post-cinema 2021
2021, as with any year, was a good year for Good Movies-if you’re looking, you will find them, and there are plenty more yet to come produced in the year that haven’t yet been made available for the hungry masses, as indicated by numerous year-end critic lists that contain 75% movies that won’t be viewable until like March 2022.
But what of those objects of my obsession which defy such easy categorization? They’re not movies, they’re not TV, and I defy the label “content.” These are what I am deeming the finest in “post-cinema” in the year 2021, from material made directly for YouTube by video essayists and comedians, to short films for which there is no conventional home but such a platform, to larger scale items made for corporations like the BBC and Netflix that nonetheless refuse to carry any one such descriptor. These are some highlights, with a short capsule on each, from my 2021 in the realms of post-cinema filmmaking.
“Convenient Parking” and “anatomies” (dir. Phil Bernstein)
One of my greatest discoveries of 2021 hails, delightfully, from very close to home. Phil Bernstein, who works in various production capacities in Cleveland, this year directed two singular and structurally electric short films.
The first, Convenient Parking, “a three-part dream about parking your car,” explores the role of the parking garage in the cityscape, creating rapturous images with the manipulation of footage taken of the concrete monoliths strewn across Cleveland, accompanied by Bernstein’s sharp and evocative narration about the seemingly eternal presence of parking garages and the sinister sociopolitical sicknesses of which they are a symptom. Its greatest sequence is its middle part, in which Bernstein quickly zooms into multilayered tapestries of buildings, windows, streetlights, a cacophony of development and undevelopment.
Bernstein contrasts this literal and specific project with his second short, , which shares the preceding film’s engaging three-part structure but refocuses onto material far more abstract and tactile, using footage of organic and inorganic material, some caught in stark black and white and others in a rich earth-toned texture, and evoking the analogues between inner anatomies and their mirrors both in nature and our synthetic creations. This is all accompanied with Bernstein’s own earthy and fluttery ambient score.
The pair of films work in perfect concert, a give and take between the literal and figurative, the concrete and the natural, the spoken and the unspoken. There’s pure aesthetic pleasure in these films, and they’re easily the most underseen of any on this list, and well worth seeking out.
worlds (dir. Isaac Goes)
Isaac Goes’ worlds begins with a flurry of seemingly disparate images: fractured digital fluid artifacts, an gently ebbing tide, leaves, dust caught in beams of light, unnamed, unknown people sitting before computer screens and standing on rooftops. It settles, then resumes its kinetic speed as its images begin fragmenting and popping across the screen in layers of digital frames. There are flowers. Drones. Mirrors. Shadows blanketing rocks. Then again, a rapid transformation into solid squares of information. A figure surrounded by screens, but then alone on a soundstage, all that surrounded him a digital artifice.
This constant leap between the concrete and the abstract, the analog and the digital, characterizes much if not all of the work produced and distributed by Canadian avant-garde collective Kinet Media, a group composed of young artists and intellectuals who have worked to flatten the gap between cinematic dichotomies-high and low, film and digital, emotional and intellectual, these distinctions vanish in the wake of their montage. Worlds, Kinet’s first major release in the wake of a kind of new avant-garde notoriety upon the release of 2020 experimental feature Inventing the Future by key Kinet figure Isiah Medina, is a perfect short form thesis statement for their project. As Phil Elverum posits in the opening to his Mount Eerie album Clear Moon, “there is no ‘other world,’” our world in its entirety is composed of these concrete objects as well as the digital/virtual spaces contained within concrete objects. We interact with the world before us the same regardless of its supposed “materiality.”
Kinet’s web page for Worlds includes a wealth of reference material from its production, from the artworks which inspired its geometric aesthetics to images of its director and collaborators at work; one of the highlights is an image of a sequence’s components as laid out in the timeline of the Adobe Premiere editing suite set next to a Paul Klee painting which the application’s interface seems to mirror. A few images above this galaxy brain comparison is the IMAX poster for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Dig into any of the critical work of some of Kinet’s poster children, like Neil Bahadur, and you’ll find a similar far-reaching hunger for high and low: Eisenstein side by side with the Star Wars prequels, Michael Mann’s filmography held in the same regard as Eddie Murphy vehicle Norbit. Kinet Media supposes that, at least in some far flung corners of the continent, the kids are alright.
“Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses for Free Pulled Pork” (dir. Conner O’Malley)
“Are you scared right now?”
Conner O’Malley’s tendrils seem to touch nothing but the greatest contemporary comedy, from the quiet, humanistic Americana of Adult Swim sitcom Joe Pera Talks With You to the abrasive absurdism of Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave (two of the absolute best comedy TV shows to emerge in recent years). But his appearances in these and other series are always a compromised version of the purest, most demented characters he cultivates on his sinister, anarchic YouTube channel. He’s plenty busy, and certainly more publicly noticeable, elsewhere, most recently including a spot on the writing team of cult hit How to with John Wilson, a predictable position given the man-on-the-street ambience of some of his NYC work-but he has nonetheless produced many good and great works on his own YouTube channel, and his masterpiece, for my money, is “Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses for Free Pulled Pork.”
The short film carries us through a variety of dizzying formal conceits, first posing as a conventional bit of YouTuber fluff, with O’Malley posing as a particularly id-driven variation on his dipshit Middle American comic persona and giving the viewer a tour through, as the title suggests, the many unexpected avenues down which one might go to acquire free pulled pork in the tourist abysses of the Wisconsin Dells; it soon transitions into a Vice-esque video op-ed on “the Real America,” and finally into a bit of unexpected digital psychological horror as the two modes meet; the mix of selfie-stick iPhone imagery and a radically manipulated tunnel vision in the short’s climax is an unparalleled sight to behold.
O’Malley and his collaborators move fluidly through these styles and tones, and in particular the manner in which O’Malley pivots into the bizarre menace of the scenario before landing us again in a place of absurdist comedy, all in the span of just a few moments, illustrates his team’s expertise in what is surely a precarious balancing act. The enigmatic YouTube description of the video, “Richard Jule [sic] Cinematic Universe,” is the thematic cherry on top of this dense little comic horrorshow; as with Clint Eastwood’s film, and the other classical pieces of American mythmaking with which he has surrounded it in his filmography, O’Malley presents a nightmarish portrait of American life that exists in the liminal spaces of midwestern existence: beige hotel rooms, strip mall parking lots, small cars on a highway, and O’Malley’s own dead-eyed performance is only a comical tiptoe away from that macho emptiness evoked by Bradley Cooper in American Sniper.
It’s also, all high-minded analysis aside, a pitch perfect parody of YouTuber and edgelord anthropological video content marginalia.
“bright unbearable realities” or The Men Who Couldn’t Stop Crying and Other Unbearable Realities (dir. Jacob Geller)
Video essayist and video game critic Jacob Geller has been steadily growing in popularity over the past two years in the wake of some of his most rich, entertaining videos-such as his exploration of the intricate game design of Rollercoaster Tycoon, or the dense decade-long journey of desperate gamers to scour Shadow of the Colossus for hidden meaning, or the dizzying discourse between Don Hertzfeldt’s computer-enhanced animation trilogy World of Tomorrow and his brief journeyman efforts making a couch gag for a late-era Simpsons episode. One of his best video essays, “The Future of Writing About Games,” lays out a pragmatic and fascinating modus operandi for criticism writ large, in which the medium is less tied to its contemporary consumerist tendency to advise “whether or not to buy” and can be more effective as an independent expression of one’s experience with a piece of art, a supplement to a work of art, a part of a conversation. When we read or watch great criticism, he posits, we feel closer to each other, we feel seen, or, if not, we are granted access to modes of thinking we otherwise would never have considered. A piece of criticism, properly considered, is a work of art in itself, part of a larger tapestry surrounding the works it cites and the people who consume it.
Gellar made many thoughtful and entertaining video essays in 2021, but his best, and certainly a peak of his project thus far, was “Bright Unbearable Realities,” which abandons his typical style which is heavy with imagery and footage pulled directly from the sources he explores, and instead refocuses entirely on himself, and his spoken words. Directly addressing the camera in a nearly 40 minute monologue, Gellar, cloaked in red light, tells us a handful of urban legends about major pivots in art history: the men who couldn’t stop crying at the end of the first performances of Death of a Salesman; the audience who screamed in horror, believing the titular train of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was going to barrel through the screen and into their theater; the listeners on the night of Orson Welles’ provocative War of the Worlds broadcast, certain their small towns were soon to be subject to the rule of violent Martian invaders.
As Gellar concludes each tall tale, the harsh red light flips to natural white light, and he gives the evocative stories their proper historical context. The conceit is a delight in itself-Gellar is a compelling screen presence, and what amounts to an extended monologue with minimal cuts about a handful of moments in art history is astonishingly engaging. But the genius is where Gellar again invokes the themes of his earlier video on game criticism. The potency of these urban legends, he posits, is the same as the expressionistic potential of criticism. Faced with reality, and art, too harsh to be described literally, its describers instead turn to…artistic liberty, let’s say. The result is a more emotionally evocative, if less historically accurate, account of an art object’s place in the cultural narrative. And further, he concludes by tying these more recent bits of myth making and “hearsay” to the Iliad, and to the greater oral tradition, revealing his motivation for the minimal, spoken-word style of the video.
Inside (dir. Bo Burnham)
“It’s just me and my camera…and you, and your screen. The way the lord intended.”
Like so many contemporary artists, and this very comedy special / film / one-man-show / etc., Bo Burnham defies any one category. He’s been an ambassador for YouTube and the youth culture it generated for more than a decade. After several stand-up specials that solidified his popularity with the increasingly extremely online young people that grew up alongside him, he made a sudden shift: in 2018 he made his feature directorial debut with Eighth Grade, a quasi-Solondzian coming-of-age dark comedy that depicted the ways technology, social media, and commodification of self intersect with the natural pressures and anxieties at the turn of adolescence. One of the film’s most remarkable strengths was the ways in which it universalized its deeply specific subject matter: a white, middle class tween girl, in an American middle school, right now. Well-founded concerns about a 28-year-old white guy’s “right” to tell this particular story notwithstanding, it’s a sturdy film debut, and one that predicted an appropriate and much-welcomed emergence of stories in similar spaces by more keyed-in creatives, including PEN15, which combines Eighth Grade’s prickly adolescent discomforts with the absurdist tendencies of shows like Strangers With Candy to craft
Three years on from that terrific movie, Burnham produced Inside, which landed on Netflix, though the “content,” as Burnham so frequently, sardonically describes it, would be right at home on the platform which made Bo famous. Like so many of the early comedy YouTube songs that went viral and put him on the map, the sequences here are simple: Bo Burnham, in one place, with his instrument, a camera, and some silly songs. But out of this minimal foundation he builds a special kind of artifact, using basic editing and camera techniques, as well as some inspired projection, to increase the depth and theatricality of the proceedings. The result is a narrative built around a metaphysical odyssey through the formal limitations and specificities of various contemporary modes of entertainment: comedy special, vlog, music video, social media post, gamer stream. The material grows more powerful as the easy gags fade and the intersections between various threads become clearer. One man’s isolation, ostensibly because of COVID, is in fact reflective of a greater, twinned isolation: the individual isolation of his youth that has blossomed into his inability to create anything outside of this interior, self-involved mode, and the larger isolation of contemporaneity, wherein we’ve all theoretically given ourselves to life “inside” the internet. Again, as with Eighth Grade, Burnham smartly exploits the limitations he’s set himself to exaggerate his satire and unexpectedly universalize his incredibly specific experience. No, we won’t all relate to an affluent comedian’s angst at being superficially “homebound” in a guest house where all of his production needs can be provided at his whim; this is why he abandons any notions that we are experiencing these past years in the same way, and uses the opportunity to magnify the ways in which our loneliness is shared in the information age.
The quality of the songs is remarkably consistent, and is its own survey of a kind, running the gamut from mock R&B to contemporary indie folk (“That Funny Feeling,” a highlight of the project, has since been covered by Phoebe Bridgers, which led to an additionally dizzying bit of metatext in which Bridgers performs the song live at a show Burnham attended). As with Burnham’s formal gambits, the songs are multilayered and evoke unexpected pathos almost as often as laughs.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (dir. Adam Curtis)
BBC’s resident galaxy brained archivist and homespun middle-aged DJ Adam Curtis returned in 2021 after a several year break with his most enormous project yet, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, an 8-hour documentary film series released formally on BBC’s streaming service iPlayer but, as with all Curtis projects, quickly leaked subsequently on YouTube. It covers the largest amount of history yet for the master-from the opium wars of the 19th century to the election of Joe Biden. It is, nonetheless, perhaps his most focused in proportion, with ostensible “protagonists,” such as Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, Afeni Shakur and her son Tupac, and a select few other recurring characters, as it journeys across the 20th and early 21st centuries in an attempt to trace not just a conventional documentary narrative of our shared histories, but a more interior history, an “emotional history” he calls it, perhaps more explicitly than ever revealing the general reality inherent in his oeuvre: despite his claims to being a journalist, and not an artist or filmmaker, Curtis does indeed craft narratives tied more to emotional reality than practical reality. As always, the details, and analysis of their historicity, are largely unimportant-and, after the torrential downpour of information and imagery in this particularly bloated project, almost impossible to track anyway. These are Curtis’ classic tales of collectivism against individualism, personality against personality, state against state, etc., but in its mammoth size, more overwhelming and emotionally palpable than ever, immaculately demonstrating the exhausting scope of history and its coalescence in contemporary life, all with Curtis’ increasingly mature style and montage. For those unfamiliar with Curtis, this might be the wrong place to start-All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Century of the Self, and especially Hypernormalisation share its ambition without reaching quite so far so fast. But as intermediate level Curtis, can’t get you out of my head continues to satisfy.
The History of the Atlanta Falcons (dir. Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein)
Jon Bois and his colleagues at SB Nation have long been pushing the boundaries of form and function in sports journalism, but since 2019’s The Bob Emergency Bois has been vastly expanding the canvas on which he paints his humanistic portraits, first with that feature length survey of the history of athletes named Bob-which is able to elicit tears with a mere pan over a digital measuring tape, among other radical new forms of pathos-then with last year’s The History of the Seattle Mariners, which tells a story of American sporting as a pure bumbling absurdist tragicomedy. His latest and most enormous work, The History of the Atlanta Falcons, uses this same scope to spin a similarly absurdist yarn that also provides a portrait of our nihilistic political moment, in which hope and idealism (and a liberal can-do attitude) are simply no match for brute force and chaos. Consistent with his previous work, Bois sticks predominately to still images and primitive animations on a flat virtual surface, saving archival footage for only the most key moments, and he and his fellow narrators flatten a history of a city, its people and its sport into a universal political tragedy. Its two greatest triumphs: a longform elaboration on the life and legacy of Michael Vick, transparent on his vile actions but nonetheless radically empathetic; and a feature-length recount of the Falcons’ catastrophic Super Bowl against the Patriots in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, which makes a dizzying thrillride out of a national memory most sports fans would rather have buried.
Originally published at http://stammitti.wordpress.com on December 31, 2021.
