Screenshot from angelicism01’s Film01, 2023.
A DAY AFTER DEINSTALLING my own show, a firewall downtown at Blade Study, and one before the ashen haze from Canadian fires began its acrid encroachment across the skies of greater New York, a very online and apocalyptic bard, angelicism01, premiered a first cut of Film01, histoire(s) de l’internet at Anthology Film Archives. Logistical information, relayed with paranoia and an unearned solemnity of tone, was withheld from my inbox until two hours prior: “Keep location information private for our safety,” the email read. The original invitation, dated May 17, declared, “Film01 is a peace zone.” Normally I do bring my long sword (ho!) to the theater, but out of respect for the occasion, I left the steel at home.
The facts as I can substantiate them are as follows: Angelicism01 is a prolific—already, an overrated quality—writer who has been publishing a Substack since late 2020, around the same time I published on QAnon in these pages. Coincidence?! They also claim to have come “into existence” the same day that a girl named Ciara Horan died. More on that later. Their first article was titled “A Portrait of Donald Trump,” in which a few of their thematics were laid out, e.g. addiction (“If the world is in a state of addictogenesis, then we know from our experience of addiction that an addict will use until they die or until they need not to, until the trauma underneath can be faced.”), Christian philosophy, and The Donald (“Trump’s genius is of course partly penis”). Their other interests include “namelessness and overwhelmingness,” as well as our ongoing sixth mass extinction event. I don’t know who they are, and angelicism01 doesn’t seem to want us to know. Few have swiped right on this profile, but the mutuals—a motley assortment of meme-posting accounts, young people sporting hundred-yard stares, New York microcelebrities, and aspiring fame whores—seem misted in the perfumed ambiance of loyalty, or at least tickled by the fizziness of belonging to any clique or cult. Angelicism01’s writing is hard-driving yet often aimless, at times poetic, even beautiful, but could also fairly be characterized as impenetrable scripturient announcements goated with the edgelord sauce.
And like all writers, what they really want to do is direct! A reading from the book of “PRINCIPLES OF FILM01: HOW TO SHOOT ANGELICISM CINEMA” (June 24, 2022):
Thought under extinction has no plot, no dramaturgy, no twist, no opening or closure, no suspense. It’s not literal or theatrical. It’s, lets [sic] say, pure. It’s a pure cinema, play of light and darkness without a voice-over. It’s the camera indifferently recording glaciers melting. Film01 is the extinction pov. Cinema is a 20th century reality and angelicism belongs to the 21st century. This means angelicism is not cinema. It films cinema. It subsumes both contemporary cinema and the history of cinema.
This caliber of pedantry made me think we have a one-man—and I do think angelicism01 is absolutely a man—Cahiers du Cinéma-live-and-die-by-their-craft artist on our hands. The obvious Jean-Luc Godard shoutout in Film01’s subtitle speaks to their demand to be taken very seriously (an interview with the late Frenchman is even excerpted as voiceover in the movie). Prior to the start of Film01, some murmurs drifted through the not-full house about the soon-to-screen piece being three hours long. Perhaps the audience was afraid of being—or becoming—bored. After the fact, I learned there had been a rumor someone would shoot up the theater, for whatever that’s worth. A troupe of VIPs—a number of people who make either sustained appearances or brief cameos in the film—occupied the third row from the screen. They (mostly) stayed for the whole thing. Although I had some second thoughts when, not long after it got going, I was treated to lingering shots of a cross carved into someone’s bleeding index finger, I, too, saw it all. Cinema lives?
But this, as even angelicism01 claims, is not cinema. It is a nonnarrative, assiduously edited anthology of TikToks, Instagram Stories, memes, and various viral clips intercut with a small percentage of original footage. If you’re not the kind of person who gets excited by a statement like “Let’s begin with a series of static shots by no one”—which my notes tell me was either recited or appeared as a text across the screen at some point in the visual stampede—then histoire(s) de l’internet is not for you, even if it may be about you and your life as mediated more by timeline than by time. It’s the filmic edit’s epic meeting with the social media feed, insisting on the negligibility of the sources of the content in the movie as well as perhaps even the viewer’s experience of it. Angelicism01 might think this relates to how the internet’s contents are so voluminous now as to be immanent, but to take that as a strength of this movie, would, of course, be a leap of faith. It remains to be seen whether exploiting the internet’s collapse of contextual meaning as form is able to yield meaning beyond stating that such a collapse is taking place. One of the director’s favorite phrases seems to be: “We are speaking to existence,” as borrowed from a SoundCloud rapper’s drug-hazed livestream some years ago. “Tears are a mistake. Infinity is a problem,” the movie told me, but I couldn’t say how proximate that was to the expropriated voiceover of a viral sound clip of a British girl saying “shut the fuck up” over, and over, and over, or where it fell in relation to the many cut-ins of K-pop dance sequences. I remember explosions, visual gags about 9/11.
Screenshot from angelicism01’s Film01, 2023.
Angelicism01 was looking for the image of extinction online, and Film01 is like a volume of search results, collated. It’s not illuminating—you’ve probably seen a lot of it before. The collaging of individuals’ camera-facing vulnerability and found footage of worldly disaster is very similar to the compact music video for Airport’s “World Alone,” which I wrote about in these pages back in 2016. Film01’s re-representation of new world disorder through a Flusserian onslaught of technical images is undertaken with a grave attitude, though moments of uplift, intentional or not, fly by. Consider the free-floating declaration: “There will be no films after this one because there will be no time to make them.” Maybe the difference between a bricoleur and a director of film is that the latter knows how to end one. Film01 has no ending, can have no ending—a film about infinitude can only be stopped or turned away from.
Like a drug, Film01 puts one through stages, some better than others. In the last quarter of the movie, a gal walks down a sidewalk reading aloud off of her phone: “Getting high on the internet at the end of time is perfect. It’s like war.” The movie’s program of amphitheatrical discourse looks and can feel as shitty as spending three hours scrolling on social media does. Extended passages of nature and urban scenes as calm oases in the chaos of the composition are obvious homages to Hideaki Anno’s The End of Evangelion (1997), for which we could blame a lot, trust me. As with that film, with its indulgent biblical imagery, Film01’s accumulation likewise implies that angelicism thinks he needs to go through all the circles of hell to find a lift to heaven. I can’t quite tell what he believes, but if I may tweak an old, prototypical meme of a smol unidentified flying object, he “wants [us] to believe.” How, or why, though, are we supposed to believe in you?
It remains to be seen whether exploiting the internet’s collapse of contextual meaning as form is able to yield meaning beyond stating that such a collapse is taking place.
Umberto Eco’s theory of the cult object says that such a work “should show not one central idea, but many. It should not reveal a coherent “philosophy of composition” but it should live on, and by virtue of, its magnificent instability.” This is a cult movie, and one of its main methods of construction, e.g. theft, all but guarantees some legal exposure and hamstrung scalability as a formally distributed film. I respect the choice, but am compelled to lodge the strongest of objections (your honor) to the movie’s most straightforward passage: A memorial of sorts to a girl who died before she was twenty and is known via 4chan boards for the following she encouraged there or was entrapped by, depending on your perspective re: how much a child can be held responsible for creating an explicitly erotic and self-destructive feedback loop with strangers on an online forum. I wouldn’t know who she was if not for angelicism01’s obsession with, even empathy for her. But I also question whether raising awareness of Horan by appropriating the material that exacerbated, even created, her doomed situation, does her memory any kindness. It wouldn’t kill her to leave her alone.
Screenshot from angelicism01’s Film01, 2023.
Another major problem with angelicism01’s movie, and any purportedly cutting-edge work using the internet’s piles of material, is the limitation of an audience that can’t or won’t engage with work for a sustained duration and find anything there to further their thinking with. Even one of Film01’s more famous stars allegedly walked out of the Anthology screening. If true, this seems to affirm our anon auteur’s interest in automaticity. The work will exist for its own sake, the director’s satisfaction perhaps, speaking in an endless scroll to an existence that only the most terminally online can relate to, or to an extinction event with greater material ramifications than whatever’s up on TikTok. The painter Pierre Bonnard once said, “The painting will not exist if the viewer does not do half the work.” Consider this a warning: We will get the culture we deserve at the end of time while getting high on the internet.
The reception in the lobby at Anthology afterward was sparse, fizzled out, even glum. Red wine and candy were served. Saltwater taffy—baby blue and white. Sour belts. A man snapped a photograph of me behind my back—I knew it by the flash. My friend Dean Kissick, a writer who pops up briefly in the background of Film01, tried to draw out my immediate reaction to the experience. I declined. My intuition told me to leave, walk away from this whole scene. The next day, the sun turned into a scalded dot glowing Pantone’s color of the year for 2012—when the world was supposed to end, again—reminding me of another circle: the black ring in an expanse of white screen to which Film01 returns, or recurs, with rapidly blinking intensity. A few days later I see someone reading the 1991 Koji Suzuki novel Ring on the subway, exit at my usual stop, and find a bootleg DVD of the American adaptation sequel The Ring Two (2005) on the street. I open Instagram and the top post is photos from the premiere, including one of me. I don’t recall consenting to this. Film01 is not unlike the haunted VHS tape in The Ring—don’t watch it if you don’t want to be manipulated, infected by images. Then again, the farcical aspect of all this is that it will be difficult to brainwash people with a movie few can or want to see.
Screenshot from angelicism01’s Film01, 2023.
ALMOST A WEEK LATER, on Sunday the eleventh, Metrograph held another one-night screening with slightly flummoxing access, prioritizing tickets purchased with cryptocurrency—that’s so over!—and insisting that the event was sold out before I could get one. Titled “THE IDIOT”—a reference to a Byung-Chul Han book and perhaps a cross-promotion for an upcoming screening of Lars von Trier’s 1999 “Dogme 95” joint The Idiots—the showing was organized by Metalabel (“a release club where groups of people who share the same interest drop and support work together”) and featured work by eight contributors whose time-based digital collages, like Film01, evince little investment in narrative filmmaking and linear time. And yet the films were scheduled to start right at 7:30 PM, with doors at 7! The program notes indicated that these works were meant to “shed light on the purity and significance of the Idiot’s pursuit of self-expression.” That loaded word again—“purity.”
Charlie Curran’s contribution to Metrograph’s “THE IDIOT.” Photo by author.
Charlie Curran’s movie was the most cohesive: a found-footage survey of the r/WallStreetBets saga. I remember it all too well. So did Dean. In the lobby afterward, we waxed nostalgic for the golden yesteryear of 2021, back when we were young, wild, free, and learning about call and put options. His best gal, Paris Review assistant editor Olivia Kan-Sperling, had a full Telfar backpack. I hope she might show me what she’s packing, someday. Dean revived the topic of Film01 and spoke of his desire for it to break the rectilinear boundaries of its frame. I noted that that sounds a lot like expanded cinema, which is about, oh, sixty-plus years old at this point, and currently available for investigation in the simulated Stan VanDerBeek dome at MoMA’s “Signals” survey.
Tiffany Sia, Max Weinman, Joan Jonas, Carissa Rodriguez, Whitney Claflin, Eric Banks, and Rachel Harrison at the Light Industry Benefit on June 14. Photo by author.
THE GLEEFUL ANHEDONIA that characterized most of the aforementioned moviegoing experiences met its dialectical opposite several days later at a refreshingly snail-paced dinner with some of the smartest and most accomplished film buffs in New York. This year’s benefit for Light Industry—a venue for cinema in all its forms, regularly holding at-capacity events of fairly niche or challenging work—took place at Archestratus Books + Foods in Greenpoint on June 14 and served an amply illustrious group of allies. Cinema lives! And here are a few keeping it alive: Tiffany Sia, David Joselit and Steven T. Incontro, Jeff Preiss, Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, Whitney Claflin, Bruce Hainley, Carissa Rodriguez, Joan Jonas, Joshua Siegel, Alex Kitnick, Zak Kitnick, Jennifer Krasinski, and Louise Lawler—the last of whom wore cool shades all night. Preiss lauded the wonders of cataract surgery over bowls of vichyssoise—my compliments to the chef, Paige Lipari—noting he had been worried about what might happen during the procedure in case of involuntary eye movement. Lawler, apparently, shares his surgeon—and, as he quoted her, “I moved my eye.” Praying for a speedy recovery for this visionary! Later, Preiss gifted me a beautiful, moving story about his family and 9/11—about intuition and something incredible. On principle I refuse to edit this material into our final cut. I will share, however, that Hainley seems to be working on a project about Richard Prince’s legally embattled forays into appropriating Instagram posts. Cheers—looking forward to it! As I listened to Joselit and Sia converse, the thought occurred to me that if you’re looking for an artist whose work engages the internet’s circulatory system of images and video to truly critical effect and with real stakes for the creator, please engage whatever Tiffany puts out into this world. If you’re not in hot water with at least one national government, is your work really so edgy?
Morue à la mode de Maria at “Marguerite’s Kitchen.” Photo by author.
The light industrialists Thomas Beard and Ed Halter had arranged for an entire menu based on author Marguerite Duras’s (pronounced “Du-rass”) recipes, which they were introduced to via John Waters. “Cooking, unlike literature, is for everyone.” She said what she said! Port was served with the pâté de foies de volaille, and it was over a glass of the sweet red that I ventured to ask Beard if he knew of the angelic anon’s recent foray into film. He was unaware, but he described their writing as “electrocuted by the divine fire of the internet.” Limpid brevity! He then generously shared with me a pro tip about the film Havoc in Heaven (1965), a Chinese animation that was restored by an online network of DIY fans and preservationists. Now that’s what I call collective authorship motivated by love and lore against the entropy of extinction! I walked home from dinner with stargazer lilies in my hand—there’s something you can hold instead of a phone.
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