth production note. The eighth day of production took place on July 2 and the following paragraph was recorded the next morning on my phone at work.
There is so much going on that it’s hard to stay focused: keeping up with new friends, quitting my job (last day this Thursday), putting in my 30-day notice, editing solo video projects, a big empty room with a piano and our two skateboards leads to all kinds of distractions. We got three more shots, I think only ever having to do a maximum of three-and-a-half takes for the second. We should’ve shot more, but I didn’t realize that we should’ve kept going until after we had already packed up everything. My mistake, should’ve checked the shot list one more time. We’ve been on a bit of a time crunch because I leave at the end of July. We reconvene this weekend. (Unfortunately, we will actually not be getting back to production this weekend.) My last day is the sixth, so I’ll be free to work on shit that actually matters to me. When I’m not consolidating and packing and getting rid of, I’ll be shooting, editing, uploading.
One unforeseen challenge now though is the door to a back closet that houses some props we were gonna borrow is now locked for the first time since we’ve begun moonlighting in this dance studio. I think I have to start being a dictator if we’re gonna finish this on time. I always drag my feet. I envy people who just create shit, it all just comes pouring out. I think too much, man. The idea will come practically fully formed, like “Kubla Khan” did to Coleridge after an opium-induced dream, but I hesitate in the execution. The idea is there, but I get stage fright. What if I’m not as good as I think I am? What if no one gets it? What an ass I would seem to be so confident in myself and my work if it was only mediocre or above average at best. But “Kubla Khan” is one of the greatest Romantic poems of all time precisely because it is unfinished. Only the first fragments of sporadic genial affliction could be captured to paper before the rest was lost in a flurry of hazy memory and unwelcome intruders. Coleridge is my favorite poet precisely because he was not as great, or heralded, or confident as Wordsworth, and he knew it. A man who felt he always had to overexplain his own perceived shortcomings before anyone else could humiliate him with them (see his preface to “Kubla Khan”). That fear of humiliation and rejection lie most of all with rock and roll’s last poet laureate, Kurt Cobain. We don’t want to be the greatest, we just want to be someone’s favorite, and preferably live to see it.
III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
Won’t you please let me go? These words lie inside, they hurt me so And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you Just what I want to do I’m not the kind that needs to tell you Just what you want me to
I saw you this morning I thought that you might like to know I received your message in full a few days ago I understood every word that it said And now that I’ve actually heard it You’re going to regret And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you Just what you want me to You’re not the kind that needs to tell me About the birds and the bees
Do you find this happens all the time? Crucial point one day becomes a crime And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you Just what I want to do I’m not the kind that needs to tell you, ooh
Lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you Lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you Lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you
The above lyrics are taken from this wonderful piece of songwriting from one of my favorite musical groups at the moment. The italics are mine, to distinguish between the two distinct timbres of Bernard Sumner’s singing, to be addressed momentarily.
I am living by a new rule where I stop giving a shit about people who don’t give a shit about me to combat the creeping exhaustion I feel (emotionally, physically). I invest too much in other people’s shit: fix your own problems! leave me be! I am in the midst of a great uprooting: my 30-day notice signaling the end of my rental agreement at the end of this month, my two-week notice marks my exit from my job with my last day being tomorrow, I have way too many projects going on right now: an essay/collection of related essays/book I wanna start researching/outlining/writing, two short-form videos both started but not finished, a public art experiment, my short movie, an impromptu feature-length movie of sorts that needs to be stitched together, and I have no phone—it’s at a new friend’s house (I have been spending a considerable amount of time with her because I enjoy her company and conversation, it’s hard for me to find people I actually find funny and charming and worthy of respect) and I don’t have transportation or time to go get it (not that I particularly need it; wait, yes I kinda do, I gotta call my grandma to tell her I plan on taking her up on her offer to live at her house for the remainder of the summer), so day three without a phone begins tomorrow. No matter.
I was reminded of someone who was at the foreground of my mind some months ago (go back and see for yourself) today. I had been sticking to my new rule, but today was such a good day, although I can think of absolutely no particularly discernible reason why, so after I walked home from the bus stop in the rain, I decided to perform a dreaded check-in—a 21st-century digital phenomena wherein a rejected party masochistically, and therefore, often routinely, keeps tabs on the person(s) who have turned them away. It has been about two months probably since I told myself to finally cut that shit out, and in my stubborn resolve, I stuck to it rigidly and absolutely. It was this person too that came to mind when I listened to the first song off my first playthrough of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies (May 26th). As I kept returning to the song in the following days and weeks, the two intonations of the vocals struck a chord within me. Now, the more I mull it over, the more I think this is such an obtuse observation, but I see the two timbres—one high and strained, one low and tired—as a man and a woman, the complementing objects of the song. But, they are not having a conversation. Each of their respective verses like a telegraph through time to the other, not even certain if the other will hear it, let alone respond—sent out into the ether to be picked up, only if they happen to stumble on the right digital crater, that is, if the breadcrumbs were followed correctly. It’s a game, simple sign exchange, word=play, and the best part, you don’t even know if they’re even playing at all.
Yet, what I am also just now realizing is the vocalizations at the end of the song are sung in the higher-pitched voice. Across space-time, the response of his lover is lost, made blurred and indistinct by the distance, “further all the time.” Curtis’s choice of further instead of farther denotes the distance as a metaphorical one, bridged by a technological (in)capability that compresses physical space into modulated waves, a relationship of re-/delayed mediation.1 Stretched too thin. Are they cries? shouts? elation? guilt? anger? or symbolic of everything left unsaid? An understanding, yes.
Oh, and so what did I find on this walk through the museum gallery of the digital Other? Words that I take as written only for me. They found me and plucked all the same chords, so they are only for me. And once more, their words inspired me to action, stirred an idea that had been brewing internally, now poured out into the ether. Read my thoughts. Who knows if I’ll get back to you—when? Two months later, my bad idea got its proper conclusion after only two weeks, as it turned out, unbeknownst to me. You see, it was after my message was received in full that I made my rule to get my shit together. I knew it wasn’t a bad idea: it was absolutely necessary.
The beauty of the excruciating situation of the song and the events recalled to me tonight? None of it was meant for me. It means absolutely nothing. The song can be interpreted according to any number of readings, as one voice or two or entirely otherwise, all at once. The message I found carefully framed on the wall could be about me or anyone else. How brilliant! You write poetry, I write nonsense. I feel so much better. It’s not even a question.
You sly dog, you do think about me! Did you check in?! I’m calling it there, that’s what I’m telling myself. Look how much fun this is. It is beautiful.
Hello?
Do you read me?
Huh, guess no one’s home.
Note
The alternative meaning of further as adjective (i.e., moreover, furthermore) not shared by farther manifests that the “touching” is happening “all the time” precisely because of the “distance”—the constant contiguity of techno-mediation. It’s just digital screens instead of analog radios.
Holy shit, another long take, how crazy!!! Looks like someone’s read Bazin 😂🤣😂🤣😂 I swear (to no one in particular) the long takes are purposeful. (Of course, they are, why would I make it harder for us when I could just cut the shit out of space, time, and their image?) We finally recorded the first two shots of the second part two nights ago. That was I had planned for that night since I had work in the morning and we got there around sunset already. After that, it devolved into absolute lunacy—the best kind. The Theatre Centre we’ve been sneaking into thanks to a pebble lodged in an exit door was completely empty. We stayed pretty focused while shooting, but we went buck wild when we got what we needed.
I am a big proponent of as-few-takes-as-possible and just letting the camera roll and going for it, seeing what we can pick up. The next production date—whenever that may be—will be an easy one to execute. The only challenge was getting the first shot right, coming through the door into the new space. I tried different ways of falling through but none of it looked good on camera, looking not very believable or just downright funny—not very scary. I set up mats so I was actually able to trip myself for real when I walked through, but no good. It took several takes and different approaches to my entrance, but the fall had to be scrapped. Hard to fall through a door that opens outward, after all.
I have been thinking it would be fun to go back and look at some of my old essays I submitted for school. The purpose is to fix up some of these texts and/or to expand some into more lengthy, thoughtful projects with better direction and scope, now that I have graduated and can do whatever I want really. Plus, I need to start building some kind of public “portfolio” to prove to some imaginary prospective future employerthat I actually do, in fact, write with a relative amount of competency. Also, I felt that this essay could serve as a bit of a companion piece to the video I just finished, and while they don’t necessarily go together, I am picking up on many of the same threads that were on my mind at the time I was writing (December 10, 2022).
The following essay was the last piece of writing I ever submitted in my three-and-a-half years at my undergraduate program within the Film and New Media Studies department. This essay was my final contribution to my time in college and the cherry on top of a one-on-one directed study with a professor of mine who came to be a trusted cinephile-mentor over the years, an advocate for my writing, and a good friend. The semester prior I had completed my “final” project for my Humanities Seminar, a paper almost twice as long as the one I am about to reproduce and horrifyingly bland and academic when I went back to reread it. I can only describe this piece as my reaction against that style of writing.
Although much of the layout/form of the writing/images that I messed around with on the original Word document will be changed due to the alien nature of the blog format, I think the message should not be too harmed; however, I would recommend whoever happens to find themselves reading this here now, that you take the time to at least watch Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Ichi the Killer (2001, Takashi Miike), and Demonlover (2002, Olivier Assayas), as they will all be discussed, or perhaps don’t, that in and of itself could offer a fun, alternate reading. So, here is maybe the best thing I have ever written, over a feverish few days.
When cinema “ended” it had already been the end of history. It just had not caught up yet until the digital exposed what was already apparent: film, as the everlasting, pure cinematic medium, was a fantasy no longer tenable. Years after the fact, I have caught up too. It is the end of my last semester. What comes next? As I see it, the end of history and the digital merged aesthetically onto a cinematic formulation that mirrors what Hito Steyerl calls the “groundlessness” of the present (13). The simulations of the postmodern were imbedded into the cinema. Capital, as much as gravity, pulls us back to Earth again. Inertia is a historical process. Falling,
Falling, ever faster. If there is no end,
can it be disaster?
In her thought experiment, Steyerl characterizes the inability to rally behind progressive metanarratives or offer foundational truth claims as free fall—the feeling of disorienting weightlessness that comes with falling (13). Only there is no ground. One falls ostensibly forever, having forgotten the time before when they were not. As a result of the shattered horizon—shattered in its linear form and shattered, as in, realized to be a manmade fiction—of the present and the digital revolution, aerial perspective has been the dominant way of looking (14).
Postmodern simulation dominated mainstream cinema around the dawn of the new millennium, when the digital revolution, already in progress for decades, was going global. This fin-de-siècle cinema thematized the growing digital neoliberalization of the planet, equally paranoid as enthusiastic. The exciting, untapped relations to new media technologies and processes found its way not only into the diegetic realm but into the films’ form as well. The previously privileged analog truth of film was increasingly overwritten with computer-generated effects, digital nonlinear editing systems, digitized negatives, and of course, the digital video camera (Rodowick 6-8).
In the decade or so surrounding the new millenium era (let us say, 1996-2004), several moving image texts were tapped into the precarity of the digital revolution: that is, what would become of the cinema? The image is changing, digital video patrols the skies unseen. The relation between viewer and viewer as well, that which constructs the view and those who view it. The digital underscored the groundlessness of film as a medium, challenging notions of indexicality and reality in their anxiety about evolving new media technologies.
Linear perspective is spatial relation that makes the image navigable; however, there is also the notion of linear time that it introduces, as its spatial construction allows the “calculation of future risk” (Steyerl 18). Predictable linear time is modernist in its ideation of linear historical progress: “The future might be a ways away, but it is inevitable.” In order for these calculations and narrative constructions to exist, the horizon must be imagined as stable. The index, the human, the medium. Cinema takes its core language from painting, so it would not be a stretch to map linear perspective onto film, as also evidenced by the film strip’s material (linear) composition, in opposition to digital video’s free fall perspective. Linear perspective is built around one eye looking in space, the cyclopic lens of film maintains this linearity. With the digital, a lens may not even need be present.
Vertical perspective, similar to linear perspective’s construction of grounded spectator and stable horizon, creates floating spectator and stable ground. This aerial view reflects the distancing effect of “surveillance technology and screen-based distractions” (Steyerl 24). To be above is no longer to escape. God is not in His heaven—the cinema is—and all is not right with the world. I have spent time wondering what draws me to this period, only ever able to come up with the lackluster post hoc excuse of time travel: to return to birth, where it all began in 2001 with a pulse.
And so, I am just as much concerned with beginnings as I am with endings. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, vertical perspective spells the end. After two hours of digital ghosts moving between digitality and reality, the gaze itself becomes equally disembodied and haunting, perhaps even more so. The final shot is an aerial shot, no different than one found on Google Earth really, or a video feed from a drone—that is, until we are shut out. Kurosawa turns the TV off, defeated. The last image before the screen goes black is a sad little ship in a deep blue sea. Realizing cinema, which extended the “detached observant gaze” from photography, was, of course, going to become only more elaborate in this respect (Steyerl 24). Even when the world has ended, verticality ensures that it will be rebuilt in exactly the same dysfunctional image. The digital captures “the world as a picture,” as Steyerl points out in How Not to Be Seen. Maybe the apocalypse was the digital, but the digital is the only thing that can survive to witness it. Nuclear winter.
The final shot freezes in time before the camera zooms out (or the image sinks into void), only then does Kurosawa switch it off. The freeze frame is the dying breath of the filmic trying to reassert itself at the dawn of the digital century, but the screen zooms, the freeze frame itself a frame within a frame of the digital before the image is turned off remotely. But as I watch this scene over and over, this photographic gesture is never actually a still image: “its ontological structure is of a constantly shifting or self-refreshing display”—subverted once more, this time by the digitality of my computer monitor (Rodowick 138). The closing song over the credits, “~lay down my arms~,” signals Kurosawa’s admitted defeat before his name fades to black. “Now, alone with my last friend in the world, I have found happiness.” Michi, the woman from the frame narrative, tells us this revelation as Kawashima dissolves into digital particles. Her last friend is no longer there, but she still acknowledges his spectral outline on the wall. A ghost: half-present, half-absent. A new kind of indexicality? This might as well be Kurosawa talking through the screen. Having come to terms with the false fantasy of cinema as a distinct medium with its own essence, Kurosawa embraces the uncertainty, although quite reluctantly and only at the signs of inevitability, admitting that it’s “not coming back,” “there’s nothing left now.” The ghost of Kawashima, the digital particles resist gravitational pull, and in the next shot, he becomes vertical perspective himself.
“Pilots have even reported that free fall can trigger a feeling of confusion between the self and the aircraft” (Steyerl 13). The cybernetic conjunction of man and machine was exacerbated even further by the automatic qualities of video compared to film: instantaneous playback, on-site improvisational synthetization, its grab-and-go consumer appeal. Pulse highlights confusion of person and digital image machines, where the machinic component of the cybernesis has subsumed the human element. The end occurring on a boat is of importance here as well. Boats once relied on the horizon for navigation. Now maritime navigation is subservient to aerial. The camera floats above the imagined stability of the observer on a boat’s deck. This aerial perspective gives no information, makes nothing visible that was already otherwise so. The move upward of the camera extends the walls of the frame, the ship forever trapped in the middle of the sea during the apocalypse, the ship to be seen constantly from above, trapped within the confines of the frame in space and time. It has nowhere to dock. The epitome of linear perspective travel/navigation has been outmoded. It can never dock. Film likewise threatened by video. The linearity of film, its images miniaturized and sequenced in rows, has been compounded by the chameleonic single frame of the digital numerical. Aerial perspective, its tie to video, transports us away from reality, Kurosawa notes. It creates a distancing god’s eye in place of indexical immediacy.
Once more: 2001, Japan: Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer diagrams a similar confusion of self and machine. Antagonist Jijii (played by Shinya Tsukamoto) removes his loose-fitting garments to reveal the physique of a bodybuilder. The grotesque bodily transformations of the famous body horror auteur go digital: the filmmaker’s face uncannily superimposed onto an ill-fitting muscular form. Tsukamoto snaps bodyguard Takayama’s neck in bone-crunching POV. The walls of the frame are doubly claustrophobic; free fall channeled by the socioeconomics of the apartment building. The snapped neck looking up implies thwarted desire to fly out of free fall to accelerate upward to break the illusion of relational weightlessness. The snapped neck indexes the highly stratified society of new millennium Japan, “intensified class war from above” as seen from below (Steyerl 26). Rather than looking up to the sun, the nationalist pride of Japan, we are met with a washed-out sky. So then, even if we did climb the floors, what is waiting at the top?
To fall back down again. In slo-mo, Kakihara balances on the railing of the rooftop staircase, having been kicked by Ichi. The moment right before one is condemned to free fall feels as if it would never end. “What do you mean history has ended?” He is expected to catch himself, but he loses control and enjoys the fall. After Tsukamoto discovers the body, Kakihara is pictured in a liminal space washed in blue light, recognizable as the place where Karen, and presumably Boss Anjo, once tortured Kakihara for his own masochistic pleasure. Although he fell to ground to escape the unfulfillment of his digital desires (digital media creates impossible desires: Kakihara deals in pornographic videotapes), he cannot escape the limbo of groundlessness. Even death offers no reprieve. With history killed, where do the dead go? They haunt the present. Like a video image allows one to see one’s image instantaneously, to see oneself outside of oneself, to haunt oneself—Peter Campus’s dilemma, the “displacement of image.”
Let us return to Tsukamoto’s Jijii: even the cyberpunk director cannot escape becoming a cyborg, modified by the digital, incorporated into it, nay, constituted by it! If we follow this logic, the other major characters can be ascribed with a cinematic positionality. Ichi is easily video with his slick black costume, hikikomori relation to TV and videogames, and false, programmed memories inserted by Tsukamoto are coated in digital noise. Tsukamoto’s orchestrative relationship to Ichi as well as his digital chimera body marks him as film with digital modifications, a partly video aesthetic merged to film. He is Miike. Kakihara is the most difficult to characterize, until I read Tom Mes’s assessment of the film, wherein he resolves the trinity quite nicely. Kakihara, in such a libidinally unsatisfying film with despicable and pathetic characters, is the only “identification figure” left for the audience, both him and the viewer participating in violence with a laissez-faire attitude (Mes 235). He is like you and me.
In the end, mastermind Tsukamoto—no motives ever explained—kills himself, like Kakihara. Ichi, although never seen again after the rooftop, survives alongside the child Takeshi who kicks him as revenge for his father’s murder. Kakihara’s blue purgatory is prompted by Tsukamoto looking up the apartment shaft, and before that, when he looks up, montage implies that he intuits Ichi’s helpless state as well. Tsukamoto (film as a medium in its own limbo) realizes his mortality in the pathetic fates of the unstable yet precise ones and zeroes of digital video and the audience. After the masochistic spectatorship is lost to free fall, our new identificatory figure is Takeshi; he registers the camera at the end after a computer-generated crow flies by his head—a new relation between a new audience and a new form of cinema is forged after the digital continues to infiltrate postmodern society (no longer merely onscreen violence but a part of nature itself). Digital cinema requires a new mode of viewing, of interacting with the world. It starts by recognizing the gaze, only then can we deploy digital cinema to examine critically our contemporary institutions.
Like Kakihara’s delight in free fall, the audience loves the fleeting hyper-Newtonian thrills enhanced by digital technologies which leads to the birth of the acritical audience, a viewership that desires spectacle enabled by digital special effects. The death of cinema begets the death of the audience. Although now, it would seem the causality is reversed. However, it was all an illusion. Kakihara was not kicked off the roof; the digital did not thrill the audience. The index of Ichi’s knife boot on Kakihara’s forehead, as a sign that is marked by direct causality, is a hallucination. Video has no index, no relation to the real from the perspective of the filmic semiotic paradigm. Puppet master Tsukamoto’s filmic persona as the one to reveal Kakihara’s unmarked forehead confirms this illusion. It does not matter. It is Tsukamoto’s actions that still lead to the death of Kakihara and the humiliating dissolution of Anjo gang. Ichi—a voyeuristic, isolated, amorphous avatar for Tsukamoto—did not cause Kakihara’s death as Tsukamoto had planned. Tsukamoto looks up at the sight of the aerial perspective framed by the apartment building. He recognizes his own fate—suspended in air, around the neck, from a tree. Takeshi ignores him for the camera, and after humiliating the two biggest sadists in the film, demonstrates a sort of mastery over Ichi the Digital and Tsukamoto the Analog Hybrid.
After free fall, the audience is left feeling like Kakihara, trapped in the blues of our empty sadomasochistic chamber, completely unfulfilled in either impulse. The hanging chains in the foreground key us into the shackles of verticality. The camera cuts to close-up: Kakihara looks up at the high-angle lens, his digital extendo mouth falls open, his eyes expressionless. Cornered by the camera on all axes. The horizontal tessellation of the non-place walls overpowered by the free-falling chains. The intermixed horizontal and vertical credits reconfigure this visual contrast metacinematically. The last chain of text is vertical and ends with the year: 2001.
The stability once afforded by linear perspective and its privileging of the horizon has been superseded by “multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points” (Steyerl 13).
“Digital practices call for transformation, dissemination, recontextualization, and even transmutation into other kinds of perceptual outputs. Their identity is inherently multiple and open to viruslike mutations into ever-renewable series” (Rodowick 133).
The following year, Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover carries the torch. The ending sees Franky interfacing with an automatically scrolling selection of snuff livestreams spotlighting female torture. Aligned in a row in the center of the frame, the Hellfireclub thumbnails roll from left to right consecutively, resembling a perversely digital film strip. Gravity is inevitable, and thus, so is free fall. As Franky contemplates over a model of DNA, the tortured Diane looks back at the surveillance camera beaming her image to viewers and voyeurs alike, like us and Franky. Here, Assayas claims that this turn of events, the end of cinema, the end of history was always to pass. A digital determinism. Hardwired. Diane’s face strikes the same visual chords as Kakihara’s—both in limbo, both watched and aware of it; his desires shaped by digital mediation, desires of others pasted onto her through the digital. “These hands could’ve moved mountains.” The lyrics of the closing credits indict the filmmakers but also mourn the potentialities of the digital that continues and makes more efficient the exploitation of women under capital and moving image culture. Franky embodies Steyerl’s floating spectator, safely inputting his fantasies from a high-angled distance thanks to daddy’s credit card. Aerial perspective is male, White, and wealthy: it is not afforded to everyone. After the film’s form effectively kills itself and then returns to continuity stasis, after its defeatist conclusion, Demonlover takes the motif of visual entanglement (“tangled in shit”) from Ichi’s purgatory and makes it auditory in the credits. Two simultaneous voices, singing different lyrics, are heard. 2002 (palindrome): the digital and analog, two ongoing threads in not-quite-yet-certain relation. The fear is not the future but that the future will bring nothing new, in fact, only arriving with the same old failures. No new solutions. All films picture some purgatory—whether trapped inside a monitor, a retired space of sexual fantasy, or, as in Demonlover, some present combination of the two.
These films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, and Olivier Assayas react to digital disorientation of cinema, the invasion of multi-screen displays and aerial perspectives onto linear filmmaking. In addition, they react to the decentering of the individual subject as a result of this new perspective paradigm. Ichi the Killer seems most willing to embrace the digital with its laughably over-the-top, grotesque computer effects. It is also the most confident in its embrace of the digital absurd, the figure of Takeshi offering some generative possibility under the digital regime. In the years before and those that followed, the digital absorbed cinema and did cinema better. Pulse knows this truth, Ichi and Demonlover too. Cinema’s own genetic makeup and language created its death, as its formal conventions were programmed into the digital. If we are to consider Rodowick’s assumption that the digital image does not “occupy space,” then the digital is spectral—a ghost from the future that haunted cinema even before its new millennium revolution, a harbinger of the death of cinema (134). And so, the linear perspective once coded into digital machines and software has taken on a new gaze that Rodowick fails to address (132). “Photorealism was displacing abstraction as the driving goal of research in digital image simulation” (Rodowick 132). Now, the entire world is digital simulation with surveillance situated atop it, maintaining it.
“Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa”: Pulse’s phantasmagoric computer virus turns people into images (Steyerl 28). But Kurosawa images this transformation as much epochal as it is apocalyptic. Twenty-one years later, self-objectification might be our only chance to render ourselves invisible, or at least organized under some new solidarity. If the boat were removed from the final shot, the film would end on a much less dour note. The endless sea would be a place of play with its open possibilities: sink or swim.
History has been halted. My future as well. Suspended in air. However, if history ended half a century ago, then it was certainly confirmed last week. Recent advances in artificial intelligence processes [Midjourney and, more recently, OpenAI] spell, once again, the end of the human, and I do not mean this in any alarmist, “end-of-cinema” sense. OpenAI GBT-3.5, for example, an application programming interface in open beta, can write an essay about Hito Steyerl’s concept of the poor image, for example, or answer ethical and philosophical dilemmas faced by the postmodern subject, with oftentimes surprising mindfulness—that is, humanlike, student-like. This software exposes the inhuman manner of writing upheld by humanities scholarship. Academic publishing institutionalizes and protects stale form, never rewarding anyone for challenging it. In few years’ time, AI will surpass academia in this form of writing that it blindly teaches. Of course, it will; it can do it better! “Did you internalize the content?” “Can you swallow information and spit it back out?” In the near future, an undergraduate could receive a degree largely by submitting assignments (partially or mostly) written by AI—undetectable to Turnitin and editors. OpenAI even allows one to edit text according to customizable instructions, allowing overworked and underpaid professors and teaching assistants to grade and add comments faster, if desired. AI will grade AI, simulations of simulations. The sort of education that regurgitates formula should be over. The infinite conversation must come to an end. AI art will continue to produce and then consume itself to produce more AI art, until humans are pathetically pushed out of the loop. The same will happen with online discourse, etc., etc. We are made external to the infinite conversation after believing ourselves to be enlightened for centuries, and the end of that process is to digitally recreate ourselves via feedback loop that no longer needs us. The end of (the end of) history. Thus, I do not think there is no future. While technology and media will devolve into the mindless never-ending discourse we finds ourselves engulfed in today, we will have the ability to walk away and start again, to refuse to watch the forty-seventh installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe produced entirely by AI, to escape free fall. The freedom to choose, but the choice is always yours.
The digital is one means by which we can turn writing into a living document.
With this, I have relinquished the linearity of my academic track and the style of scholarship it produces for the uncertainty of free fall outside of its bubble. Here, I have taken up the impossible challenge of concluding an entire semester’s worth of theory across all my classes, plus the last three-and-a-half school years of undergraduate knowledge, all while attempting to discover (over just a few days) some alternative form that will satisfy me, that will convert narcissistically (in)coherent thought process to poetic, nonlinear magnum opus. And I have failed, but it is all there somewhere in between.
Works Cited
Mes, Tom. “Ichi the Killer.” Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, revised edition, FAB Press, 2006, pp. 226–243.
Rodowick, David. The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard U Press, 2007.
Steyerl, Hito. “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux, 2012, pp. 12–30.
Although not much actually got done yesterday per se, it was a rather eventful day of laying groundwork. We made it to the Theatre Centre where some dance recital for children was taking place in the neighboring building, but we managed to slip past and get into the studio space—the black sandbox. It involved mostly a lot of fucking around and coming and going to bring more stuff from home or go get food. We are gonna have way too much fun in there: kicking a yoga ball around the empty dance floor, logging into the mobile computer carts to edit the plot/shot list, trying to get a pair of subwoofers to work, digging through props, wandering around in the pitch black of the basement, imaging what we could do in this building after everyone has gone. We were both feeling inspired in the way that a little kid gets excited and has ideas. Our guerrilla filmmaking is branching into a plethora of projects made only possible in such a flexible space: more video ideas, sleepovers, parties. We’ll see if we get kicked out before that happens, but we already have a way to sneak back in should we be kicked out by University Police. Was that sign on the door to get into the studio always there? A police escort for not being associated with the Dance or Theatre departments seems a tad excessive. However, evidence of others having been in the space is apparent, so we gotta be careful, although no one disturbed us for the hours we were in there being not exactly quiet; no one came to check or lock up before the faculty left the building for the night.
But our freeform exploration of the room—digging through the props left in the back storage room, me randomly playing the same four notes or so on the piano and inadvertently developing a theme when no prior mind had yet been dedicated toward any musical score, shuffling all these new ideas into the fold of the Google Docs outline on the computers we didn’t realize were there—allowed us to get to know the space, how best to live in it. We are not an occupying force, laying claim to or using the space, more like nomads or hobos who come and go. Although, a lock and key that was found in the storage area is currently being borrowed so we can house our equipment in the locker room. Heavy rain for the next hour, the forecast said, and I was not about to carry my camera through the downpour, as we biked and longboarded through a mile of puddles that splashed up to my waistline. It was a good day.
The day before yesterday, after my internet was thankfully fixed, we spent the night revamping the YouTube channel (new profile picture, new banner, new name), making an Instagram account, and all the work that was required to make that all happen. Milk Toast Video is officially online. I found an app called Photo Cartoon Coloring Editor, a real piece of shit, but it allowed me to color in the drawing that I asked my friend to do, so we didn’t just have a black-and-white sketch for our channel. Later that night, I painstakingly fought with Instagram over the upload of my “Seasons in the Sun” video, cutting it into four parts and trying again and again to upload them despite extremely unhelpful error messages. (I ended up having to compress one of the videos, the third of four, even though Instagram swears you can upload videos up to 1GB.) It really is an awful, poorly made app—the post count is higher than it should be, as a result of trying to get these videos public. But, hey, it’s at least up there now and I cannot say the same for YouTube. (I still need to appeal that bullshit.) We’ll probably be back in there tonight to actually start shooting, and then, back to the 9-5 until next three-day weekend.
videophage.com 
