Wim Wenders said he was most impressed by Antonioni’s response to the Room 666 prompt, which is why he left it unedited – including the ending where Antonioni turns the camera off, producing one of his characteristic moments of ‘dead time’, lingering on the empty, inanimate space after the character has left the frame.
Your essay made me think of this part of Antonioni’s statement in Room 666:
‘Of course, I’m just as worried as anyone else about the future of cinema as we know it. We’re attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. But as the spectrum of new technologies gets wider, that feeling will eventually disappear. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future. High-definition video cassettes will soon bring cinema into our houses; cinemas probably won’t be needed anymore. All our contemporary structures will disappear. It won’t be quick or straightforward, but it will happen, and we can’t do anything to prevent it. All we can do is try to adjust to it. In Red Desert, I was looking at the question of adapting – adapting to new technologies, to the polluted air we’ll probably have to breathe. Even our physical bodies will probably evolve – who can say in what ways. The future will probably present itself with a ruthlessness we can’t yet imagine.’
I’d be very interested to hear Antonioni’s thoughts on recent developments in AI. Red Desert not only observes the effects of mid-20th-century industrialisation, but is also visibly infused with those effects. The camera acts like a robot, getting distracted by the oil-carrying black tube on an offshore platform. The editing mashes images together with a machine-like indifference to the audience’s need to comprehend how one scene flows into another. And the score seems to have been composed and performed by a choir of robots who know only the music of the factories, and who see no reason to learn any other kind.
In your post about AI, you say that:
‘AI generated videos are all “post-cinema” completely divorced from any of the original technique of cinema. The technique of “filmmaking” has entirely evaporated, that which “looks cinematic” is all that’s left.’
In Red Desert, I think Antonioni tries to create the sense that the film has been shaped not only by human agency and technique, but also by the robotic equivalents of agency and technique. Elena Past refers to ‘petrocinema’ in her reading of some scenes; the film’s dependence on and immersion in industrial processes transforms it on a fundamental level. Perhaps Red Desert is more attached to the inanimate world than it is to the human race. It’s a fascinating example of how ‘the medium is the message’, when the medium consists of world-eating factory products.
David Ehrlich recently wrote that ‘AI tools are useless without a bedrock of human creativity to steal from, and its certain failure will be an expensive testament to the fact that algorithms will never create new things. Even a five-year-old can sense the difference between something that was made with care and something that was generated without thought. People are born knowing the difference, and so there’s no sense in accepting that we have to let “progress” condition us otherwise.’
Antonioni might point out the generation who are ‘born knowing the difference’ will one day die out, and that our understanding of ‘creativity’ (and how much it belongs to humans or could potentially belong to algorithms) is likely to evolve over time. If that makes it sound like he would be unsympathetic to current fears about AI, or mindlessly accepting of these changes and the impacts they would have on people, I would again point to his admission that he was frightened by the changes besetting cinema in 1982, and his acknowledgement of the unimaginable ‘ruthlessness’ (I think it’s more like ‘ferocity’ in the original Italian) with which the future will alter our way of life. [1/3]
In 1964, speaking to Jean-Luc Godard about Red Desert, Antonioni described his encounter with an early form of artificial intelligence, which he called ‘one of the most extraordinary discoveries in the world’:
‘It was in a tiny box, mounted on a load of tubes: there were cells, made up of gold and other substances, in a chemical solution. These cells have a life of their own and have certain reactions: if you walk into a room, they take on one shape, whereas if I walk in, they take on another, and so on. In that little box there were a few million cells, but from such basis you can actually reconstruct a human brain. It was so incredible that at a certain point I couldn’t follow the scientist’s explanation anymore. Yet, a child who has played with robots from his earliest years would understand perfectly; such a child would have no problem going into space on a rocket, if he wanted to. I feel very envious of such people. I really wish I were already part of that new world.’
Godard’s take on the ‘new world’ in Alphaville, though inspired by this conversation, is very different from Antonioni’s. Rather than marvelling at the AI brain and wanting to join the younger generation on some intersidereal mission, Godard pictures the futuristic city as a dystopia in which love, poetry, and other ‘illogical’ things are punishable by death. Where Antonioni mourns his own inability to adapt, Godard revels in it as a sign of humanity persisting against the encroaching robots. Where Antonioni portrays every ‘escape’ as a self-dismantling fantasy, Godard uses the hero and heroine’s escape as an allegory for re-discovering love and hope amidst the darkness of the modern world.
But I think Red Desert is a far more telling and frightening dystopian vision than Alphaville, precisely because it is infused with that philosophical sense of inexorable change, alongside that deep-seated terror of the new and that envy of new generations who are able to adjust to it. Red Desert’s protagonist, Giuliana, grapples with the sense that she cannot adapt to the new world but also with the sense that she cannot help being transformed by it. Paradoxically, she empathises with the robot’s un-empathic eye, painfully aware of how obsolete she appears from that perspective, but still cursed with the human wants and needs that are dying out. It’s as though we were experiencing Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of someone who is slowly turning into a pod person, but whose transition is interrupted (like the busker who gets mingled with his dog) and finds herself occupying a nightmarish hybrid state, part old-human, part new-robot.
I like to think that Antonioni’s AI movie would have made extensive use of AI images and footage, capturing the horror of those whose way of life is destroyed by this technology, but also their revelatory insights into the nature and impact of these emerging art-forms. Such a film might not accomplish the same ends as industrial action or other forms of protest, but I think it would be disturbing and (for want of a better word) generative. [2/3]
‘Cinema no longer creates the narratives that define the culture, instead it relies almost exclusively on its own past cultural influence or existing worlds, characters, and stories from other forms of media for its success.’
It makes sense that you then segue into talking about AI, which works in the same cannibalistic way, but isn’t this still a way to ‘create the narratives that define the culture’ – that is, self-cannibalising narratives that jam together tropes and memes, and that define what ‘culture’ is and will be from now on, albeit in terms that you and I would find alien and depressing?
And I think it’s also worth questioning what we see as cinema’s ‘unique demands on our attention and time.’ Rivette’s Out 1 is impossible to watch in a single sitting, and is built out of improvised scenes that at times clearly don’t hang together – at one point you can see Michael Lonsdale and Bulle Ogier trying to pull the story in different, incompatible directions based on their conflicting understandings of what has happened so far. Rivette’s film invites the viewer to become distracted even during a single episode, and certainly in between episodes. The more you are immersed in Out 1, the more you find yourself becoming paranoid about the ‘real world’ you live in outside the film, and looking for structures and patterns in that world. This forms a special kind of ‘contained narrative experience’, just one that is more loosely contained. You can have the same kind of ‘contained narrative experience’ while doom-scrolling, if you stand back and trace the journey of your thoughts and emotions across those three hours of seemingly wasted screen time. Indeed, this might well turn out to be a more compelling and immersive ‘emotional narrative’ than the one I experienced when I last went to the cinema, to see The Rise of Skywalker.
And as for the communal aspect of cinema, the ‘unique opportunity to all experience a single narrative together and then discuss it afterwards,’ I can’t help thinking of the time I saw L’eclisse at BFI Southbank in 2015. After the film had ended, the man next to me asked me what I thought of it, and said that he found it very ‘over-directed,’ full of ‘terrible acting.’ I said that I thought Monica Vitti and Alain Delon were wonderful, though I could understand why the style of acting in Antonioni’s films isn’t to everyone’s taste. The conversation died there, and I was left with a sense that this stranger and I had watched two different films. If we’d made the effort, perhaps we could have had a stimulating conversation about different styles of acting and directing. However, it seemed more appropriate not to have any such conversation after L’eclisse, but to engage in a furtive and abortive attempt at communication, then go our separate ways. That film ends with the main characters not meeting for their agreed date, and for seven minutes we watch strangers – some of whom look disconcertingly like the characters we’ve been following – drift past the camera without engaging with us or each other.
A film can be a pointedly non-communal experience. You can feel all the more alienated from your fellow humans as you leave the cinema, and a great deal less lonely watching the film at home. We don’t really share our experiences, we just like to think that we do. It’s as wonderful as it is terrifying that films can remind us of this, and by the same token that they can undercut our sense of what is ‘special’ about a trip to the cinema. [3/3]
Hell of a comment and I don’t have time to fully respond in depth at this time but want to say thanks for the response and I enjoyed reading it. Lots to consider here, and I love especially highlighting Antonioni’s piece in Room 666.
Real quick I’d just flag that I certainly am not denying the full potential of the experience of cinema in the way you lay out. (It can be isolating, fragmentary, and create dramatically different experiences in people) and I would never want to claim those things aren’t present and valid aspects of the art. My aim with this essay was more so positioning its relative average function as medium among other mediums.
You and your theater-mate for L’eclisse may disagree, but if me and another person each scroll on TikTok for an hour, despite whatever “contained narrative experience” we may have each accessed separately—haven’t even seen the same thing and therefore have nothing to even agree or disagree about.
So I take your point that a single film can also be experienced in two wholly different ways, but I still perceive there to be important relative differences. Perhaps that’s naive.
When it comes to AI, I have many many thoughts, but every time I try to write about it it strikes me that it is still so new that most theory and criticism directed towards it is still almost entirely speculative. What will it feel like, and look like practically as whatever it is comes into contact with culture. We’re watching that unfold right now but it’s still so early. From the experience so far, it certainly feels dystopian and gross, and I have a negative aesthetic reaction to it’s prevalence, but is this in some way inherent to current limitations or more the result of the fact that we haven’t yet learned to use it in any truly interesting ways.
I don’t say this to argue in favor of AI’s development and use, mostly to say I have a hard time orienting myself critically towards it beyond engaging critically with the structural, material, and ethical foundations of its creation.
Thanks for your reply, Thomas. I didn’t think you were denying the full potential of the experience of cinema – and I wasn’t suggesting your (already long and nuanced) post needed to encompass yet more perspectives.
Sometimes after reading/watching your work (or Tom van der Linden’s), I find myself wanting to voice a more negative, less life-affirming perspective, and happened to find the words to do so on this occasion. For instance, your video about ambition is challenging and very attentive to marginal, non-idealised experiences, but still leans in a redemptive direction – I might dwell more on the un-cathartic pain of mindfulness, which again is something Antonioni captures very well. On my Substack I’m publishing a scene-by-scene analysis of Red Desert, and I’m sure my tendency to ‘accentuate the negative’ is exhausting, at times, for my vanishingly small audience. But I guess I have to plough my furrow...
It's obtuse of me to disagree with you about the narrative experience of the doom-scroller. I try to limit my phone use as much as possible, and usually feel that time spent on social media would have been better spent doing almost anything else. It certainly isn’t naïve to point out the relative differences between these forms of media consumption. But I also think about my gradual realisation, over the years, that playing a video game – or any kind of game – can entail the construction of a narrative or even, arguably, a personalised work of art, like the one Céline and Julie cobble together in another Rivette film, or those dreamt up (or discovered) by the lonelier individuals in Out 1. So I try to challenge myself to think about what that dispiriting phone time really means to me, and how it might seem more significant and substantial (than a film) to someone who was conditioned and socialised by media in different ways. Your post has made me think more deeply about this.
Totally agree about AI. I try not to talk about it either because it feels like flailing about in a space full of partially-informed flailing (most of it better-informed than mine). Sometimes I hear people emphasise its limitations, and it’s like they’re dismissing the Wright brothers for making substandard planes. Most often, AI makes me think of Antonioni’s line about the future coming at us ‘with a ruthlessness we cannot yet imagine,’ and I want to brace myself for that but of course don’t know how.
wow i think reading this instead of watching the youtube video incites the same type of immersive contextual effect you talk about. it plays with my attention in a more thoughtful and meaningful way.
i also feel like your meta lens on cinema is so cool especially when the themes of this post relate to what it means to be human at heart (building community, sharing stories)
We need to approach the screen like we do the stage. Production rather than consumption will be the way we bring community and literacy back into it. We’re all walking around with smartphones in our pockets making a lot of epic non-fiction content (yours included) but I rarely see film. What if a/v club kids read screenplays like theatre kids read scripts and we performed movies like Shakespeare in the park? It would help immensely with media literacy, remind us that there’s a literary work at the heart of every production, and introduce a great deal of community back into the ecosystem. It’d probably be more fun than pro shoots where time is money, too.
I’ve got a screenplay that’s niche enough I don’t think I’ll be able to sell it and I’ve been toying with releasing it like a play. The idea of groups of friends each putting their unique spin and filming in their unique context is really exciting to me, even if they just did individual scenes. I’d love to curate a YouTube playlist with my favourite scenes to get a patchwork quilt of a movie, maybe update it each year. Put up a prize if I can make enough money off of it. The studio system is locked in this crisis of perpetually skyrocketing budgets that’s making them more and more risk averse when all I want are more movies like Slackers.
Wim Wenders said he was most impressed by Antonioni’s response to the Room 666 prompt, which is why he left it unedited – including the ending where Antonioni turns the camera off, producing one of his characteristic moments of ‘dead time’, lingering on the empty, inanimate space after the character has left the frame.
Your essay made me think of this part of Antonioni’s statement in Room 666:
‘Of course, I’m just as worried as anyone else about the future of cinema as we know it. We’re attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. But as the spectrum of new technologies gets wider, that feeling will eventually disappear. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future. High-definition video cassettes will soon bring cinema into our houses; cinemas probably won’t be needed anymore. All our contemporary structures will disappear. It won’t be quick or straightforward, but it will happen, and we can’t do anything to prevent it. All we can do is try to adjust to it. In Red Desert, I was looking at the question of adapting – adapting to new technologies, to the polluted air we’ll probably have to breathe. Even our physical bodies will probably evolve – who can say in what ways. The future will probably present itself with a ruthlessness we can’t yet imagine.’
I’d be very interested to hear Antonioni’s thoughts on recent developments in AI. Red Desert not only observes the effects of mid-20th-century industrialisation, but is also visibly infused with those effects. The camera acts like a robot, getting distracted by the oil-carrying black tube on an offshore platform. The editing mashes images together with a machine-like indifference to the audience’s need to comprehend how one scene flows into another. And the score seems to have been composed and performed by a choir of robots who know only the music of the factories, and who see no reason to learn any other kind.
In your post about AI, you say that:
‘AI generated videos are all “post-cinema” completely divorced from any of the original technique of cinema. The technique of “filmmaking” has entirely evaporated, that which “looks cinematic” is all that’s left.’
In Red Desert, I think Antonioni tries to create the sense that the film has been shaped not only by human agency and technique, but also by the robotic equivalents of agency and technique. Elena Past refers to ‘petrocinema’ in her reading of some scenes; the film’s dependence on and immersion in industrial processes transforms it on a fundamental level. Perhaps Red Desert is more attached to the inanimate world than it is to the human race. It’s a fascinating example of how ‘the medium is the message’, when the medium consists of world-eating factory products.
David Ehrlich recently wrote that ‘AI tools are useless without a bedrock of human creativity to steal from, and its certain failure will be an expensive testament to the fact that algorithms will never create new things. Even a five-year-old can sense the difference between something that was made with care and something that was generated without thought. People are born knowing the difference, and so there’s no sense in accepting that we have to let “progress” condition us otherwise.’
Antonioni might point out the generation who are ‘born knowing the difference’ will one day die out, and that our understanding of ‘creativity’ (and how much it belongs to humans or could potentially belong to algorithms) is likely to evolve over time. If that makes it sound like he would be unsympathetic to current fears about AI, or mindlessly accepting of these changes and the impacts they would have on people, I would again point to his admission that he was frightened by the changes besetting cinema in 1982, and his acknowledgement of the unimaginable ‘ruthlessness’ (I think it’s more like ‘ferocity’ in the original Italian) with which the future will alter our way of life. [1/3]
In 1964, speaking to Jean-Luc Godard about Red Desert, Antonioni described his encounter with an early form of artificial intelligence, which he called ‘one of the most extraordinary discoveries in the world’:
‘It was in a tiny box, mounted on a load of tubes: there were cells, made up of gold and other substances, in a chemical solution. These cells have a life of their own and have certain reactions: if you walk into a room, they take on one shape, whereas if I walk in, they take on another, and so on. In that little box there were a few million cells, but from such basis you can actually reconstruct a human brain. It was so incredible that at a certain point I couldn’t follow the scientist’s explanation anymore. Yet, a child who has played with robots from his earliest years would understand perfectly; such a child would have no problem going into space on a rocket, if he wanted to. I feel very envious of such people. I really wish I were already part of that new world.’
Godard’s take on the ‘new world’ in Alphaville, though inspired by this conversation, is very different from Antonioni’s. Rather than marvelling at the AI brain and wanting to join the younger generation on some intersidereal mission, Godard pictures the futuristic city as a dystopia in which love, poetry, and other ‘illogical’ things are punishable by death. Where Antonioni mourns his own inability to adapt, Godard revels in it as a sign of humanity persisting against the encroaching robots. Where Antonioni portrays every ‘escape’ as a self-dismantling fantasy, Godard uses the hero and heroine’s escape as an allegory for re-discovering love and hope amidst the darkness of the modern world.
But I think Red Desert is a far more telling and frightening dystopian vision than Alphaville, precisely because it is infused with that philosophical sense of inexorable change, alongside that deep-seated terror of the new and that envy of new generations who are able to adjust to it. Red Desert’s protagonist, Giuliana, grapples with the sense that she cannot adapt to the new world but also with the sense that she cannot help being transformed by it. Paradoxically, she empathises with the robot’s un-empathic eye, painfully aware of how obsolete she appears from that perspective, but still cursed with the human wants and needs that are dying out. It’s as though we were experiencing Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of someone who is slowly turning into a pod person, but whose transition is interrupted (like the busker who gets mingled with his dog) and finds herself occupying a nightmarish hybrid state, part old-human, part new-robot.
I like to think that Antonioni’s AI movie would have made extensive use of AI images and footage, capturing the horror of those whose way of life is destroyed by this technology, but also their revelatory insights into the nature and impact of these emerging art-forms. Such a film might not accomplish the same ends as industrial action or other forms of protest, but I think it would be disturbing and (for want of a better word) generative. [2/3]
When you say that:
‘Cinema no longer creates the narratives that define the culture, instead it relies almost exclusively on its own past cultural influence or existing worlds, characters, and stories from other forms of media for its success.’
It makes sense that you then segue into talking about AI, which works in the same cannibalistic way, but isn’t this still a way to ‘create the narratives that define the culture’ – that is, self-cannibalising narratives that jam together tropes and memes, and that define what ‘culture’ is and will be from now on, albeit in terms that you and I would find alien and depressing?
And I think it’s also worth questioning what we see as cinema’s ‘unique demands on our attention and time.’ Rivette’s Out 1 is impossible to watch in a single sitting, and is built out of improvised scenes that at times clearly don’t hang together – at one point you can see Michael Lonsdale and Bulle Ogier trying to pull the story in different, incompatible directions based on their conflicting understandings of what has happened so far. Rivette’s film invites the viewer to become distracted even during a single episode, and certainly in between episodes. The more you are immersed in Out 1, the more you find yourself becoming paranoid about the ‘real world’ you live in outside the film, and looking for structures and patterns in that world. This forms a special kind of ‘contained narrative experience’, just one that is more loosely contained. You can have the same kind of ‘contained narrative experience’ while doom-scrolling, if you stand back and trace the journey of your thoughts and emotions across those three hours of seemingly wasted screen time. Indeed, this might well turn out to be a more compelling and immersive ‘emotional narrative’ than the one I experienced when I last went to the cinema, to see The Rise of Skywalker.
And as for the communal aspect of cinema, the ‘unique opportunity to all experience a single narrative together and then discuss it afterwards,’ I can’t help thinking of the time I saw L’eclisse at BFI Southbank in 2015. After the film had ended, the man next to me asked me what I thought of it, and said that he found it very ‘over-directed,’ full of ‘terrible acting.’ I said that I thought Monica Vitti and Alain Delon were wonderful, though I could understand why the style of acting in Antonioni’s films isn’t to everyone’s taste. The conversation died there, and I was left with a sense that this stranger and I had watched two different films. If we’d made the effort, perhaps we could have had a stimulating conversation about different styles of acting and directing. However, it seemed more appropriate not to have any such conversation after L’eclisse, but to engage in a furtive and abortive attempt at communication, then go our separate ways. That film ends with the main characters not meeting for their agreed date, and for seven minutes we watch strangers – some of whom look disconcertingly like the characters we’ve been following – drift past the camera without engaging with us or each other.
A film can be a pointedly non-communal experience. You can feel all the more alienated from your fellow humans as you leave the cinema, and a great deal less lonely watching the film at home. We don’t really share our experiences, we just like to think that we do. It’s as wonderful as it is terrifying that films can remind us of this, and by the same token that they can undercut our sense of what is ‘special’ about a trip to the cinema. [3/3]
Hell of a comment and I don’t have time to fully respond in depth at this time but want to say thanks for the response and I enjoyed reading it. Lots to consider here, and I love especially highlighting Antonioni’s piece in Room 666.
Real quick I’d just flag that I certainly am not denying the full potential of the experience of cinema in the way you lay out. (It can be isolating, fragmentary, and create dramatically different experiences in people) and I would never want to claim those things aren’t present and valid aspects of the art. My aim with this essay was more so positioning its relative average function as medium among other mediums.
You and your theater-mate for L’eclisse may disagree, but if me and another person each scroll on TikTok for an hour, despite whatever “contained narrative experience” we may have each accessed separately—haven’t even seen the same thing and therefore have nothing to even agree or disagree about.
So I take your point that a single film can also be experienced in two wholly different ways, but I still perceive there to be important relative differences. Perhaps that’s naive.
When it comes to AI, I have many many thoughts, but every time I try to write about it it strikes me that it is still so new that most theory and criticism directed towards it is still almost entirely speculative. What will it feel like, and look like practically as whatever it is comes into contact with culture. We’re watching that unfold right now but it’s still so early. From the experience so far, it certainly feels dystopian and gross, and I have a negative aesthetic reaction to it’s prevalence, but is this in some way inherent to current limitations or more the result of the fact that we haven’t yet learned to use it in any truly interesting ways.
I don’t say this to argue in favor of AI’s development and use, mostly to say I have a hard time orienting myself critically towards it beyond engaging critically with the structural, material, and ethical foundations of its creation.
Anyway thanks again for the detailed response!
Thanks for your reply, Thomas. I didn’t think you were denying the full potential of the experience of cinema – and I wasn’t suggesting your (already long and nuanced) post needed to encompass yet more perspectives.
Sometimes after reading/watching your work (or Tom van der Linden’s), I find myself wanting to voice a more negative, less life-affirming perspective, and happened to find the words to do so on this occasion. For instance, your video about ambition is challenging and very attentive to marginal, non-idealised experiences, but still leans in a redemptive direction – I might dwell more on the un-cathartic pain of mindfulness, which again is something Antonioni captures very well. On my Substack I’m publishing a scene-by-scene analysis of Red Desert, and I’m sure my tendency to ‘accentuate the negative’ is exhausting, at times, for my vanishingly small audience. But I guess I have to plough my furrow...
It's obtuse of me to disagree with you about the narrative experience of the doom-scroller. I try to limit my phone use as much as possible, and usually feel that time spent on social media would have been better spent doing almost anything else. It certainly isn’t naïve to point out the relative differences between these forms of media consumption. But I also think about my gradual realisation, over the years, that playing a video game – or any kind of game – can entail the construction of a narrative or even, arguably, a personalised work of art, like the one Céline and Julie cobble together in another Rivette film, or those dreamt up (or discovered) by the lonelier individuals in Out 1. So I try to challenge myself to think about what that dispiriting phone time really means to me, and how it might seem more significant and substantial (than a film) to someone who was conditioned and socialised by media in different ways. Your post has made me think more deeply about this.
Totally agree about AI. I try not to talk about it either because it feels like flailing about in a space full of partially-informed flailing (most of it better-informed than mine). Sometimes I hear people emphasise its limitations, and it’s like they’re dismissing the Wright brothers for making substandard planes. Most often, AI makes me think of Antonioni’s line about the future coming at us ‘with a ruthlessness we cannot yet imagine,’ and I want to brace myself for that but of course don’t know how.
wow i think reading this instead of watching the youtube video incites the same type of immersive contextual effect you talk about. it plays with my attention in a more thoughtful and meaningful way.
i also feel like your meta lens on cinema is so cool especially when the themes of this post relate to what it means to be human at heart (building community, sharing stories)
We need to approach the screen like we do the stage. Production rather than consumption will be the way we bring community and literacy back into it. We’re all walking around with smartphones in our pockets making a lot of epic non-fiction content (yours included) but I rarely see film. What if a/v club kids read screenplays like theatre kids read scripts and we performed movies like Shakespeare in the park? It would help immensely with media literacy, remind us that there’s a literary work at the heart of every production, and introduce a great deal of community back into the ecosystem. It’d probably be more fun than pro shoots where time is money, too.
I’ve got a screenplay that’s niche enough I don’t think I’ll be able to sell it and I’ve been toying with releasing it like a play. The idea of groups of friends each putting their unique spin and filming in their unique context is really exciting to me, even if they just did individual scenes. I’d love to curate a YouTube playlist with my favourite scenes to get a patchwork quilt of a movie, maybe update it each year. Put up a prize if I can make enough money off of it. The studio system is locked in this crisis of perpetually skyrocketing budgets that’s making them more and more risk averse when all I want are more movies like Slackers.
Great video essay, so much work went into it. Very insightful as always.
https://substack.com/@startupmac/note/p-170423966?r=61vdna