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Magna Opera

  • A Steam Room of Troubles

    There is no escape, there is simply the
    given, and there is nothing that we can do.
    —Harold Bloom, “Interview,” Diacritics

    Throw your soldiers into positions whence
    there is no escape, and they will prefer
    death to flight. If they will face death, there
    is nothing they may not achieve.
    —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

    I cannot break my months-long fixation with the metaphor of drowning. I notice it, more than ever now, everywhere. It started up once again this time with another fascination: monasticism, or rather the men themselves who were individually and obsessionally committed to it. (What is the place of/for the ascetic in the modern world, if there is any at all?) These two forces coalesced before me in Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert, wherein the writer-monk posits that the Desert Fathers—the fourth century ascetics who turned their backs on the realm of the social and walked into the same deserts that propagated the earliest known human civilizations in order to live a life of solitude in the ruins of these empires—opted to “swim for [their lives] in an apparently irrational void.” And for this, Merton lauds them, gently urging his reader to follow in the footsteps (although not quite literally) of these humble Christian forefathers. It would seem that he proposes we willingly accept that going-under feeling (an existential impulse in search of an “‘anarchic’ desert ideal” not entirely divorced from Camus’s train of thought previously referenced) as he celebrates a “leap into the void,” the detachment of oneself from ego, although in surrender to and devotion toward God. Thus, according to The Wisdom of the Desert, this frustratingly slippery answer to the question of drowning cannot be an intellectual one but rather only and wholly a personal, spiritual one. Therefore, he proposes an individualistic solution to a collective social dilemma, which no matter how appealing or personally helpful (and I do find his reflections to have made a beneficial impact in my own thinking), I cannot find satisfactory. So, the fixation remains.

    But for all this talk of the desert, one’s entry into almost all Christian denominations is heralded by christening, baptism, that is, by some submersion of the mortal body in water; this ritual not only undergone for the purposes of initiation but even more so a necessary component of the salvation doctrine. Put plainly by Geoffrey Bromiley in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, “[t]he goal of baptism is eternal life.” To add, the act is itself a symbolic conquering of the primary primal(/mammal) fear. It is the very defiance of drowning that inducts one officially into the embrace of God’s undying love. It is no coincidence that the biblical Greek text employs the verb báptō, denoting several water-related actions, namely, “to dip,” “to immerse,” “to bathe,” and “to drown.” However, it is only baptism if you can manage to get out of the water.

    Suffocating in my own snot for the past two months, my body produces this mucus for its own defense against some unknown foreign contaminant. The sickness comes in waves, off and on again. The only recourse, especially when the inability to breathe renders sleep improbable, seems to be the image, to submerge my chills and body aches in hyper-consumptive normality, one shimmering spectacle immediately followed by another with no time to come up for air.

    To allow just one breath of their flows into your system causes your airway to seal itself as to prevent the entry of anything further into your lungs, your body essentially asphyxiating itself. The spasmed voice box eventually fatigues, releasing its dam and allowing fluid to flow freely into your airways post loss of consciousness. Laryngospasm and aspiration, as described, comprise the most common mechanism of drowning. Aspiration, “when something that’s supposed to be in your stomach . . . gets into your airways,” as Cleveland Clinic puts it; on the other hand, aspiration, as in the object of one’s dreams or desires, a goal or ideal to strive toward. The confusion of consumption with respiration in combination with the connotation of aiming toward a yet-unrealized future spells out the exhausting stalemate of the contemporary dilemma of drowning. Much has already been said of the collective inability to imagine a future that is not worse than that dictated by our current downard spiral trajectory. And so, consumption is the new respiration, having effectively replaced it to where it is no longer possible to imagine life without this ubiquitized, digitized, convenient version of it. (Note how false prophets who extol such solutions as the “dumb phone” or call for the resurgence of pre-streaming technologies all must look backward: this is precisely not imagination, this is nostalgia and self-help guruism.) We have nothing left to aspire to.

    When the sickness washes out with the tide (and like any tide, only temporarily), I have to reckon with the consequences of this gross submersion: not the endless coughing to remove the excess phlegm from my nasal and escophagal passages, but the new habit I have picked up over and over again, the one that nobody can seem to kick for good.

    “Modern life is a sea of images”: this is how Camille Paglia establishes her historical tracing of Western art in her 2012 book, Glittering Images, with the very first line. Paglia believes us, especially children, to be dangerously flooded with overstimulating digitized distractions, proposing “self-education in art” as the salve to ease our detiorating socio-politico-cultural landscape and turn back our declining attention spans, seductively worded with plenty of aqueous metaphors. Again, I do not even necessarily disagree, but find this answer ultimately unable to grapple with the phenomenology of drowning on the basis of its do-it-yourself, individualist stance, an iconoclastic one that is informed by Paglia’s personal brand of libertarian feminism. Is there nothing outside ourselves that can save us from this boundless, mesmerizing sea?

    It was not until I took my first visit to a bathhouse that I gained some insight, or at least anecdotal experience, regarding the implications of a contemporaneity figured in a constant state of drowning. Sitting in the warm caress of an 118-degree steam walk-in, I first noticed changes in my breathing within a few minutes. My ability to inhale oxygen felt dampened, my breathing shallow. Attention moves solely to breathing, as you force deep breaths in and out in spite of the oppressively humid atmosphere. You find it is not impossible, only requiring more effort and focus as you readjust to the new climate. As the hot water pours into the bucket on the floor and fills the tile chamber with water vapor, you retreat further into yourself, losing sight of the other bathers sitting only several feet in front of you. To not lose your cool, to resist the panicky feeling of drowning, it is almost as if you are actively required to continually and wholly center your own bodily experience. Then, in a moment, you begin to think about every single bead of water on your body, the sweat being pulled out of every pore, until you feel every little thing with exacting acuity. Behind a cloudy visual field, your body and the environment begin to merge in your mind. Is this particular drop of liquid rolling down my back from the room or from me, condensation or perspiration? The air begins to clear, the fog slowly dissipating but never disappearing; the hissing, boiling water from the faucet into an overflowing bucket runs slower but never gets cold. The collective comes back into frame in the breathing room, where one can once again see and hear the reassuring dissonance of others’ labored breathing. The site of arduous labor and pointed focus returns momentarily to a site of communal recovery and socialization. When all is said and done, for lack of a better word, it feels like microdosing drowning.

    “Hence baptism has no purely external efficacy and in itself is unimportant,” writes Bromiley. Much like the lack of a unified scientific consensus on the positive health benefits of heat immersion, the purpose of the steam bath is more appealing as an internal exercise, a test of will not wholly unlike the retreat of the ascetics into the desert. (It is no coinicidence that it is cultures outside of or adjacent to the Occident that tout the physiological/psychological benefits.) Nonetheless, not a discredit to its potential as therapeutic practice, forcing oneself to reckon with the sensation of drowning in a controlled environment. Yet, to further reiterate, drowning seems particularly unaccomodating to solutions of intellectual- or spiritualization, at least in terms of a large scale, collective response against its imposition on every human tendency toward life (if that is something even worth looking for).

    All that being said, as my avocational trip into the mist reminded me, there is no building a tolerance to drowning. At the end of the day, drowning is simply drowning. It is a metaphor that has haunted the greatest dramatic minds and works of the Western world. In Shakespeare’s magnum opus, the eponymous prince of Denmark for all his courtly brilliance, like the very playwright behind his words, could not remedy the drowning problem. In the most famous verse ever written in the English language, Hamlet asks, “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer // The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, // Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, // And by opposing end them.” It always comes back to the same binary choice: kill yourself or suffer. Shakespeare explicitly ties the deathly option with water, worded as if double entendre, invoking warfare against “a sea of troubles” and the physical action of swimming, that is, “tak[ing] arms against” the determined direction of a most powerful current. “To take arms against a sea of troubles” is to “swim for one’s life in an apparently irrational void” is to tread water until exhausted strength drags under an unwilling body. And so, there really is no choice in the matter at all: it is always and simply, suffer and then die. Therefore, it would seem that the question of drowning is no question at all, but an indispensable fact of human existence: that is, that the human condition is the condition of drowning. Yet, we insist on creating for ourselves infinite petites morts—little drownings, figurative ones, ontologically pharmakonic—to avoid facing la grande noyade.

    In his science fiction novel, The Futurological Congress, Stanisław Lem differentiates between the two drownings. Throughout these passages taken from the memoirs of the fictional Ijon Tichy, Lem’s absurd man experiences hallucinatory breakdown after hallucinatory breakdown of an eccentric future world that itself already resembles a psychoactive drug-induced hallucination. As Tichy succumbs to the dissolution of his reality, he is transported into other illusory ones, sometimes even residing within them for extended periods of time, like the alternative lifetimes lived by those under the influence of a salvia trip. The world of this novel and the starting point reality of Tichy is one already heavily medi(c)ated by a laundry list of hallucinogenic drugs with any single expectant emotion existing in dosage form. Before his Dantesque descent into the bowels beneath his reality (literally as he takes refuge from a terrorist attack in the sewers), Tichy mistakenly drinks the tap water at the hotel hosting the conference. As a result, he accidentally acquaints himself firsthand with the psychotropic effects of benignimizers, a class of mind-altering substances that do exactly what it sounds like:

    Every analytical reflex was as if submerged in thick syrup, wrapped and smothered in a porridge of self-satisfaction, all dripping with the honey of idiotic optimism; my soul seemed to sink into the sweetest of oozes, like drowning in rosebuds and chocolate icing.

    It is here that the reader encounters the only instance of the word “drowning” in the entire novel, in a novel that bombards the reader with an overstimulating overabudance of absurd scenarios, characters, and visual images, in addition to its motif of water, especially submersion. It is worth highlighting that the only form of the verb “to drown” is conjugated in the present continuous tense here and, more importantly, presented as a simile. After Tichy’s persistent trips into alternate realities and consciousnesses, he awakens, as if from a dream, from these altered states when he rolls over into the waste water beneath the Costa Rica Hilton.

    In the non-place of the Hilton, after enduring the effects of the drug-laced water, he remembers he was not seen anyone drink any water. This is a future where just about everything except water is consumed. If someone is thirsty during the Futurological Congress, “they would have a coke, or a schweppes,” always something prepackaged and for sale. Perhaps in this avoidance of the nectar of life, the inhabitants of this funhouse mirror world have drowned out their fear of drowning, and as a result, their connection to its life-giving properties. It is precisely this interaction with that insurmountable animal impulse within all humanity that snaps Tichy back to “reality” one last time, finding himself once more fallen into the “stinking, blessed waters closing over [his] head . . . choking on the foul swill, but happy, happy!” Here, Lem expresses the necessity for contact with the threat of “real” drowning as opposed to the “false” drowning of addiction and self-medication but also, even more so, psychiatry and overmedicalization. Realizing that he has finally made it to the second day of the convention, Tichy laughs uncontrollably, startling one of his colleagues who drops the manuscript he is fussing over. The document falls into the dark water, “float[ing] away—off into the unknown future.” Here, Lem concludes his work on an uncertain yet contently fatalistic note, and working within a genre that conjures the present in its vision of imagined futurity, does not pretend to hold the answers.

    I do not feel so bad if even the greatest English dramatist in his finest poetic hour or the most widely read science fiction writer channeling Aldous Huxley could not write us beyond this fatalistic condition. I can accept that and it. I do not believe any one can pull us out, for life is sin. You pay for the mistakes of the past with your advancing age. Your bones creak from the abuses of adolescence. Your relationships all mirror those that came before you. That which was done unfortunately unto you, you will unfortunately do unto others. Everything that has been done has already been paid for, someone has already picked up the tab. We are fallen, and the water is rising. If history has proven anything it is that the world will keep ending for generations to come. Memento mori ad infinitum. There is no reversing it, despite the feeble protestations of those suggesting lofty, impossible radical (re)turns, to some manner of means by which we used to or ought to be conducting ourselves. I cannot go back. I have no memory. We can never afford to go back, to pay back. Everything that has ever happened is right here with/in/out us. Full steam ahead.

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  • Is There No End for a DREAMER?

    In the closing minutes of Bresson’s second color film and third Dostoyevsky “adaptation,” the usually perambulatory Jacques silently hunches over two partially painted canvases laid across the floor. Earlier in Four Nights of a Dreamer, the viewer catches a glimpse at a couple such paintings that have been more or less finished: large faceless portraits of women defined by bold outlining brushstokes of black uniformly filled with vibrant hues of pure primary and secondary color. The young artist tries to find his ideal woman on the streets of Paris and on the canvases that he leans against the walls or lays across the floor of his studio. Rather, he translates their fleeting forms onto the canvas. As a former colleague from Beaux-Arts tells Jacques, art is about absence, the dual-sided disappearance of the artist and the object. Unable to approach the women who catch his eye and whose eyes he catches, Jacques speaks longingly, poetically of imagined scenarios into his portable tape recorder. In his poetic musings and De Stijl-meets-pop-art portraiture, he removes their features, perhaps unable or unwilling to remember them after his countless failed “attempts” at romantic connection, or perhaps in search of their essence, what they can all be reduced to most essentially, but more than likely this project leads one to his own faint-hearted idealism. This is the impression Jacques offers when Marthe asks for his story, he having just pulled her from the ledge of a suicide attempt over the Seine, having spent one year in wait for a lover who has finally returned from abroad only to ostensibly forget about her. It is as if Bresson took Louis Daguerre’s famous photograph from the Pont Neuf—its panoramic view of the river, the bridges, and the two figures in the foreground, resposing in the shade—as the starting point for his most lovely, sensuous film. Said to be the first photograph taken en plein air and with a visible human figure—and even more, there are two of them. Maybe they are in love, maybe they are not, who is to say.

    Let us step away from the impetus and back toward the end. In this scene before the last drowsy blink of the camera iris, Jacques paints an aural picture, a daydream reunion with Marthe: she will apologize profusely for her having abandoned him on their fourth and final night together in favor of her unnamed lover who passes them during the busy nighttime scene. He wants her to admit her mistake, to suffer “one thousand deaths” for him as a result of her decision, but more than anything else in that moment, he wants to be with her again. He ends his soliloquy, rewinds the tape, leaves the recorder at his bedside, and plays back the words he has just spoken. On the other side of the room, he kneels before his painter’s palette, surrounded by the reverse sides of several large paintings already completed with two primary works in progress situated on either side of him. His inability to focus on one or the other recalls the beginning of his story that first night on the bridge: Jacques spies an attractive woman through a shop window, they look at each other with interested glances, he follows her down the street but never approaches, and when he eventually loses her, another grabs his attention. His back turned to the camera, Jacques mixes yellow tube paint with water, trying to achieve a desired consistency, going back and forth between adding more paste and more water. He cannot seem to find the right balance—or maybe he is simply stalling, putting off the work he knows needs to be done—as with water-miscible oil paint, too much water will cause the paint to not adhere to the material support. He abandons this prolonged effort and turns away from the palette and the right hand’s canvas, twisting his focus toward the other open-faced canvas on the left, where an open red paint can sits between the bent artist and his work. Like the others, it is a portrait of a woman: he has finished most of the coloring on her dress green while the halted progress on her face divides her into two halves—one side, red brushstrokes; the other, blank. Without any need for water, he firmly presses and applies the red liquid onto the black-outlined area just above her expressionless, dichotomized face. The adjoining shapes become conflicting ones through their identical hue, marking a new direction for Jacques’s work, wherein previously no region of one highly saturated color is seen to border another of the same color. Further, in the first flashback at his studio, Jacques gets distracted by the conjurings of his own tape-recorded imagination while at work on a similar portrait; however, this red-skinned model’s hair is already in the stagnated process of becoming yellow. And so, the yellow paint Jacques was fussing over was intended to be the brown-blonde hair of Marthe. (He may have been watering down the paint, as when a water-soluble pigment—if that is what it in fact is—is greatly watered down, it will dry darker. Perhaps, Jacques was trying to recreate the subtleties of Marthe within the preestablished astringency of his minimalist style.) Instead he opts for red, the same unmistakable hue of the scarf he bought for her and lovingly wrapped around her head only moments before she left him alone on the street, for the man she believes herself to love more.

    This is what becomes of the dreamer. Subsisting himself on fantasies from fleeting memories and imagined fancies, he can only think to expel these feelings outward into some great project he is too embarrassed to share with anyone. He sees his dream as “flat and boring,” but he is a slave to it. Jacques will not be able to get Marthe out of his mind until he captures something of her in his art, so that her canvas, her image can be flipped around and leaned against the wall with all the others, but the ideal will still persist and there is only so much room. The floor is filling up and the walls are bare. A man is condemned to dream, to chase his ideal until he is able to impress it into the mind’s of all men.

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  • The Dissolve between Auteur and Actor: The Mimetic Interrogation of Antoine as Truffaut [Revise-it #3]

    Am I…washed up? These days, it is so hard for me to imagine myself writing something as focused as this piece. Maybe that’s just what happens when writing becomes a hobby you sometimes do in between working and hanging out rather than a full-time field of a study. I barely changed a thing about this paper from April 2022, only really fixing the numerous typos. I notoriously did not proofread my essays before I submitted them (often at the last possible minute), and this one for Film History II is no exception. Anyway, my professor loved it, calling it a “marvelous reading . . . that genuinely defamiliarizes and enlivens my sense of and appreciation for a film I’ve seen and taught dozens of times.” I don’t know if it’s that groundbreaking; perhaps I’m just in a mood, because I have to send someone a sample of my writing and feeling my more recent efforts inadequate and sloppy. Just the thought of spending this much time at the keyboard again—researching, outlining, writing—feels unbelievably daunting.

    The 400 Blows is not just one of the seminal works of the French New Wave, but a semi-autobiographical declaration of adolescence based on its film-critic-turned-director, François Truffaut. Truffaut opens his childhood up to the screen, presenting himself through Jean-Pierre Léaud’s performance as Antoine Doinel. In the film, Truffaut maintains a mimetic dialogue between himself as filmmaker and his represented childhood self, somewhere in between imitation and opposition. However, in the scholarship surrounding this film, the Antoine-Truffaut connection is passing contextualization and the New Wave is blanketly regarded as a radical departure from or rejection of classical aesthetics. In what “had to be best scene” of the film, Truffaut stages a three-minute conversation between the institutionalized Antoine and a psychologist. The psychological evaluation in The 400 Blows foregrounds the mimesis at the heart of the film and of the French New Wave. This scene deconstructs the division not only between Antoine as character and semi-autobiographical alter-ego but reflects the mimetic relationship between Hollywood and the emerging nouvelle vague.

    Before breaking down and exploring Truffaut’s own breakdown of mimetic distinctions of character and industrial-sociohistorical contexts, I need to examine how Truffaut mimetically employs and inevitably departs from the groundwork of Cahiers du Cinéma criticism and theory. This background is important for the mimesis of Truffaut and Antoine and between that of the French and American cinemas that follows. Firstly, the scene in the psychologist’s office disrupts the realism to which cinema should aspire, according to André Bazin, proto-auteur theorist and godfather of the New Wave. This scene is marked by several dissolves that deter any realistic sense of space-time, as the camera stays entirely trained on Antoine alone despite the classical cue to introduce the next scene. Thus, this formal experimentation subverts Hollywood assumptions of film grammar as well. Mimetically experimenting with Bazin’s film philosophy, the “wide-angle, deep focus long shots” that capture Antoine’s “moments of freedom” are abandoned—the distance between foreground and background no longer “exaggerated” (Fabe 128). The dissolves, which remain within the psychologist’s barren office, imply this scene is a long take that has been cut up in the editing room. This itself is mimesis: a long take that is edited but smoothed over with dissolves into a pseudo-long take—rejecting the confines of either filmic component. Unlike the long takes on the streets of Paris or of a running Antoine, there is no physical subject to track in this lengthy psychological examination. The mise en scéne is not shot in deep focus and rich with polyvalent props for the spectator to spot. There are no visual indicators to distinguish between fore-, mid-, and background; there is only Antoine, a dark wall, and a table. The interrogation room is a liminal space, its claustrophobia is imposed by the wall behind Antoine, which heightens the gravity of this moment for Antoine’s uncertain future. The quieted handheld immediacy invokes this narrative crossroad. In this scene, the audience is not afforded to “run by his side,” as Sam Solecki phrases it (58).

    Returning to the central argument(s), this scene foregrounds and (formally) disrupts the mimesis between Truffaut and Antoine. Most notably, the score and usual camera movement are not present here, which are responsible for the “aura” that lessens Antoine’s misdemeanors; therefore, Antoine is put on display without these intermediating factors (Solecki 54). He seems to be telling the truth: the character of Antoine, that is, but he is departing from the life and script of Truffaut. Antoine is finally able to speak for himself. For example, in the police booking scene, he is spoken for by the officers and his adoptive father. Now, Léaud gets to improvise his own characterization for Antoine, distancing himself from Truffaut. Once again, there’s no deep focus or nondiegetic score; it’s just him.

    The rattle of the camera mirrors the uneasy body language of Antoine and Truffaut behind the camera is likewise characterized as anxious under that restless and rebellious charm. Both young men are aware of their respective audiences. Truffaut is not only an iconoclast kickstarting a film movement with international repercussions but sharing his traumatic childhood. In this moment, the audience, like Antoine and the judicial system, are reckoning with his character and the decisions he has made up to now. Erin Hogan describes Truffaut’s camera as “highly sympathetic” to Antoine and his session with the psychologist is a rare moment where an “authority figure listens to him” (30, 36). However, Truffaut is much less sympathetic to adult characters—the psychologist is never even pictured, she is noncorporeal, she is unhuman. The absence of an actress on set during filming affirms that the adults in Antoine’s life are (literally) not there for him. Moreover, the woman’s voice added after the fact is therefore separated spatially (she is not on set) and temporally (by the dubbing in post-production and her age). In agreement with the documentary-like aesthetics fostered by cinematographer Henri Decaë, the added voiceover of Jeanne Moreau becomes a voice of God (which formally highlights the psychologist as an authority figure), as Léaud does not hear it. And during the shooting of this scene, Truffaut asks the questions to Léaud, establishing a mimetic effect through the semi-autobiographical narrative (“Jean-Pierre” 0:55–1:00). Furthermore, the scene was largely improvised, constructing a break between Truffaut as Antoine and Léaud as Antoine that still fits within the fluidity of mimesis. The actor strays from the director’s childhood as source material, rejecting stringent autobiographical imitation. Yet, Truffaut did not directly transcribe his early teenage years onto the screen, treating mimetically his own childhood in addition to a flexible approach to screenwriting and filmmaking.

    The interview elucidates Antoine’s motivations for his crimes, as up until this point, there was minimal explanation in his own words that speaks to the “degree of his unhappiness” (Solecki 56). Concerning Truffaut, the answers in the interview, which still draw from his childhood, reflect his motivation for becoming a filmmaker and bringing his own story before an audience. This scene not only solidifies our support for Antoine’s escape—even if it is brashly juvenile and his capture inevitable—but Truffaut’s first feature and inauguration as a filmmaker. Antoine, like Truffaut, feels trapped, and the film’s form reflects this truth. Wide, open shots that record the city are shaky and restless but not illegible, expressing an equally restless desire to break free from unsatisfying circumstances. The enduring movement of the frame constantly projects to the audience that the story of Antoine is that of Truffaut. So, the relative formal restraint of the interview is Truffaut telling the audience that he is still there, albeit less so. This is Antoine/Léaud’s moment, and the audience must examine why they support the delinquency of this boy. What are the implications of his actions? What are the causes? Truffaut urges his audience to be critical of their own spectatorship in addition to being cognizant of their passive status before a projected series of images. Put simply, this confrontation with Antoine is a confrontation of our own spectatorship. Why do we support Antoine? Why is this scene here, disrupting the flow? What should happen to him? The freeze frame that ends this scene arrests our uncertainty, suspending the conclusion of the examination. This photogram solidifies the spectator’s sympathy for Antoine and formally recalls and foretells the other instances of his imprisonment. The placement of this frozen medium close-up after the one in the police booking scene questions but ultimately affirms the spectator’s sympathy toward Antoine in the final suspended shot. Truffaut challenges passive consumption of narrative that has been shaped by the invisible editing of Hollywood, raising more questions than he answers in typical New Wave fashion. Truffaut criticized French films for their lack of formal risk and sincerity, so he inserts a scene between the lead actor and himself—albeit slightly disguised—that highlights the self-reflexive sincerity of Léaud and Truffaut. Both draw from their lives to form one character.

    On the other hand, this scene also highlights the mimesis between the French New Wave and Hollywood. The Cahiers critics were cinephiles enamored by several auteurs within the American film industry; however, these same foundational French critic/filmmakers diverted from American cinema and the socially unconscious American and French societies. The striking quietness of the examination—auditory and kinesthetic—contrasts the gestural, handheld 16mm aesthetic of the film before and after this scene. As a result, the stillness of the camera in this scene functions in opposition to its role in classical Hollywood; the anomalous stasis of the camera calls attention to itself when bookended by a film that rejects stasis almost entirely. Antoine’s slightly offscreen gaze heightens this effect, not quite acknowledging the camera, like he’s intimidated by it, refusing to register its overbearing presence. This scene contains seven dissolves that do not all operate in the same fashion: that is, in service to spatio-temporal continuity. These transition effects make legible the subtle differences in space and time. The first dissolve, discounting the one that opens the scene, is placed after the interviewer’s question but Antoine’s answer immediately follows as if the edit was not present, unaffected. In addition, the next two dissolves occur in quick succession as he listens to the psychologist relay claims from his parents that he is a liar. Truffaut manipulates the passage of time by keeping the psychologist’s voiceover consistent, but the image of the fidgeting Antoine is mirrored in the editing that acts equally uncomfortable and uncertain. This loosening of classical grammar invokes form following function by creating a similar residual effect in the viewer. Furthermore, the subdued state of the camera in this scene rattles and even pans slightly, never fully embodying stillness. The slight visual discontinuities between the dissolves betray the ostensible lack of movement. For example, the aforementioned dissolve brings the doorknob into the frame and its position on the otherwise blank wall illustrates the gestural nature of the original long take. Even at its most still, the caméra-stylo reveals Truffaut behind it. The audience is never aware of the time that passes for Antoine during the interview, as some dissolves shrink gaps in between questions and others seem superfluous in this respect.

    Truffaut negotiates with Hollywood filmmaking grammar in a less jarring and more mimetic manner than Jean-Luc Godard and his extensive use of jump cuts one year later in Breathless. (The contained camera in the psychologist’s office also recalls Breathless, but in a less radical way than the temp morts of the twenty-five-minute apartment scene.) The refusal to cut to a reverse shot of the disembodied voice is another example of Truffaut tackling Hollywood formal practices and twisting them, in addition to the not-quite stillness of the camera and the incongruous dissolves. Even the film’s most notable formal element, the freeze frame, is present but obscured in this scene. The dissolve that transitions from Antoine in the office interior to the visitors at the front gate exterior hides the frozen image of the interviewed youth. In conjunction with the muddled continuity of the dissolves, the frozen frame mimetically interacts with Hollywood by subduing its own formal experimentation. In other words, the preservation and maintenance of continuity associated with the dissolve subverts Hollywood aesthetics but is employed to hide the classically divergent freeze frame. Even within the suppressed rebellion of Truffaut’s usually kinetic camera, which he demonstrates undeterred in the dissolved shot before this scene, cinematic conventions are being broken. The stasis of this scene reflects Truffaut being contained by the pre-New Wave tradition de qualité that restricted French cinema through its stale, bourgeois form.

    Ultimately, this scene is a test for Antoine and Truffaut, as the boy next to Antoine warns in the previous scene. The scene with the psychologist is not a conversation, but an evaluation; there is an asymmetrical power dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewed. Like Antoine and the absence of an actress on set, Truffaut cannot see his audience. Thus, the dissolves reflect their desire to escape this interrogation, as if this transition technique is them trying to incite the next scene, foregrounding their discomfort. Antoine desires to escape this grueling trial and Truffaut desires to return to long take tracking shots; they both get their wish. When the awaited transition to the next scene finally ends the interview, the image is frozen, calling attention to the indexical makeup of film. Here, Truffaut is reversing the hierarchical organization of filmmaker over spectator and once more implicating the audience in the film, asking them to actively engage with it as spectator and socio-political actor. In short, he plays with audience expectations of film form to self-reflexively elicit an awareness of their spectatorship. As a newcomer director in a well-established national industry, Truffaut reverses the director-spectator relationship, invoking more active participation with the moving (and sometimes frozen) images from his audience and highlighting his own discomfort with cinematic and industrial stasis to induce their own discomfort. The freeze frame that ends this scene suggests that Antoine is not heard by the psychologist after all and the system she represents—this notion is left ambiguous, to say the least. The final freeze frame of the film channels this energy directly onto the audience, directly calling upon their newfound active involvement to expand beyond the diegesis.

    In conclusion, Truffaut does not imitate either approach to cinema—Cahiers or classical—instead opting to mimetically experiment with both modes. In addition, the similar appearances and childhoods of Truffaut and Léaud contributes to the mimetic characterization of Antoine. The mimesis between Antoine and Truffaut is itself mimetically entangled with that between Hollywood and the French New Wave. It is impossible to separate these mimetic dialogues, as they mutually inform each other, as evidenced in the scene between Antoine and the psychologist. I cannot even make clear separations between the two in the organization of this essay due to this overlap. Nonetheless, the onscreen mimesis between Antoine and Truffaut highlights a style of filmmaking that was more sincere, personal, risky, and socially conscious than le cinéma de papa (Truffaut lauded aspects of American cinema as bold and lambasted the French industry for its monotony). Truffaut’s opus offers a challenge to the form. Yet, the mimesis directed by Truffaut is not just found in relation to autobiography or classical Hollywood, but movements and genres from Italian Neorealism to film noir. The New Wave brazenly centers the abstraction that comprises the mimesis at the heart of the movement.

    Works Cited

    Fabe, Marilyn. “Auteur Theory and the French New Wave: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.” Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique, U of California P, Berkeley, 2014, pp. 120–134.

    Hogan, Erin. “Boyhood, Abuse, and Adult Intervention in The 400 Blows (Truffaut 1959), Small Change (Truffaut 1976), and Pellet (Mañas 2000).” Red Feather Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013, https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/6a58c084-8445-4b4d-b5fb-2bc65b9a6026/downloads/Hogan%20RF%20V4i1%20SP2013.pdf?ver=1646403833519.

    “Jean-Pierre Léaud at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival for 400 Blows.” YouTube, uploaded by Criterion Collection, 4 Oct. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvQp2xiHaDs.

    Solecki, Sam. “The 400 Blows: A Life on Film.” A Truffaut Notebook, 1st ed., vol. 3, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015, pp. 53–61. ProQuest, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/lib/usf/reader.action?docID=4396126.

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  • The End of the World | Now Streaming

    “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”
    —Maurice Blanchot

    To have this movie be an adaptation of The War of the Worlds—a respected science fiction property that has been remixed by the likes of Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, and Classical Hollywood—is hysterical and is so bold in its ridiculousness that it horseshoes itself back into being almost brilliant. Think of Ice Cube’s oft-repeated lines when on video call with his colleagues or children: “I’ll circle back.” Each of the aforementioned and adored adaptations, like another popular science fiction novel turned classic film(s), Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has been tackled by several filmmakers who all impart their own social critiques into the central figure of the alien invader. And it is here that I feel this movie and its screenlife style try to accomplish something interesting. A production impacted by the pandemic five years ago, War of the Worlds (brought to you by a music video director and a big tech giant with a $2 trillion market cap) adopts a stylistic approach that mirrors (1) the diegetic patriarchal surveillance of DHS dad Will Radford (Ice Cube), (2) the extradiegetic constraints imposed on people in lockdown, and (3) the formal and economic limitations of a film industry in the midst of a global pandemic. Like another release from this year, Ari Aster’s Eddington, this film (although less expressly) sorts through the wreckage of a world torn apart by Covid-19 as mediated by the increased presence of digital communications technologies in our lives.

    What struck me almost immediately about this film is its depiction of care onscreen, or rather how care as we experience it now can only be accurately depicted via screens. In particular, this protective but somewhat distant father (a result of his wife’s death) switches through dozens of windows and tabs and dialog boxes in order to watch over his pregnant daughter Faith: commandeering CCTV cameras and surveillance drones, checking her Apple Watch heart rate monitor, remotely breaking into her MacBook to read her text messages, etc. In one hilarious scene after an alien attack on her lab, Will guides his bleeding-out biologist daughter into a Tesla that he has hacked into, instructing and reassuring her over FaceTime, as a towering tripod alien lumbers toward her position. “Focus on me,” he tells her, as he clicks, scrolls, and zooms through his surveillance application software (aptly named Guardian), all the while simultaneously watching news coverage of the invasion and firing off messages to colleagues. In an affective sense, this is exactly how it feels to live in a post-pandemic world, how it feels to live in the aftermaths of the apocalypses that characterize twentieth-first century life. For example, many still work from home or at the very least are never not answering work texts and emails: the balance between work and life continuing to erode, the internet only having made everyone all the more productive. A consequence of neoliberal network society, the digitized privatization of everyday life. With the younger generations, this takeover looks a little different: Will begrudges his son Dave for staying home and streaming himself playing videogames, but this is a very real (albeit parasocial) response when one is faced with the inability to physically/emotionally connect with one’s peers in person after a year of staying home with only immediate family. Will goes as far as to remotely access his son’s PC and uninstall the new game as an act of tough love. The world feels so much different now, and so does care.

    Cinema feels so different now too. Likewise, most of the formal devices employed in War of the Worlds are thoroughly post-cinematic, this film taking place largely on a desktop; however, when director Rich Lee on the rare occasion opts for a standard cinematic device (e.g., a fade to black or a static shot from a nondiegetic camera toward the end of the film), it is these select moments that actually feel jarring and offputting: that is, the language of cinema that we have become accustomed to for over a century is no longer adequate to reflect that which is current. It is exactly that this movie does not take place, take up space1, that heightens its postmodern affectiveness. In other words, the limitations of physical life are dwarfed by the phenomenological demands and precarious neuroses of our internalized virtual environments.

    The cameras are off their tripods, so to speak, and like the curses escaped from Pandora’s box, they can never be put back. The camera is no longer even a camera. Moreover, after cybersecurity analyst father and leader-of-the-resistance hacker son team up and fail to infect the data-mining tripods with an “old school” computer virus, the spacecraft-esque heads detach from their robotic legs and fly toward the locations of each member of the Disruptor hacker team, having tracked their IP addresses. In this situation, the camera liberated from its support and itself, we have become not the imagemakers but the images themselves. Ice Cube is relegated to a little box on a Discord call as he watches on helplessly, his home ostensibly destroyed, believing to have just lost his son who he was finally beginning to connect with as well as any trace of his wife, having never cleared out her belongings. Will frantically commandeers a nearby surveillance drone to watch the rubble and cinders. Every man his own Twitch streamer, forced to react when constantly confronted and never not inundated with a feed of all the world’s horrors. Taking this point even further with wonderfully clunky irony, we learn from human characters, who are only ever interacting with each other via screen mediation (there is one marked exception, maybe more on that in a later post), that the occupying threat are hybrid organisms containing both biological and cybernetic components.2 This confusion of man and machine—watcher and watched, invader and invaded—invokes precisely that we ourselves have become the hosts for digital imaging and networking technologies and in turn have attached ourselves to other people primarily and irremovably through these pathways.

    And so, according to this digital regime, turning men into cyborgs, how might love, for example, between a father and his family, look and feel? At first, Will is obsessive: he sends his dead wife messages on Facebook everyday, he repeatedly listens to a mundane voice memo she left him, and he spies on his own children in order to feel close to them. So then, what does love feel like at the end of the movie, after this character changes throughout the course of this invasion? Love, as it turns out, is letting people into your system, like a virus. In the finale, as Will ventures out from the safety of his command center for the first time, he relinquishes remote control of his computer to Faith, who has to navigate his multi-screen displays, seeing how her father sees the world and interacts with others, as she guides him through the bowels of the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. In addition, she must also guide her brother as he hacks into military drones in order to destroy the oncoming alien attacks (that look straight out of Action Movie FX, which is in no way derogatory) that are targeting an Amazon delivery drone flying through DC, which is manned by her delivery driver boyfriend Mark, to get to Ice Cube in order to bring him a thumb drive for the “cannibal code,” newly converted from the DNA sequences of a cancer cure into computer code, that will deactivate the U.S. government’s top-secret data collection program, and thus deactivate the data-sucking space invaders. And so, rather than voyeuristically keeping tabs on his own family, the workaholic dad learns to let go and trust himself to trust his children.

    Despite its dull insistence on sentimentality and the redemptive power of the family unit, War of the Worlds nonetheless offers an amusing and thought-provoking illustration of the collision, the event horizon between the digital world, the world of data, and the real world, the world of people. As Ice Cube likes to tell Eva Longoria over at NASA whenever she asks him about the recent abnormal weather events that prelude the invasion, “I told you, I watch people.” Even that simple statement alone maintains this confused, collided perspective; after all, he does not actually watch people, he watches images. Yet perhaps that begets the question: what’s the difference?

    While I do not think this is an evil or unconscionable movie or even an unwatchable one, it is certainly a self-exculpating venture. When the aliens from another world first arrive, the on-the-ground news coverage style footage immediately invokes climate disaster: one shot especially conjuring the recent forest fires that ravaged California in the last year. Not to mention, when they first arrive, the tripods attack such sites as natural gas pipelines and electric grids, emphasizing the continuing and irreversible acceleration toward ecological destruction. One character remarks that this coordinated assault is not only attacking necessary human resources but also our ability to collectively respond to them. The tripods specifically target these stockpiles, but none are more important than the data centers. And so, this film poses a critique of our economy’s obsessive, full-steam-ahead attitude toward surplus and accumulation by having these parasitic invaders attack sites of abundance and wealth generation for tech oligarchs.3 However, this film premiered exclusively on Prime Video, a streaming platform that belongs to the largest information technology corporation in the world.4 So, of course, Amazon has countless data centers of its own, each comprised of tens of thousands of servers. (No wonder data is said to be the most valuable resource over and over.) In fact, these data centers are responsible for hosting Amazon Web Services (AWS), lending cloud storage services to some of the biggest companies in the world (e.g., Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn); in fact, approximately one third of all internet traffic passes through AWS.5 Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that if Amazon data centers went down, a good chunk of the internet would also be affected. And so, the environmentalist and big tech anxieties become empty platitudes, as these data centers require enormous expenditures of energy in order to store our digital footprints, just for them to be sold as discrete packages of information to advertisers, credit and insurance companies, or even law enforcement. So, these vampiric, bionic reapers (that are invoking climate disaster in the film) are behaving themselves much like these corporations who are significantly causing and entangling these crises in the first place.

    Like many projects in this faux populist turn within Hollywood (or really just Hollywood writ large), this film reifies the status quo but now with a little added lip service, but perhaps that is giving too much credit to a movie that no one took seriously. Nonetheless, War of the Worlds would like you to believe that only the federal government with its bloated bureaucracies and bad actors is the one responsible for burning a hole in the ozone layer or for selling out your data to be kept behind glass in case of emergency.6 It is the same blame shifting, buck passing that Disney did with WALL-E; however, this time, it appears that no one is buying it. Frankly, one could easily trace this ethos all the way back to the very inception of the blockbuster form, to fellow H. G. Wells admirer, Steven Spielberg, fifty years ago.7 And so, when any movie tells you how bad things are and that all you need in spite of that is a little Faith, just remember, as this film’s trailer tells us outright, “it’s worse than you think.”

    Notes

    1. Diegetically, it consists mostly of screen recorded desktop footage of a man in his office. Formally, there is no physical medium onto which the images shot are imprinted and those images are further distanced by being frames within frames within frames. Metatextually, as this movie was swept under the rug and dumped onto Prime Video only yesterday with a trailer dropped only a week before that. ↩︎
    2. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as in War of the Worlds, we learn that maybe we are not so different than those who enslave us. Body Snatchers never just about the infiltrating communist threat—although it certainly reflects that Cold War anxiety—but also certainly the stark conformity already present in suburban 1950s America. This same polyvalency can be applied no doubt to Lee’s War as well. ↩︎
    3. As a result of the alien assault on data centers, Will looks on frantically as the Facebook messages with his wife, the last trace of her voice, her pictures—that is, her digital footprint—are scrubbed from an internet under attack: her digital death. By having the widower retreat into his work following her biological death, the obsession with the digital reflections of his wife, his constant tormenting of himself and inability to let her go, is intrinsically linked to capital’s obsession with constant accumulation for its own sake, way past the point of profit. The latter informs the former. ↩︎
    4. Not to mention, in terms of self-exculpation, War of the Worlds has for one of its heroes an Amazon delivery driver, saving the day by having someone place an order to activate his delivery drone. ↩︎
    5. This figure was reported in 2020. ↩︎
    6. This conversation between Joe Rogan and Edward Snowden goes into details on how and why consumer data is collected ad infinitum: https://youtu.be/VFns39RXPrU?si=w78TBnhvFtfH2qeU. ↩︎
    7. For more, an essay I wrote on Spielberg’s Jaws: https://householdrubbish.wordpress.com/2024/11/02/out-of-many-one-out-of-one-many-jaws-and-the-contradiction-of-the-new-hollywood-blockbuster. ↩︎
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  • On WAVELENGTH

    “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”

    John F. Kennedy, Jr., Remarks at the America’s Cup Dinner Given by the Australian Ambassador, September 14, 1962

    Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) opens with a team of people moving a shelf into a room. Throughout the course of the film’s structuralist experiment, the shelf remains mise en scene until the persistent and linking zoom segments slowly bury it in the illegibility of extradiegetic space. The frame: everything onscreen eventually becomes everything offscreen. That is the nature of the camera, exemplified here by the continuous, encroaching zoom at the center of the film. At the apex of the experiment lies a photograph, prefiguring the cinematic obsession with (its own) death. A moment that will never occur again arrested in time and space and flattened forever; the zoom must also come to an end, there is a limit even to the lengthiest and most penetrative gazes, otherwise, what you have is not cinema. Snow’s quasi-long take zoom gives motion to death. This is really no different than any other film, but the fundamental elements of Wavelength do not obscure this fact, in fact, quite wholly and only the opposite.

    The addition of the empty shelf in the opening of the film mirrors the room and the medium itself, each cell is space to be filled with matter. Yet, herein lies the central paradox of film: still images are only indexed onto these film cells via light, and only when projected in time do these “dead” images come to “life.” As Prospero reflects in The Tempest, “These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” The photographic intervention transforming subject into object, something even less: an image—a flicker that delights across the screen. To shoot is to record, but to replay is to reanimate. The bookshelf remains empty, lined with only dust and light, like the strip of spectral images of the object itself.

    And so, the same applies with either of the windows on the back wall; however, they (and the room at large) do become populated with subjects/objects, yet the central paradox still holds true, further emphasized by their fleeting nature onscreen. None of these things last. At the outset, watching Wavelength feels like being a fly on the wall, observing life events unfold from a singular and determined vantage point, never receiving context for the glimpses of actualities beyond and within these four walls. Women chat, cars pass, men die. In other words, there is a narrative in Wavelength—somewhere in between its forty-five-minute runtime—but one the spectator is not privileged to, unable to escape the confines of this Canal Street loft. Despite its overwhelming lack of furnishings and relentless forward propulsion, the viewer is always acutely aware of the larger picture. Women chat, cars pass, men die, and film rolls. The ceaseless thrust toward the final image, toward the film’s death, toward our own, despite the aforementioned signs of life—the photographed waves a worthy figure of this death drive.

    That is, photography is the only means by which to capture it. Film absorbs the waves of the visible light spectrum and channels it here into fluid momentum. All that is Wavelength is the cresting of the wave that just begins to crash back down in its final formal gesture—the image of the water tacked to the back wall washes away in blur. Final frame: like a radio being tuned to catch different waves of transmission, the image finally revealed and held in all its detail starts to lose clarity until its ripples and waves are lapped into shallow focus, swept into the nothingness of the camera apparatus. Across several different film stocks and print processes, Snow pushes us toward the pull of the void. When one wave crashes, another is formed in its ripples, and so on ad infinitum. To the sea, to the photographic basis of cinema, to the mortality of men, or to the end of the film itself, Wavelength returns the viewer back whence they came.

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  • Out of Many, One; Out of One, Many: JAWS and the Contradiction of the New Hollywood Blockbuster

    From the beginning, Jaws was always supposed to be the highest grossing film ever made. Widespread rollout into hundreds of theaters simultaneously during summer vacation, extensive television adverts, and a tie-in merchandise line all ensured its blockbusting capabilities before the film was ever screened before a paying audience. So began the industrial model of the blockbuster, an enterprise had it failed, would have meant (in a manner of speaking) the studio being “on welfare the whole winter,” as shark hunter Quint warns the Amity townsfolk. He could get the job done for three, but will accept nothing less than ten thousand. High risk, even higher reward. “This shark will swallow you whole,” that is, if you (the studios) fail to control this colossus never before seen. And so, this fear of being reduced back to working-class toil and all its insecurities and instabilities is the central anxiety at the bleeding heart of this film.

    In Jaws, the individual reigns supreme, the deliberative power of the masses are manifested as corrupt, overly bureaucratic, ineffectual, and callous. No doubt a consequence of Nixon’s Watergate blunder the year before. After all, chief of police Martin Brody moved from New York City to the quiet Massachusetts resort town in order to escape the urban tumult and social alienation, to start his middle-class life on his new suburban waterfront property. He was afforded the opportunity of upward class mobility, not entirely uncommon for the time, but one that was increasingly waning well before the outset of the next decade.

    Yet perhaps, the greatest element of fantasy in a film with a 25-foot killer shark is surmised by Brody’s insistence that “one man can make a difference.” However, in the world of Jaws, any attempt to come together is thwarted. Initially, Brody unilaterally closes the beach after the first attack, then relinquishes to their reopening at the behest of Mayor Vaughn. Furthermore, the civilian shark hunting parties are demonstrably disorganized and counterproductive, leading to the capture and killing of the wrong animal. Lastly, the final expedition of Brody, Hooper, and Quint goes horribly awry. Brody, with his fear of the ocean, clings to an onshore (stable) notion of collective support and accountability while at sea, attempting to radio for help in killing the great white; however, Quint, the self-made working man born and bred on a individualist diet of mistrust and self sufficiency, smashes the thing to bits. Right as the three men—a cop, a scholar, and the one man specialized for this kind of work—begin to get along, the shark attacks, leading to a damaged hull, a busted engine, and a dead captain.

    With Quint eaten alive and Hooper stranded underwater, Brody the surrogate of the state employs the former’s mode of safety and vantage with the latter’s tools to explode the relentless consuming machine. The ideal individual for the neoliberal age. Brody fully succumbs to the call of the individual after the death of the “working class hero” (Hooper’s jab at Quint). This middle-class savior now captaining the surviving duo of himself and the old money academic, kicking to shore in tandem, held afloat by flotation barrels. The state-regulated industrial patriarchy of Classical Hollywood gives way to the neoliberal network society. Every man for himself. Quint is not so fortunate. He succumbs to the gravity that the other two manage, as if a necessary sacrifice, sliding down the deck into the jaws that haunt him. The working man is consumed by the spectacle, pulled into the indiscriminate, all-devouring field of the shark.

    In the theaters, the similarly stratified audience has become enraptured by the Spielbergian cinema; in addition, a sort of stratification of the audience itself was underway on the basis of class due to the growing suburbanization of theaters. Not to say that the early cinema was utopian and did not succumb to divisions and exclusions, but in just 70 years, gone are the days of the nickelodeon; here are the days of the mall multiplex and the drive-in theater. And then now, streaming and the home theater further continue the social atomization of spectatorship, especially with rising ticket costs turning cinemagoing away from its roots as a shared working-class pastime. However, in its depiction of a fraught relationship between the collective and the individual, Jaws does not simply and entirely willingly accept the cult of the individual. Likewise, outside the text, the pop auteur forges a formal language unique to himself, while appealing to the largest possible audience. Spielberg wishes to have it both ways, and like any good hyper-Newtonian blockbuster, things end up in the air.

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  • God’s Postmodern Man

    I have no memory. I have no history. I am God’s postmodern man.

    Anthony the Great, Father of All Monks
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    I will have no memories left by the time I become an old man. Yet another storehouse of memories has been destroyed by time and carelessness. (Is it really careless on my part if the mechanism is designed to break, designed to be superfluously delicate?) I will have no photos to share with my children and grandchildren, in a world where I choose to start a family. Children keep your stories alive, but I have no stories and likely will have no children. There will be no record—no footprint. This is the second or third time something like this has happened. It’s especially annoying considering, only months ago, I individually went through six-thousand photos and managed it to a respectable thirty-five hundred. I have mourned the loss of a hard drive or old device as I did the loss of some friends. To be fair, it did not take much time to get over either instance. I come to accept that it was simply time to move on, it is of no matter whether it was my choices that caused the outcome or not.

    Is it surface imperfection or rotten at the core?

    Two years ago, on the day of moving back home for my last summer vacation, my phone falls from a mundane height at just-the-right angle, dislodging shreds of glass from the screen. (Even now, without a camera roll as reference, it is difficult to construct a coherent timeline from my position in the present.) At the time, I was on a video call with the first woman I had ever fallen in love with. Ironically, the relationship did not last very much longer after that. As the years passed, more of the screen chips away, spiderweb fractures spread across the back glass, and the camera gets a hole in it that quickly fills with sand, now only able to capture impressionistic swathes of light and subject through its broken lens. The second day of this new year, a properly tremendous drop adds a new array of colored lines under the initial impact almost two years ago. It is completely unusable by the middle of this week. A keyboard with a mind of its own gives way to a screen with zero haptic response. My first fear is that I had just lost the first time I was in love. Yes, I still have my own memories, encoded and stored; however, the problem now lies in the retrieval, lacking the specific visual stimuli designed to conjure memories. A photograph is an instance, allowing one to recall a time now passed. Without the instance of the photograph from which to ground my re-collection, all these moments—whether shared or having only been perceived by me—will be lost. The issue is not technology; the issue is memory, and mine has been failing for four years. A brain fog that will never pass.

    I knew it was hopeless, but I set an appointment the next day to have the screen fixed with money I really could not afford to spend, knowing it was likely an issue that had gone beyond mere display. All they could offer was to essentially replace the phone for more than double the price of a screen repair. While not the most terrible deal, all my photos would be trapped on the locked phone with no conceivable way to access them. There is no backup. All anyone can muster in the aftermath of these situations is well-meaning advice to back up your data before the next time this will undoubtedly happen again. It never matters. Even if you do your best, something still goes wrong. If I were to tally all the happenings since my having moved to New York, on paper, the deltas would surely outweigh the pluses. However, no one lives life on paper anymore.

    But then, sometimes, things are not as bad as you thought. Wading in the midst of the rubble, you think to check elsewhere and, sure enough, there exists a partial catalog. The last year-and-a-half in images might still be missing, but it is something. It has saved what you feared was gone forever. For you, it’s enough. So, do you consider yourself spared?

    I suppose it is rather fitting that the act of deleting was the last time I will ever see each and every one of those pictures, having gone through the last eight years of lives in order to trim the digital fat. It is certainly devastating to think about: all the planned video ideas that can never be started, let alone finished, the loss of an ongoing record that provided some sense of linear time, all those instances you want to always have on demand. Yet, what else can I do but accept my fate, even try to enjoy it? For a second, I worried about publishing this—it’s too personal, too much about me—but I will wake up in the morning a completely different person. After all, I am unburdened by the depths of memory. I cannot be upset. I have already forgotten.

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  • New Headphones

    I am only writing to stave off the impending depressive episode that I can feel building up in my body. This is gonna be all off the top. I feel too overwhelmed by choice in this city. I’m too obsessive for this. Just yesterday, hanging out with my new NYU friend for the first time, she takes me to a market and I can’t decide what cookies to buy. Most of the options were too expensive and I knew whatever I chose it wasn’t gonna be very good and I didn’t need to be buying them in the first place, so I made myself pick up a cheap, day-old black-and-white cookie after much pacing and deliberation and complaining. My next essay that I’ve been researching and outlining is gonna take so much time and energy and I don’t think it’s gonna turn out that good. It’s not a novel idea it turns out, so I’m not sure how best to go through with it. The laptop I have is a real piece of shit and it’s a hassle to get it to do the simple things I want it to do. I miss my computer back home. How pathetic is it that my happiness is tied to a machine? I guess it’s not that pathetic to be like everyone else. The only Übermensch is that man you will never see or hear from, living away from everyone according to his own beliefs, on his own terms. If the Nietzschean ideal can be surmised as the warrior-poet, I see not many better contenders than Ted Kaczynski. I feel like every man at his core is a libertarian: deep down, we all want to be homesteaders. An entire class of people that cannot stomach being told what to do. And I see videos of these guys going out into the wilderness with next to no survival skills and an iPhone, where they’ll learn how to live off the land and build a house and gather food, like a real man. Yet, they have to post. It’s a compulsion. I genuinely believe it’s just our evolution. The Call of the Wild is overwritten by the Cry for Attention. I try to reject—more like, moderate—all this technology that wastes time and kills attention spans, while, on the other hand, I exalt it in the abstract as maybe still possessing some liberatory potential. The Accelerationist Manifesto professes this doctrine as well: that is, technology can be repurposed under a new economic organization: it can liberate us! the Keynesian future isn’t dead, it just got delayed! However, not even a machine is born with a completely blank slate. There’s too much us in them. As a species, we have always been searching out care. It’s our nature to seek it. I suppose seeking always ends in destroying. I won’t shit on these guys for wanting to get some likes by uploading their lives. I’m not a primitivist, and from what little I know, I honestly think it seems like an ineffectual political philosophy, but aesthetically it just makes sense to me. There is a beauty there, an appreciation that emanates from my bones— something I can neither question nor adequately describe. I wouldn’t want to. Jameson is wrong. There is no waning of affect. On the contrary, there is an overproduction (and thus, a manufactured overconsumption of this surplus affect). Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of Shaviro lately. I was introduced to him in college and I agree that no one’s doing it like him when it comes to writing on film—although I find myself legitimately and equally excited by the stuff he’s written on any other subject. I have finished a handful of books and essays in just the past week or so, which feels great (with many of these PDFs just picked up on random urge and finished in just a few sittings or less), but then it all gets too overwhelming again. I can’t read everything and I certainly won’t understand a good chunk of what I do read, I can’t possibly comment on all of it. This next big essay idea keeps finding new sources for itself, and like the last one, will take months to fix together. I need to focus on other things to stay sane, but then it’s just there weighing on my mind, so how can I do anything else? So, I don’t do anything. It feels like a black hole honestly. Maybe that’s just writing in general. The obsessive-compulsive cannot be broken, it seems. It’s so frustrating to be someone so easily discouraged and afraid of criticism and rejection, but then after putting forth the minimum amount of effort to convince myself “well I tried, didn’t I?,” knowing full well that I’m not gonna get anywhere, I can’t learn to just give up. I can’t throw a punch, but I can take one. I like to call myself a “not-angry person,” but it was only yesterday I actually realized how angry I still am. My anger is not outward, but I don’t feel it’s inward either. Freud believed melancholia to be a manifestation of anger toward oneself. I genuinely don’t know if I’m angry at myself. I certainly don’t express it outwardly. There are no vocal outbursts, no smashed keyboards, no hatchets through doors, no slamming fists. I don’t think anyone will ever see or hear that again. But, there is that venom. If not inward, then interior. Whenever I see something so mundane that it really should not even be given a second thought or garner any more than a nanosecond’s reaction, I try to mediate between myself and the anger, but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. That’s because it’s not a feeling: it only becomes an emotion when you try to rationalize the affect. I eventually forget, and then I’m angry again at the next thing. You can pull a man out of anger, but you cannot pull the anger out of a man. It’s the only emotion we’re taught is acceptable, says bell hooks. It feels like I have to undo all the damage of purposefully making myself as invisible as possible over the last decade. I don’t get to be mad that no one wants to pay attention to me. I don’t want it, but I do. I won’t pretend to be above the want for validation. I’m not better than that. I’m not above scrolling on my phone for far too long or wishing for the perfect partner to help alleviate my problems. My Bluetooth headphones broke for good right before I moved here, then the iPhone adapter for these awful old CD player earphones broke, and then yesterday, the speakers on my phone stopped making sound altogether, which isn’t even the first time that’s happened. I walked to Target to go buy Swiffer pads and headphones. I didn’t care what kind they were. I was going in there and getting whatever: no looking for a better deal online, no standing there reading the back of every box; I just bought the standard Apple EarPods with a new adapter and left. Cleaning the floor and listening to music. I knew that would pick me up. I always kinda thought the music-as-therapy/music-makes-you-feel-less-alone crowd were annoying, but I did feel it working. I still kinda feel like shit again. Now, I’m trapped with these headphones. I can’t hear anything without them. After two days of training for my new job, I decided to stop showing up. I hated it there. I hated those people. The second day wasn’t just giving it a second chance, but an exercise in figuring out what it was that was rubbing me the wrong way about this place. I can only describe its “culture” as bro-ish. It felt like going in to work at a frat house. It was even funnier when I learned that this shitty Scandinavian company for all its emphasis on “chill vibes” was sued not too long ago for misogynistic hiring practices. It all made sense. I didn’t want to feel like the weird kid who got caught sneaking into a Sigma Chi party and was now being publicly humiliated in front of everyone for thinking he could have ever gotten away with pretending to be one of them. The majority of that training felt more like hazing than any sort of learning. I am a quitter. I’m proud of it. I don’t care. I don’t care enough to describe it in anymore detail, but it made me smile to think of their reaction when I wasn’t there the next day. Of course, they don’t actually care. It’s whatever, I got paid for the online courses and the two days I showed up. I want to find something better. The backbone of my pseudo-justification for moving here was to get closer to a thriving artistic and filmic culture. No, it’s because three years ago I was the angriest and unhappiest l’d ever been and wanted to leave everything behind. I really thought that was possible. I said that I was going to move to New York City. I had to! Even after clawing myself out of that hole, I still felt compelled to go through with this promise. I forget that me now is not the same as me then, or maybe I forget the opposite. I really don’t know. On the one hand, I made it here, which is insane; yet, I’ve already put up my hand to throw in the towel. I’ve barely tried to find a job that won’t make me want to kill myself. Wasn’t that the whole point, to find something that relates to my passions? Whatever, I got paid to learn how to make coffee and juice for a few days. I’ll see your $150 and raise you a pair of new earbuds. It was only a matter of time before I had no other recourse but to admit that I too get lonely and in need of comfort.

    ,

  • In the Face of Fire: Peter Campus’s Three Transitions, the Self-Portrait Tradition, and the States of the Arts [Revise-it #2]

    This essay is the second piece I wanted to elaborate on, as I think the readings I teased out have not been previously discussed, to my knowledge, by any of the previous scholarship surrounding this videotape by Peter Campus. This was originally “Response Paper 5” for my History of Video Art class in my final semester, a low stakes weekly assignment, meant only to be 250 words, to ensure we were engaging with class materials. However, in my preparatory rewatches of Three Transitions for the assignment, I was propelled to keep riffing and digging further and see where it took me—much past 250 words. When I thought I had said everything I had to say, there was another idea that jumped out ahead of me, necessitating that I push forward. Once more, this text ended up being more ambitious than I had originally imagined: that is, I found myself having much more to say all over again—new angles, new complications—a year and 3,000 words later. So, here is a little something to mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important contributions to the history of video art.

    In relation to fine art, Peter Campus’s Three Transitions did not immediately remind me of the standard self-portrait. Campus’s addition struck me as something else, operating by an entirely new set of principles, diverging from the usual artist posing in medium close-up. In my mind, if we were to compare this video to any self-portraits, what seems a more suitable comparison are those paintings that foreground the process of the artmaking within the self-portrait itself, pushing or playing with the genre’s conventions rather than focusing on a realistic re-presentation of artist likeness. Diego Velázquez or Adélaïde Labille-Guiard with their self-portraits in a group, for example: Las Meninas (1656) and Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785), respectively. In addition, Pieter Claesz with the combination of self-portrait and allegorical still life in Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628), or Johannes Gumpp’s two self-portraits (ca. 1646) and Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (1960) that see the artists each represent themselves three times in one painting. In all these examples, the artist is seen at work, creating, within that very work that is now displayed for the viewer. And while the latter three reveal the material supports of their self-portraits upon the canvas itself, Campus, despite working with a different medium with its own set of formal apparatuses, also opts to highlight these same fixtures of two-dimensional art in his work, namely, paper and paint. But to create his own version of a triple self-portrait, Campus superimposes two video feeds, adjusting the alpha channels of the layers to double his likeness for each of the three transitions. (So, is that two-self portraits total; one for each layer? Three; for each vignette? Or six; for the total number of Peter Campuses onscreen over the video’s duration?) Despite the multiplications of himself, Campus’s gesture is not one wholly in line with self-portraiture. Unlike those artists, Campus is picturing his body in order to “destroy” it. Two layers of visual information are glaringly (and repeatedly) fused to form an anti-self-portrait triptych. In Three Transitions, Campus plays on the art tradition of the self-portrait, challenging its celebration of artist identity and individual subjecthood by employing video abstraction, alongside two-dimensional art media, as tools of deconstruction.

    In what I see as aligned with typical early video art fashion, Campus is concerned primarily with deconstruction without necessarily planning any sort of reconstruction. In the first scene, after appearing to cut and then step through his own superimposed back, Campus shoddily tapes the ripped paper barrier back together. In the second, he applies paint atop his face, and due to differences in his movement and position before the camera in each layer of footage, reveals a second face that appears to have been waiting underneath the “real” thing. And the third sees Campus burn a piece of paper that holds his own moving image through the same principle of chromatic substitution explored in the second. Across all three of his transitions, Campus is taking fine art media and repurposing them to dis-figure his own image and question assumptions upheld by the self-portrait tradition, a tradition previously only made possible by similar supports. In the scholarship surrounding this video too much attention is paid to Campus himself and the changes undergone by his body-image and what that means he means about subjectivity in the age of instantaneous feedback, etc., etc. I am more interested in the objects at hand. Too much focus on the self and not the portrait, the support, the media that organizes the form.1 The “self-ish” approach seems antithetical to the project of a video centered on breaking down boundaries. Rather, what is the video saying about self-portraiture? about artistic tradition? about itself and its medium within said tradition?

    For instance, one could note several similarities between Campus and Gumpp’s acts of tripled self-portraying (and by extension to Rockwell’s appropriation of the latter as well); however, Gumpp’s goal is one of “defiance . . . by means of art,” an act of preservation from a mysterious, overlooked artist acutely aware of his “impending absence” after the work’s completion (Blasone 3). As scholar Pino Blasone astutely notes, art critic Jean-Luc Nancy and artist Norman Rockwell in their own responses to Gumpp’s portrait omit the symbolic additions of the cat and dog on either side of the artist. As I see it, scholarship surrounding Three Transitions fails to accommodate the significance of Campus’s symbolically reflexive mise-en-scène as well.

    The relationship between painting and moving images goes further back than Campus and his critique of the subject and the limitations of self-portraying. Long before video, film took from painting its core language, but film was about real time—images in motion. When consumer-grade video equipment was made available to the public, artists who adopted the new medium (in the mid-60s and into the early 70s) made themselves the objects of their art, many often performing alone in their studios. These video pioneers added the elements of time, motion, and sound to the act of self-portraying as artistic expression. They took advantage of the instantaneous feedback allowed by the advent of video—to see oneself in real time, to interact with one’s own image, and thus, act according to it. Not to mention, analog video also contributed to the destabilization of art as tangible object. At the time, video was stored on a physical tape, but the images were not viewable through this mechanism alone, as on a reel of film. You could not handpaint on magnetic videotape or physically cut it like film. Unlike film, unlike painting, video processes were all electronic. And so, by employing two-dimensional art media, Campus reflexively acknowledges the historical basis of this new form of moving image media in order to produce something aesthetically radical.

    By foregrounding paint media, Campus returns to the linguistic basis of filmic cinema in order to forge a new mode of looking, one more adapted and adaptable to the world of screens and simulations.2 After all, video (Latin for “I see”) is an action, while film is a technology. In her “Aesthetics of Narcissism” essay, Rosalind Krauss identified this looking as one directed back on the artists’ self when she prescribed onto video a psychological model of medium: narcissism. She argues that the mainstay motif of nascent video art, that is, the monitor, creates a closed loop of space-time with the camera, and it is within this loop of space-time that the artist operates, manipulating their own image by engaging with their own image (Krauss 50). Put simply, an “investment of energy in selfhood” characterized the video art medium more so than any common material basis (Jurgess). Whenever I engage with Krauss’s assessment, I always find myself agreeing and disagreeing (no doubt a testament to its rhetorical brilliance and academic longevity). For example, while Campus does observe his own image offscreen to direct the movement of his body, by the finale of the video, he begins the move to remove him-self from the image, absorbed into the frame. He allows the viewer a peek into the pregnant nothingness beyond the human. All one needs to participate in the camera-man cyborg is hands—the only parts of his body left. And so, Three Transitions, although largely spotlighting the artist’s corporeality, searches for a new mode of looking that attempts to peer beyond the subject. In the liberal Western world, social institutions—including, and especially, those involving art and artmaking—are centered around the concept of the individual, the subject. Perhaps, we can never escape this narcissism or self-possession, I don’t even think Campus completely does (or can), but he suggests the possibility and necessity for other “models of posthuman distributed subjectivity” not centered around the human (Jurgess). After all, Campus titles this work Three Transitions, not Three Self-Portraits, foregrounding the progression and destruction of his body-as-art-object through time, emphasizing transformation, evolution, moving beyond. But toward what?

    According to Steven Shaviro, “An artist is somebody who wants to turn the whole world into images; but he usually ends up making more objects instead.” However, Campus with the ending to his most famous video—a video that has overshadowed the rest of his oeuvre, essentially rendering him into an image, in a manner of speaking—typifies this desire to turn the world into images. Video only conjures images, not objects. For Shaviro, an image is nothing like a solid object. By placing his image over paper, by painting his face, and only by videotaping these acts, Campus registers the unique ability of video to flatten the world into images, especially the art world and its traditions of self-representation à la object construction. Why go to a museum to view the works of the Old Masters when the entire canon of Western painting exists free of charge as images online? He burns the old media until its just a camera recording darkness. “Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to a state of almost transparency” (Shaviro). Campus accelerates this process toward its logical conclusion, removing art media and artist from the picture—no, from the screen.

    In an increasingly visual culture increasingly concerned with surfaces and interfaces, Campus becomes these very things himself. For example, in the final transition, Campus is the only visible thing, placed in the foreground as well to highlight his role as surface, as image (as he also holds his own image in his hands). Of specific importance here as well, the background gets noticeably darker from the first to the second to the third transition, paradoxically adding and subtracting a sense of depth within the frame. Both self-portraiture and Three Transitions convert three-dimensional models to two-dimensional image to create the illusion of depth; now, the camera does most of that work for you, allowing the artist to focus on different, newer questions alongside the age-old quandaries. And so, it is all a flattening into surface: the transfer from 3D to 2D, from life to analog (and once more now to digital). Video is concerned with nothing but surface, that is, with what we can see.

    The void is absent, the void is revealed, the void is darkened, and it is here, at its darkest, its most impending and impregnable state, that Campus stages the crux of his critique.

    In the first two sections of Three Transitions, things return to how they were, albeit changed: the paper barrier is more or less intact, Campus still has a face (or two?). But in the last episode, the protruding brow of Campus shrinks back out of frame as the paper—as stand-in for classical painting media—withers away. The first two vignettes could be read as a dual-sided repetition of destruction-creation but the last is a destructive gesture toward subject and two-dimensional fine art tradition, especially the self-portrait. Yet destruction seems too harsh a label for this misleadingly simple video short. It is more a change of matter into new forms, as its title implies. The video triptych follows Campus’s phase transitions through the three states of matter. In other words, the first section is solid (paper), the second is liquid (paint), and the third, gas (fire). It should be noted that fire is a chemical reaction: through video, art and the human body are ultimately undergoing a sort of molecular transformation. The reappearance of paper in the finale is not a return to the groundedness of the initial solid phase, as it is not solids or liquids that combust but the gaseous vapors produced once heated.3 After reaching its flashpoint, this chroma-keyed sheet of paper, once ignited, cannot be repaired like the first, destroying the possibility of any ultimate reconstruction.

    However, there is a fourth, more elusive state of matter, and I do not believe Three Transitions leaves it out. Without definite shape or volume, plasma as a medium is quasi-neutral, infinitely conductive, and dominated by electrical and magnetic fields. Videotape could be described in much the same way, interacting with both these fields, encoding audiovisual information by magnetically recording electronic signals. Like its first appearance, the paper in this final section once more acts as a barrier, separating the “real” Campus from the black void before him, the camera from the void, viewer from void. As it burns, an indefinite space of possibility is revealed; it makes itself known, finally apparent to the viewer so trained to focus on the artist and art objects. That buck stops here for Campus, with video. No longer is the author the final word on the creation of meaning. For the final four seconds before the credits, the disembodied hands of the artist appear as if those of the camera—the camera now functioning like POV. Campus-as-camera. This final action captures the ready-to-hand synthesis of man and video. Film may have developed the language, but video handed out the paper and pen (or rather, paper and paint) to everyone.

    Then, Campus cuts the video short. The paper is never fully allowed to burn. He will eventually have to let it go; an action that we will never see. The edit does not allow the viewer to witness the artist dropping the old media/tradition nor does it allow any legitimate destruction to the artist’s body. As I work through the problem of this video over and over, the self-portrait reasserts itself more than originally considered. Yet, there is a cut. That is the brilliance of Three Transitions: it is both humorously deadpan and disorienting, it is self-portrait and not all at once. Shaviro affirms this paradox more broadly: “images have a weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing.” Campus’s career aside, as a standalone text, the video and the state of the artist end ambiguously (i.e., what becomes of the artist and his hands, previously tasked to rip, tape, and paint?). Nothing. The paper is always still there, even if it is burning, but the face is always erased by the end, however, the perpetual loop of the gallery will always be sure to bring it back; the gallery monitor and canvas work in tandem after all, preserving the order of things. Like postmodernism to medium specificity, video interrupts, but it does not undo. Yet no video since has captured the potentially deconstructive, emancipatory power of video as succinctly as Peter Campus’s Three Transitions. Video is the next state; the void, its reflection. Video was the next state, but it is not the final state.4 Nonetheless, video still has the power to move art and subjecthood effortlessly between each phase of matter until there is nothing left but two sets of pinched fingers clenching ashen paper in a void, perhaps where something new can spring forth.

    Notes

    1. It would seem that the current direction of Campus’s career (i.e., opting to work in the vain of what he refers to as “videographs”—static long shots of natural landscapes recorded with a digital video camera—which followed his period as a nature photographer from the late 70s to mid-90s) and the choice to now stylize his name and works without capitalization spells a move that aims to de-privilege the subject. ↩︎
    2. According to André Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” the essence of photography is centered on its realism, taking over the realistic function of painting maintained up until the late nineteenth century. As a result, cinema took over as the primary arbiter of realism, producing the richest imitation of reality: “André Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance” (Bazin 10). Campus makes uncanny the realism once proclaimed to be embodied in the photographic arts. To paint one’s face to reveal the same face via chroma key technique figures the fledgling video medium as markedly and consciously departing from realism, or, at the very least, concerning itself much less with such notions while reflexively operating within this filial thread of the (moving) image. (And so, it can be said that video has the baggage of two other art forms to carry.) However, and/or for example, the locked, static framing in Three Transitions recalls the “simplicity” of silent cinema tableaux, in turn derived from the landscapes and genre painting of nineteenth-century French Realism. Even the videographs mentioned in the previous note also invoke this historicity. So, maybe Campus is not all that far off? ↩︎
    3. Additionally, paper serves a different function between the first and third transition, appearing in the latter to behave almost like a monitor or even a mirror. Ironically, the next and now current stage of video in its digital iteration has been regarded by scholars like Lev Manovich as more akin to painting than traditional cinema or videotape (3). Not to say that Campus predicted digital video, but he certainly foresaw and/or ushered in the conditions that allowed the (post-)medium to literally supplant itself over physical media, overtaking those cultural spaces once dominated by print and paint before the Information Age. ↩︎
    4. But what will supersede video and the digital? This article suggests the quantum, which oddly enough returns in some sense to the analog model. The difference between digital status and quantum state is also perhaps relevant—something to think about and develop later. I don’t know anything about science, but it all sounds very exciting. Even further reading: https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/the-end-of-digital-revolution-is-coming-heres-whats-next.html. ↩︎

    Works Cited

    Postface

    What is left in a world in which we have burned our images?

    Perhaps, in fact, we have reached the void that Campus foresaw, having walked face first, full of excitement for all its promises only to find there was no global village, there was no more counterculture, and there was nothing beyond our selves. We only got more images. The digital revolution changed everything and nothing. We are unhappy not because we have become images or because images have been exposed as always having been the “real” thing, but because we mistake the images as anything other than what they are. An image is an image is an image.

    La vague (1869/1870, Gustave Courbet)
    The Unchanging Sea (1910, D. W. Griffith)
    a wave (2009, peter campus)
    , , ,

  • Denouement

    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.

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  • The Future Is Spectre, the Future Is Video [Revise-it #1]

    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 employer that 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.  

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