i just know it’s beautiful… i just think it’s really beautiful
—spiraljette filming the sun and sky for the June 5 cut of Film01
What needs to be believed will be believed, when needed.
—Nick Land this February
L'être le plus prostitué, c'est l'être par excellence, c'est Dieu, puisqu'il est l'ami suprême pour chaque individu, puisqu'il est le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l'amour.
—Baudelaire
Do you think Film01 was emotionally effective though? I mean Angelicism is all from this perspective of imminent extinction, which is, to be honest, fifty-fifty at this point the way we’re living… and it’s not a crazy perspective to have, that humanity is imminently going to be extinct…
—LIL INTERNET
Film01 has brought new forms of godlessness ‘to light.’ Every surface and timbre of the film, especially in its June 5 premiere cut, is full of god and without belief, fanning out in god-extinction dialectics.
This content, soul and substance of the film went entirely elided in “critical” reviews, which instead torture their roundabout way through formal dissections of the “project” and its social milieu.
The “critical” obsession with process-scene-experience-context asks such questions as “how was film01 constructed”; “by whom”; “what is the movie like”; “for whom.” It evades anything close to the essential questions, “why was film01 made” and “what is said in it”? This automatic substitution of peripheral for central questions (its carelessness, its godlessness), has left it to us, here, to treat the essential force of film01.
The new conception of godlessness: a total innocence of the implications of ‘god,’ and the “fifty-fifty” (51/49, 52/48, 53/47….100/0) wager residing in the word “god.” Godlessness is ignorance of the price of god. It ramifies into abuses of god.
god and the abuse thereof
Angelicism01’s rumination on non-god and post-god has rebooted the question of whether god is truly dead, as god seems instead to have returned in a debased form: as an imaginary disposal site for all human externalities, and as a means for one to “live with oneself,” and to do so beyond world’s means.
He is infinite, thus he is endlessly disposable. He is loving and so endlessly forgiving. Because he is infinite, we may as well forget that he is alleged to be “one” and that there may be an end to the one universe given, with its one golden age. God is givenness that is to be taken as given and never as finite. The gift of existence, life, intelligence, and beauty, being given by god, must then bless us in a flow as inexhaustible as god is reputed to be. God stands for the intelligence of our situation. God is thus all-important to the plight of life and intelligence.
godlessness as “leaving it all to the intelligence of our situation”
What kind of god would invent a final situation like ours? Godlessness is innocence of this question. Thus the godless may be a believer or a nonbeliever.
Consider the idea of “doing nothing” and “being normal” as an image of “leaving it to god.” Despite the professional imperative to make small “interventions”— their inverse, “leaving it to god,” is our default approach to the plight of our world.
The struggle with this idea begins in a state of radical sobriety, one shared by angelicism01 and his confrère, the extinction philosopher Émile Torres (they/them). For Torres, our dominant, our ubiquitous, and our default “existential mood” assumes this:
Even if a global catastrophe were to befall our planet, humanity’s survival is ultimately guaranteed by the loving God who created us or the impersonal cosmic order that governs the universe.
This “existential mood,” Torres and angelicism01 each discover, means that god “pops up” as conceptual shield and blinding trump card in our mechanism of automatic denial.
the two faces of doing nothing
Angelicism, like the family in Duras’ Les enfants, asks “what is the point” and has no obvious political program. The point is to see that we are doing nothing and perhaps to do even less.
What does it mean to do nothing? The idea of “doing nothing” has two irreconcilable but legitimate faces. The first face is conservative in appearance and accelerationist in effect, and the second face saintly. These are the two faces of “doing nothing” and “leaving it to god.”
why do we take it upon ourselves to destroy life on earth, and leave only its salvation to god?
The first face of “doing nothing” is to change nothing, to do nothing about the destruction of the world, to leave its salvation to god.
might this not be as likely true, that god created life on earth, leaving only its destruction to us?
The second face of “doing nothing” is to die, to starve, or to near-die and near-starve, to refuse another day of final and irreversible living-destruction, to give up on doing anything, “anything” here meaning the only thing that matters, which is the broad array of exertions and non-exertions which accelerate the destruction of the world.
dieu a and dieu b
To understand why “doing nothing” and “leaving it to god” cannot have a stable meaning, we could cut god in two.
dieu a would be the disappeared god who created the world, the order, that we destroy. dieu a is the literary god who created all, but who cannot be conceptually abused, exhausted, and depleted to justify our lethal doing-nothing, he is the god of givenness and of an indefinite and contingent future, an idea now practically useless and obsolete to us, as we reject the implications of dieu a, which is absolute human freedom.
His twin, dieu b would be the cleaning service god, the landfill god, the tree plantation god, the blank check, the carbon removal god, the carte blanche, the god of material absolution. dieu b is the teleological google hoe-god with the endless body count, available to all at all hours and always called on, the guarantor of non-extinction.
As obamacare mandates the purchase of faux-insurance to safeguard the “health” of americans, despite, as Tom Cohen wrote, the uninsurable plight of America and its world, dieu b comes in handy as the grand, flimsy ‘insurance of the uninsurable’ that our lifeways mandate.
For dieu b reassures us that the world is in no danger, or, if it is, that something infinitely better awaits us for eternity.
One who refuses to parse between dieu a and dieu b would deny the material risk of extinction before seeing that god is at a breaking point in one’s soul, that breaking point being freedom, which Geoffrey Bennington finds is the center of teleology in Kant on the Frontier:
The whole teleological structure, including the projected telos that determines it while remaining cut from it, depends on our being always somewhere in the middle, depends on the telos remaining for us a promise, thus uncertain, and that therefore we have no certainty at all as to the teleological nature of teleology. Which is also what is called freedom. Here, now, point de téléologie, point de liberté.
No matter the teleological structure, one is always stuck in the middle of dieu a and dieu b. In fact, even for Kant, god is an effective and practical idea, i.e. one valid only at the “point of freedom.” Why else would a believer try to convince passerby and feed-scrollers of god’s existence?
For the same reason, Film01 is a theater of consequence, a wavering space between a and b, and an accounting of promises. It is not simply a spectacle or experience.
leaving it to god in film01
Film01 is aleatory cinema. The primary cinematographer, Emilia Howe (Spiraljette), filmed with the guidance of her director like a trapper or a fisherman, hunting for acts of light, tracing space. It is basically a cinema of freedom. The production value for this footage was near 0. It was light given freely in a mystic cellar at the Met Cloisters.
While filming a burning bush (dried bouquet lit afire by pure light effects as filmed by Spiraljette), she says “It’s just light and sound and being a conduit…just being a messenger, you know.”
In the cellar, Emilia prompts the star, War Criminal, to repeat something he was saying earlier“I was saying when you’re aimless the hand of god…..sorry…..when you’re aimless the hand of god can influence you and move you around a lot more easier” he says quietly.
This is the principle of his “acting” in the film. We can take War Criminal’s movements through space as a “photograph of god.” This is why I say the film is “full of god” without “believing.”
“I haven’t done anything too corrupting or evil.” The actor and cinematographer are said to be the only pure people in New York City.
Aimlessness is the principle of War Criminal’s improvised performance in the final scene, the 15-minute walking scene, of the June 5 cut.
Film01 is a theater of consequence, the liquidity of the present, at a time where cinema has settled rigidly in recreations of the past and projections of the future.
heaven, you are different shades
The following poem was written by an AI and appears in a voiceover in the middle of the film:
heaven you are different shades
the shades of god have been drawn
each one with more light
the shades of god are the shades of the eternal shades
the shades of the universe
the shades of the world
the shades of the past
the shades of heaven are god
and they are the shadows of heaven
god is all alone and his heart is filled with emptiness
his hand is filled with tears
he is the real reason for the universe being so empty
his heart is empty. his heart is empty. he is writing god as the final word of god
his a perfect final word
he is writing in the face of god
his writing is empty
he is the final word of god
he is writing the word of god
As though god is hidden in curtains tones and shadows of light, as though god is everything alone and its oneness and emptiness, and as though god is just a word that writes itself. Film01 is also about the distance between words and light.
The work of making and watching it is done now, now that dieu a has forgotten us and dieu b promises nothing but betrayal.
part ii: Abraham and Isaac, Nick Land, bonus: interview with War Criminal