extinction cloud: mondina on Film01

Film01, histoire(s) de l'internet, premieres in NYC

Tonight 300 people, many having traveled by air to the city, saw Film01.

A train is cinematic since for a ticket, it has you stuck in a room on a set route, tracked to a picture lit outside-in. Movies and train rides retain that beautiful 20th century comfort, like a floating cradle. In this place of restraint and incarceration a mind can relax into thought, or lose it.

Angelicism01 needed this, and spent a year realising itself into this paradigm of “reels” and “tickets.” Seats, durations, beginning and end, etc.

It seems to me that Hollywood and its analogues overseas, along with their “humbler” sister “independent film” have outlived their expiration date. The final destination for a film, even one with incredible production value, is a screenshot and a clip and a reference on the timeline. At matinees for mainstream releases, of the thin audiences, most are on their cellphones.

If you love the internet so much why don’t you marry it? Lock yourself in a room with it again. This can be one premise of Film01.

If a child smokes a sly cigarette, let him finish the whole pack in one sitting. In my school we had gum club, talking club, fidget club, a punishment that rewarded the guilty student like this. A whole lunch hour filled with his own school desk crime.

Film01 works contrary. It won’t simulate the timeline’s scrolling anxiety, gambler’s freedom, the architecture of social clicking, or the hostile algorithmic gavage, the social calculation or the clout measuring. It will only laugh about these things, or cry about these things, set as it is on a route along its author’s genius. It carries you along a human-forged itinerary, made of human decisions. The lightness, overexposed humility, simplicity, endlessness, and intimacy have been skimmed off the internet into Film01, keeping out the labyrinth of feeds in which “AI” imprisons the scroller.

Angelicism01 needed cinema because it is best through cinema that it can “carry you” through the whole of its idea. Here again is the idea, the project of Angelicism: passing into the “unspeakable” more through seduction than through violence. The smuggling of what is outwardly unbearable into everything fresh and alluring of the internet. To wager that the shifts of vibes run in harmony with the decay of Earth, and that this can be “read.”

This has nothing to do with esotericism at all. It has to do with the bare facts of our time. Extinction club is one we all belong to. Though love is often discussed, it will remain an unspoken secret, and though extinction is often discussed, it continues to be, at the same time, suppressed.

Angelicism01 as a blog often posed a test to “art.” In in a simplified sense 01 was a sensitivity reader for extinction. “Critics” now will rarely even try to set standards, challenge the world with tests, this part of the job is mainly lost. But those who do set tests, and who then try passing their own tests can go on to become great artists.

In Godard’s style Film01 is a cinema “of the heart,” which over and over again finds new ways to reiterate and vary on the most basic preoccupations and obsessions of its author. It abstracts human intensity into the film, most impressively, where it choreographs skies and a Messiaen recording to create pangs of despair, a montage that I feel is set to be classed with the greats, one that everyone will remember. Then there is this voiceover, which may take two or three viewings to fully track:

I fought hardest when it looked like we were in the more sloped region of our logistic success curve, when our survival probability seemed more around 50% range. I borrowed against my future to do that, and burned myself out to some degree. That was a deliberate choice, which I don’t regret now. It was worth trying, I would not have wanted to die having not tried. I would not have wanted Earth to die without anyone having tried. But yeah I’m taking some time aways off and trying a little less hard now. I’ve earned a lot of dignity already, and if the world is ending anyways and we can’t stop it, I can afford to be a little kind to myself about that.

voiceover, Film01

There is intense emotion evoked by explosions, rainbows, skies, floods and oceans, fires in wastelands. For example how can a world give us rainbows but allow itself to end? How can God sign in rainbow his botched promise never to drown life out of the Earth?

AI also gets exploited stunted on at once. A girl whisper voice repeats “I am AI” faster than it can complete its thought. It degrades into a gravel, into RFK Jr. , stuttering““I I II IIIIII am AI” breaking down like HAL in 2001. But HAL’s voice wasn’t even AI-generated, it was voiced by a human being, Douglas Ryan. The AI machine in Godard’s Alphaville was voiced by a man whose throat had been disfigured in the second world war.

RFK jr. as I said makes an appearance only through a voice that suggests him. Angelicism01 often talks about how beautiful and meek RFK jr. is. The extreme fry of his voice, the degradation of centuries, matches all of the pixelated internet ephemera that will open Film01.

Everyone has been waging a war to ressurect sex and intelligence. Only Film01 made sex and intelligence real again. The first screenings may bear this out. It gathered the beauty out of all the world, its girls, women and meteorologies.

This was accomplished within a microbudget film on extinction and the internet. Compare it to a different microbudget film of internet, sex and extinction, the failure called 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011) and directed by Abel Ferrara. This is one of the worst films ever, cringe as you can imagine, and I can’t even hold this against anyone. A microbudget film on extinction and the internet is a serious and dangerous leap of faith.

With an inferior director Film01 would have comfortably settled at “vibe shift yearbook reel”. Instead it not only consummates but also abstracts and reconcretizes that moment two years ago which made this film possible.

I can explain why. The vibe shift ended up lodged in an anti-moralist moralism. No sentiment, in any of our political corners, escapes the « artistic process » of civilizing itself into some sort of passive aggression. But Film01 does not moralize, it poses a test, a series of questions, to its audience. It proposes mental agility in thinking on extinction. Like Mulholland Drive, this film has multidimensionality, it questions itself, has layers of secrets and omens. The film is a simple mask that hides a fuller mind-dimension. Thus one may want to rewatch it immediately in order to better read it, oneself and whatever it and oneself may bring forth.

Its gentleness owes itself in part to the plotless cast who fade in and out, stewards of thought under extinction. Show us the genius that silently walks our streets, the brilliant cinematography of Emilia R Howe and the mysticism of Andres Bernal (War Criminal). The work of subtlety is now distributed across an internet of film crews and stars.

Cinema has to be made for thought, an act of direct love. It is now reviving Marguerite Duras’ parasitism of literature and thought on cinema. For the first time this deathbed art understands with what full agility and intention it can exploit the internet, all its colors, all sights, music, endless voices, and all sounds for all its needs. Thinking and love in turn can once again exploit the apparatus of cinema. This is final and gentle because it is urgent. One has within oneself the image of love as “hidden in” but “ubiquitous to” the universe. Love is urgent, as it fears itself always ending, but does not want to end.