In 2019, I learned martial arts from Jefferey Epstein's driver. He taught me five mudras and some breathing exercises. I was overnight in a ranch house somewhere close to Zorro Ranch for reasons having more to do with what time it was in Berlin than Angelicism. The filmmaker Angelicism01 lives in Great Britain. Angelicism is change in the history of change. The distinction is crucial.
If Angelicism is change in the history of change, Angelicism01 is a filmmaker in the history of "Man with a Movie Camera". As readers of Vertov would speculate, Angelicism01's full length feature, Film01, sets its gaze on artificial intelligence: "Whose vision is it? It's the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future, when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality."
Recall that "to have seen 'Looper' is "unnecessary, if you can at least pretend to have done so." Of the viewership that surrounds Film01's direct from device initial release last June, a similar logic can be applied. "Nothing more is required than acquiescence to the (almost) entirely empty proposition: it has begun (and been seen to have begun.)" (Land). Like Vertov's cinemetographer, Film01 can't go off-grid without jumping out of the system and into the matrix. A 2022 feature on the "microcults" that have come to define the shifting commercial and political utility of Web 3 (so called) feels pregnant with the viral templexity of a post-internet epic. Of the attributes assigned to crypto CEO Charlotte Fang -- "schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01" is one of them; a year later, the eponymous emerges and disappears behind a legion of proxies whose publicity is legion.
"Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private," writes Davis in her essay 'I don't want to be an Internet Person'. Like nearly every critic who has attempted to undertake the setting of the internet's universal sun from the lamplight of privacy that appears to be online culture, the editorialist struggles with the same neutrality she exploits. "As is the case for most people, you can go online to acquire a set of digitally tinged delusions which, regardless of their content, feel like the most profound, true thing in the world," Davis explains, adding that "at the same time they are incomprehensible to someone in regular society."
Around the time that the composition of Film01 began, I was flying in and out of a meditation camp somewhere very close to Jefferey Epstein's former ranch. Epstein's driver was introduced to me by a man who called himself Geronimo and whose obsession with zen and the art of archery seemed to be predicated on the internet existing. Both men seemed less crazy than my parents, despite being unable to bear even the slightest theoretical stress. Geronimo told me he was Apache and introduced me to his friend, who later claimed to have made hundreds of trips from the Albuquerque International Airport to a private ranch in the area. I took them both at face value and one day accepted Geronimo's offer to use the internet at his ranch house.
Geronimo dropped me off at the ranch house alone.
A surreal drama shrouded in Web3's abstraction of commerce and consent encapsulates Film01, a direct from device cinema feature. Like the 20th century camera in the 20th century automobile trunk moving the reel forward from the 19th century rearview mirror, the 20st century 'device' gives birth to epochal transition. The front-facing and rear-view camera as have been distinguished by user-generated social media move through event after event annihilating anything in its way.
Fang, who "allegedly groomed a harem" of e-girls "with oppressive rules", such as "restricted eating" and "encouraging self-harm" makes cancellation look and feel as exotic as high-end, size zero ethnic. "Charlie Fang is part of a new group of people who are cool on the internet," Davis observes flatly, his cache is honed from years of monitoring 4chan and analyzing digital norms." Upon being asked 'why-the-internet', Fang responded that it was likely an IQ thing.
If Film 001 exposes a natty forwardness more Ryan McCarthy than Harmony Korin, it's the cult value of Zoomer sexuality that forecloses the subject of the community. Early on in the post-post-internet epic, a young woman slurping a bubble tea (or maybe Starbucks, ironically) is projected cinema-scale, meaning around the size of a diving board. Shot vertically, on her own device, the girl's eyes direct her front-facing camera like a dialect of opportunity. She slurps the drink violently and inexorably in public.
Like the superintelligent who can distinguish the subtle differences between a 146.840MHz frequency and a 146.940MHz frequency,
Fang is not directly involved with the production of Film01.
such as the subtle distinction between a 146.840MHz and 146.940MHz frequency, Film01's cast and crew are "part of a new group of people who are cool on the internet." Observing flatly of Fang, Davis attests to a "cache honed from years of monitoring 4chan and analyzing digital norms." Upon being asked 'why the internet', Fang responded that it was likely an IQ thing.
Land describes *plot* using the phenomenon of time travel where the plastic arts, or something like it, used to be: "a reconstruction, pre-selected for consistency with the possibility of plot, which is, in turn, a proxy for intelligible agency." Indistinguishable from unbounded real recursion, the plot doesn't do much resolve at does pose "its reabsorption into the alien cognitive matrix which inherits it."
> This is not a film screening. It’s a cult-induction event. [...]
> 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
The New York premiere of the 180 hour release would see all the usual gatekeepers denied entry, as well as rumors of rumors of an active shooter. Between Film01's international hypebeasts and the fact that the project's cross-platform promotional campaign was inextricable from principal photography, it's impossible to call the crowd that flowed into the second floor theatre of Anthology Film Archives anything but a cult following. Moviegoers were welcomed by Film01's actresses, who managed the door at the premiere before settling into the seats themselves. If and when Madeline Cash pays lip service to "Remilia Collective co-founder Charlotte Fang" it will be in the abstract pages of a public review, not as Fang exits the theatre with five minutes fade to black. From a safe distance, Cash will observe wryly, "There is a difference between cult cinema and lure-you-into-a-cult cinema."
> ...deep triggers and terrible, awful thingsthough they will look and sound beautiful). A Siren song. This is dangerous psychological warfare.
> No matter what, stay in control. You will be less susceptible than others because you are not as young. For the 21 y/o's it is easier to induce. But you’re still a person, and our brains are susceptible.
No telling where, or when, in the structure or non-structure of Film01 a montage of Milady's floods the screen. For a moment since the pandemic, Fang's NFT's rose in heated collaboration with the Bored Ape Yacht Club with 10,000 unique tokens in a Japanese Chibi-style aesthetic. Their inclusion as a stop-motion animation that heightens the selection and variation of the token economy suggests stakes apparently limitless for what is still now and then called a medium. For those of you who don't know what any of these words mean,
> Block your own eyes/ears as needed, like Odysseus who put wax in his ears and had his crew strap him to the mast so that he would not kill himself.
Famous? Enslaved? Trafficked? A slight gaussian blur augments actually existing e-girls with the veil of artificial intelligence. So perfect her camoflauge, the viewer imagines, no wonder her sense of humor is grotesque. We watch as the teen annihilates the drink product, chews on the straws, babbles about her mom, changes her pronouns to keep up with the feedback; even from beneath the AR makeup filter, you can tell she's beautiful when she's consuming.
Or exit the theater if you need. Sorry you have to hear all this from me. /not a joke”
Another critic observes: "New York City is now inundated with this style, which mostly amounts to noncommittal mythologizing of the author and their acquaintances: self-deprecating indexes of perversions, hookups and nightlife encounters punctuated by niche subcultural references and name-dropping."
What took place at the premiere of Film01 was felt to be the ultimate closure of cultural production. Only those who made the final cut will have been spared the duty of having to interpret it. To be online is to be visible, to be visible is to be in Film01, to be in Film01 is to effect a claim upon a circuit of value and that value is Angelicism. The one that pulses capital through Milady raves and the under 30s crowd, Cash argues, is a cult of personality where a culture used to be.
The presence of Millennials in the room weighed like a nightmare on the turn-out of the overthirties crowd. It was as if we were forced to wonder, "Does it suspend the spatiotemporality of the internet using the idioms of cinema?" Or--" does focusing a home movie of the internet on downtown New York in 2023 leverage the dialect of film in order to avoid being life?" By the time Cash points out what Film 001 will have been about ("how everyone stood outside trying to make an astute observation") our screen time will have peaked.
Movies are magic and magic is slow. Motorcycles are fast. Geronimo liked to meditate at 100mph. The chaffeur who claimed to be associated with the largest political scandal since the Clinton Lewinsky affair drove a camper minivan.
While the mens section was so ornate I'd mistook it for the Hamam, the women's section was bare of persian rugs or tesseracts of tile dancing up the walls into fountains. In fact it looked like a rec room basement. The only thing that distinguished the women's house of prayer was a wall to wall green carpet with a large pattern. The prayer rugs were printed directly on the carpet of the basement under the mosque. I heard the door lock behind me.
I'm not impressed. Cash derives something astute, the joke we've all been dying to make about the post-platform condition: "There is a difference between cult cinema and lure-you-into-a-cult-cinema." There's a part of me that wants it to be smellovision: a fifth dimension on the part of the production team, who filled at least half the theatre at capacity in June. But the warnings that surrounded the premiere were real.
My argument is that movies are magic and magic is slow. By the time you arrive at the highly refined division of labor upon which cinema is predicated, you have to get a budget, work with writers, people like me. When I visited le grande mosque in Paris shortly after the 2016 election, it took two male staff members at the masjid to find a female member to inform me in two languages I don't know that I was, in fact, just like all the rest. The Parisian woman who led me down beneath the parking garage of the building didn't recognize the word "tourist" the way violence doesn't recognize the meaning of capital. It took virtually no organizational theatre to get me into a head covering. I don't know what the tech industry means by "onboarding."
Meaning: "get-up-halfway-thru-to-scroll instagram-in-the-women's-bathroom-and-you'll-see". Succeed in extending cinema into stall, it will be because you are in the film and because you follow all the same people; "because-you-follow-all-the-same-people" you are in the film.
Crowdsourced from the filmmaker's legions of foot soldiers, Angelicism's Film01 is so hot off Final Cut that Trump's recent arraignment appears imbricated with the reels of barely legal Korean teens sourced from TikTok. The AI voiceover that packs the picture with "e-thot" is sophisticated.
"Angelicism is change in the history of change." Unsure if it's the voiceover picking up close to the second hour of social media surf, or, if J's text jerks me awake. Like any and all epics the movie is of excruciating length. At three hours long, the experience of watching the zoomer internet cult phenomena in full, coincidentally, requires one to have taken a serious road trip with Chris Marker. Not just someone willing to doze off, and count backwards into the surgeon's anesthesia, but the one who can make out Benjamin's cameraman at work; the one who "penetrates deeply into its [reality's] web. Only in Film01's case, the one who zooms in order to "pry an object from its shell" is not a grad student but a Zoomer.
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
Benjamin's cameraman who "penetrates deeply into its [reality's] web" is alive in Film01. So is the one who "zooms" in order to "pry an object from its shell".
Sufism isn't a martial art and neither is Angelicism. At the coffee shop in Mountainaire, two men are discussing quantum physics. Perhaps there is some discussion of "entanglement". It's the kind of conversation that people who like to pick up concepts, roll them along like a ball of lint, and play them for table stakes like to have. What was weird was that it was eleven in the morning and that they were talking about general plasticity.
The phrase the men used as they were attempting to mansplain the universe won't register for another four years. I recall blurting out, midsentence long overdue for a discussion of postmodernism, that the quantum understood him. And the man in the cowboy hat laughed. Then he invited me over to his place to use the internet. Four years later, the internet feels like this, or Film 01 feels like this: a dangerous place, the way our brains perform relevance filtering.
Of the dozens of young women contracted to submit footage for the three hour documentary, Film 001, it's Emilia Howe from whom I want to know: "Do you resent Angelicism?" Her speech evades the scene, perhaps a little the way her face evades the camera. Not in its purview, but perhaps in its vacancy. "Well, I was in so many of the promotions," she expresses. Between Howe and the other Dime Square microcelebrities, it's as unclear who has a contract as who is on the other end of it.