Acephale vs Angelicism

Under the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Vichy, which saw Marianne take off her mask to play Joan D'arc in the civic imagination, the dark side of the dialectic gaped in the moonlight. "I see no reason," the editor of the magazine remarked, "not to provoke violently my comrades to perhaps unhoped for excesses, even by entering into details that others...will judge tiresome and decadent."

A Truth thats told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent

Dimes Square as seen from the second floor theater of Anthology Film Archives:

returning to New York Screens next month;

white mythology look like a Bennetton campaign,

Does Film 001 suspend the spatiotemporality of the internet using the idioms of cinema? Or is a home movie of the internet focused on downtown New York already a foreclosure? The three-hour long post-internet aesthetic object may approach white mythology from the standpoint of 'general plasticity'; else it would seek in the "stockpile of history the wherewithal to neutralize invention...to circumvent the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm."

Like an idea that must be translated out of its mothertongue in order to circulate, only those who made the Final Director's Cut will have been spared the duty of having to interpret it.

ould seek in the stockpile of history (in short, in history itself, which in this case would have this blinding search as its function) the wherewithal to neutralize invention, to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocutions: turns of phrase, tropes and strophes) the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm. The critical slowdown may thus be as critical as the critical accel- eration

The crowds that flowed into Anthology Film Archives last June did so to take part in the ultimate closure of cultural production: those who made the final cuts of a film sourced from the online phenomenon still now and then called social media will be spared the duty of having to interpret it.

Thus the metaverse is libidinal, which is to say, non-narrative: found and sourced content from the internet regurgitated back into its source community, as context; as quine. This is a community teeming with its own discourse and that always lives downtown; a community to whom the avant-garde means nothing insofar as it is located 'elsewhere'-- in an audience. Online, the circuit of value that pulses capital through Milady raves and the under 30s crowd is an audience; or as Cash argues, the cult of personality where a culture used to be.

“You have to decide whether you want to experience this. But plz know this: This is not a film screening. It’s a cult-induction event. You will be kept there until you are dead tired, then shown hours of loud imagery and slow, dreamlike sequences. This is all designed to induce a trance/hypnosis. Then once the hypnosis phase is deep, they will move over to a chapter that is created by Charlotte Fang (disgraced cult-leader/pedophile) who will implant deep triggers and terrible, awful things (though they will look and sound beautiful). [Fang was in no way involved in the making of Film01] A Siren song. This is dangerous psychological warfare.

Bataille: "To establish a community for the creation of values, values for the creation of cohesion"-- "to consider the world that will follow in the sense of the reality it contains now and not in the sense of some ultimate happiness which is not only inaccessible but also repellent".

“You have to decide whether you want to experience this. But plz know this: This is not a film screening. It’s a cult-induction event. You will be kept there until you are dead tired, then shown hours of loud imagery and slow, dreamlike sequences."

This is all designed to induce a trance/hypnosis. Then once the hypnosis phase is deep, they will move over to a chapter that is created by Charlotte Fang (disgraced cult-leader/pedophile) who will implant deep triggers and terrible, awful things (though they will look and sound beautiful). [Fang was in no way involved in the making of Film01] A Siren song. This is dangerous psychological warfare.

If the post-modern is more like a rhythm than a view (one in which 'forwards' and 'backwards' lose their spatiotemporal relevance), "late 20th century internet idealism" is a state of catastrophe that lends itself to a state of shock but also mesmerization.

“It was very beautiful. But we all had the sentiment of participating in something that happened on the part of Bataille, in the head of Bataille.”

which its subscribers-- Bataille's followers-- regarded as each the fullest expression of human subordination. Named for the Greek word meaning 'headless', the Acephalites consisted of Bataille's inner circle; drop-outs of the Paris avant-garde whose "face, gifted with the voice, with the diverse modes of expression, and with the gaze...having the possibility of unleashing immense quantities of energy...succeeded the explosiveness that up to that point had made the anal orifice bud and flame."

The visage of a young woman slurping a Starbucks frappacino floods the silver screen. Shot vertically, on her device, the girl's eyes rest on a front-facing camera's view. She slurps. A gaussian blur masks her face to augment the clarity of her complexion. So perfect her representation, the viewer imagines, no wonder her sense of humor is grotesque. She slurps the drink product, chews on the straw, babbles about her mom. "The blossoming of the human face, gifted with voice,

The post-new wave tactic of filmic endurance imbricates attention with memory. The boredom that arises demonstrates that these questions won't be necessary, as the torpor one experiences watching the epic is but a cuntshair of attention compared to the time we spend watching. Film 001 imbricates Mark Fisher's "eerie impasse that arisies when mismatching modes of intelligence, cognition & communication confront one another" with media theory, meta theory and post theory in order to demonstrate a theory of obsolescence-- of "extinction qua extinction". Its credits consist entirely of metadata. So does its audience.

What does artificial intelligence become once deposed of intelligence? Perhaps art, or perhaps what Acephalite Pierre Klossowski, brother of the painter Balthus, meant when he said Film 001's auteur is a UK-based blogger of unknown age and origin, known only as Angelicism01. Unlike Richard Prince, whose roulette of instagram portraits reflect a similar demographic trend in terms of the subject and object of influence (always a young girl, not always a female), I am told that the substack writer paid for footage sourced by the women he found online. At least one "actress" is credited as a producer.

Film 001's subject matter is not the avant-garde, per se, but a generation distinct from its auteur's and so seeks to represent Gen-Z a step ahead in time. One gets the sense that Angelicism's zoomers are children of a casino and not the offspring of the Millennials and X-ers who have inherited the 20th century in the form of its debt. Neither hopeful nor pessimistic in its depictions of environmental crisis or Korean dance trends, Film 001's casino is a cool three generations of separation between what Kracauer called the "go-for-broke game of history" and Kant called empiricism. Intent to expose the nature of the medium of the internet and also its plasticity, Film 001 is shot in the first-person in order to depict the figure of the multitude.

More slot machine than camera, more editorial than directed, the production shuttles the collapse of content from one terminal (the browser, the device, the interface) to another (the cinema, the movie theatre, the international downtown). "What happened to produce these ruins, this desappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?" (Fisher) mblazened on the cover of Acephale was none other