2024 cinema in review
i'm a coward and i've never loved anybody
A lingering thought I had going into this year was whether sincerity or irony would dominate as the underlying model for a new modern aesthetic. Being an internet poisoned degenerate cinema sicko myself, when it comes to my work I wasn’t sure how to proceed, and more specifically, what voice was going to win out. I hate movies, yet I am cursed to be a cinephile. We should make that a dirty word, a shameful thing. Ensure that Movie-Attracted-Persons face public scrutiny. Forced underground, the cinephile is forced into a black market where they find other freaks of their condition to trade torrents of the most obscure international VHS rips. Yet nowadays I see an increasing frequency of links to undistributed international arthouse cinema shared openly on X, as if some people are almost proud of their affliction. What a grotesque sort of creature. We should out people as cinephiles and cancel them. Loving movies to such a perverse degree should ruin your life. It certainly continues to ruin mine. My girlfriend left me last month and I believe that I will be alone forever. At least I have movies. Cinema is the only thing that make me feel less alone. I should have stayed in the Criterion Closet.
At the end of October I am on my way home from Glasgow after the world premiere of Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps. I have never been treated this well in my entire life. Considering I got on the plane with only $5 in my pocket, it could have been a nightmare. I couldn’t afford to buy razors before leaving Canada and so when Weird Weekend’s festival directors Megan and Sean ask how much I need for a per diem it feels like the most wonderful thing to ever happen to me. The worry of being unable to shave seems like the worst possible outcome in the lead up to my premiere. Of course, eating is secondary. I can survive without food, but being unable to shave is an entirely more prevalent sort of death. Earlier, in the summer, I was pretty convinced I was finally going to kill myself, which is why I released the first half of Castration Movie in the first place. As I laid in my bathtub I decided to put the haphazard workprint consisting of 4.5 hours of my movie online as an insurance measure. At least I made something akin to a first feature, I suppose. And to think the year started the best of any year of my life.
We finished shooting the first half of Castration Movie in January. The production would be on hiatus until December so that I could prepare for the film’s one year time jump. From the film’s initial planning stages I had the idea that I would gain weight between shooting blocks in order to humiliate my character even more as she struggles through the second half of the movie. I have always respected actors who manipulate their bodies for roles and given the scope of the project I feel I can pull my own Tom Hanks in Castaway and come back transformed for the second half of my movie. When I see our first footage when production resumes in December I am blown away by how different I look and feel a great degree of satisfaction in pushing myself into places that others may not go. I consider what else my body could do. Have any actors ever induced lactation for a role? I keep asking myself Why I want to do these things for the movie, but alas I will never be able to answer the question of Why am I like this? other than with the slogan that I’m simply a soldier for cinema in the Herzogian sense.
With the first leg of shooting complete, I finish cutting together the first two chapters of Castration Movie over a few days and then board a flight to Salt Lake City. After spending the latter months of 2023 crashing at my girlfriend’s parents apartment after getting evicted, I’m looking forward to sharing a queen size bed with two of my friends in Park City. I really didn’t want to miss Sundance especially this year, as they actually had programmed some movies by trans directors that weren’t documentaries. I never have enough money to travel, so thank god for Katie Rife offering to let me share her bed. I never really got to have a slumber party experience in my youth, but the week spent sharing a room with Katie and Kaila Hier fixes my soul in a way I didn’t realize I desperately needed. On our last night together we sit in our PJs and watch underground short films downloaded off Cinemageddon. I am lucky to have found such a strong sense of community amongst the other cinephiles in the film industry. It blows my mind going to film events and finding people who aren’t like this. Like a transgender character says in my movie, Why would anyone want to do this to themself on purpose?
Other than hanging out with friends, another reason I wanted to go to Sundance was to do a victory lap as I had just gotten all the pieces together for a movie I had been producing for six years that was finally scheduled to go to camera in the Spring. The previous year I was still getting it off the ground and it feels so cringe to be in that stage. I feel the worst type of person to be at a film festival is the desperate pitcher who enters every conversation already two feet deep in quicksand and trying their hardest to convince you to give them money for a rope. The stench of desperation, cloying for validation, not knowing who the right people to talk to are so your insecurity and inexperience radiate off of you in any room turning you into a pariah. Most people are terrible at pitching. I think I’m quite good at it, because I don’t try. I don’t need validation. Everyone knows I can make a movie and that to me it’s a matter of who are my friends and do we have something to work on together. My “experience” in the industry isn’t from learning how to pitch, it was making friends. If you’re not in film to bond with other people who love movies on your level then what are you doing here. When people that aren’t my friends tell me their movie ideas it repulses me. Why would anyone want to make a movie who doesn’t have to? Making movies sucks! Little does the desperate pitcher know that the rope they’re raising money for is actually a noose.
I grab tickets for all of the wonderful trans cinema on showcase. In between movies I do what I always do, chain-smoke Marlboro Reds as I wander from bar to bar bumping into friends and drinking. I go to the premier of I Saw The TV Glow and have a panic attack when the credits come up. I find the film deeply cursed and I love it. The movie has so much overlap with my lifelong interests that I can’t help but think back to everyone at Sundance last year telling me what good friends Jane and I might be. I look around the cinema and wonder if I’m the only trans person there who didn’t work on the film. I tell Jane I liked the movie and how beautiful their dress is. They say Thanks and I go to join Sepi Mashiahof who is the only person who can (almost) keep up with my chain-smoking. I tell Sepi and her girlfriend Ricky that we will grab lunch the next day. Sundance can be stupid and intimidating your first time if you don’t know lots of people there and thankfully I know everybody. I run up Main Street to make it to an afters for a film my friend McKarah Dreyfuss was a producer on and stay out drinking until the morning. I make it back to the room with enough time to change and freshen my makeup before walking over to the morning screening of Stress Positions. Still drunk, I was laughing the hardest in the theatre until the hangover hit me in an instant and I spent the last act trying my hardest not to throw up. It took every last bit of willpower not to, and for the rest of the festival the joke becomes that any publicist can give me $50 to throw up on demand during their screening (I offer the service to Chris Nash before the In A Violent Nature premiere but he tells me he unfortunately can’t handle vomit). I grab lunch with Sepi and Ricky and we are joined by Bridgette Lundy-Payne and her friend Alexandra McVicker. Alexandra jokes about having transitioned so that she could be the star in a Lars Von Trier movie (“He only casts women as leads”) and I am overtaken with a desire to ensure I get her an acting gig. I spend the rest of Sundance crashing parties and bumming around. Katie recruits me to be a one-time videographer for Letterboxd to record a red carpet Top 4. We interview Riley Keough and she thankfully doesn’t recognize me from the show I worked on for five months with her. More afterparties, more friends. I crash the A24 party with Kaila and it’s all the same people I’ve seen at every film event over the past few years. Is the film industry just fifty people? Probably. I continue to follow my friends around, so thank god my friends are all talented and driven enough to be at Sundance. Cinephiles. Me and Lea Rose Sebastianis take some sexy photos in a hot tub together so that she has collateral in case she wants to cancel me later. I feel like 2024 is going to be my year.
In October, I’m in Glasgow adjusting to the jet lag with an afternoon nap at the luxe hotel the festival is putting me up in. At the airport Megan even had an official sign with my name on it done up in the festival’s branding, What is happening? I have never premiered one of my films at a festival before. She tells me that she is so relieved that I’m nothing like the character in my movie. I’m woken up by the social media manager Holly and we take the train to the venue, Offline. The inside is as cold as a refrigerator and the building was previously used for some sort of textile or agricultural purposes. It’s the perfect spot to screen my movie. I end up at a Jamaican restaurant called The Rum Shack that is around the corner from the festival. I sit with Holly and the festival’s captioner Calvin (who did 4000+ cues for my film, the absolute madman) and meet Jaye from TGirlsOnFilm. Megan is busy running around before the official festival start. She walks two blind festival goers from the restaurant to the venue — the commitment to accessibility at this festival makes me misanthropic in considering the dire conditions of every other festival I’ve attended. They even made Described Video for Castration Movie (I have not listened to that audio track, however I am curious how Megan’s Scottish accent might enhance the film). Jaye gifts me a book she found at the trans bookstore down the street and it’s so beautiful to be here. I think about how I wish I had money so I could return the favour, but thankfully I anticipate this being a long friendship so I have time to make it perfect. I use the book in my production design when we begin shooting Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds a few months later in a scene in which Ada Rook’s character and mine argue over her favourite anime. I finish eating a jerk chicken sandwich (one of the least expensive items on the menu since the festival is treating me; I considered saying I’m okay going without dinner but I haven’t eaten in nearly two days) and then I make my way over to Offline for the opening screening. I watch the intro and then sneak out front so that I can chain-smoke and hang out with Megan and Sean. I am so relieved to be here. I haven’t left my apartment for six months and have been starting to get a little too socially dependant on Aoife and (while she’s at work or sleeping) Rook and Hesse Deni who I text through certain windows of my insomnia. I haven’t been sleeping well, or much at all. But all I can think while leaning my butt against the comforting warmth of the venue’s sole radiator, is how much this conversation with Sean and Megan is saving my life. I was back in the film industry again, talking with people who know the people I know and, most importantly, share that all-consuming sickness for cinema. I can finally share anecdotes that only other crazy people could understand, and I feel so happy.
During the Summer I was startled mid-ideation by an email from Sean and Megan asking if I would be interested in producing their annual UNSEE program, an hour of content that had been tackled by Vera Drew and Liz Purchell the previous years. I told them there was no way I would be able to live up to those two, but after some convincing I agreed to do that as well as come out for the world premiere of the first half of Castration Movie (which I am shocked by their willingness to screen). Lacking inspiration for UNSEE, I pitch doing the Castration Mixtape from Fantastic Fest again since it would pair pretty well with the movie. They agreed and I sent them my passport (the one with the boy name and photo) so they could book my flights. My horribly deep depression has me feeling immensely unmotivated, so I procrastinate on working on the UNSEE program until the day they need me to send it to them. I decide to make it about how I’m an unlovable coward who is desperate for attention (the same thing this blog has been about, the same thing my movies are about, the same thing my life is about?). Vera showed some skin in hers so I showed my blood in mine. Megan and Sean say I did a great job.
The best part about Weird Weekend is making new friends and seeing people I had only known from the internet. One of my old 4chan buddies from over a decade ago even made it out to see my new work after having been the sole Computer Hearts enjoyer back in the day. The day’s program is coincidentally a massive showcase of transexuals on-screen beginning with repertory discovery Scarecrow in the Garden of Cucumbers (thanks for putting that one back in the public consciousness Liz). The fest gives out buttons echoing the George Kuchar ones made for Holly Woodlawn’s grassroots Academy Awards campaign for Trash and they even make some in the same style that say Louise Weard for Best Director. Jaye gives a wonderful introduction and then it’s onto the UK Premiere of The People’s Joker. Vera’s film is sold out but it’s only the most sicko transsexuals and cinephiles who stick around for the Louise Weard double feature. We throw some beanbag seats down in front of the chairs and in my intro I encourage the audience to engage with the film at whatever level they feel it deserves. “Take a nap, go for a smoke break, leave for dinner and come back, just watch it however you want.” I sneak out of my screening to have a cigarette during the intermission and see a text from Aoife that reads IS ABBY THORN AT OUR MOVIE??? I don’t fucking know. All that matters is that I’m at my movie. Thorn had bailed immediately after The People’s Joker but I decide to start spreading the rumour that she walked out of my movie, so it’s gonna be the 30 trans girls at the screenings’ word versus hers. The weirdest part of Weird Weekend is when people tell me they travelled in from all around the UK to come see my movie. Oh god did I ever need this. Sitting in a micro cinema watching my movie with an audience that is 90% trans women is the best thing to ever happen to me. Everyone laughs when they are supposed to and when the movie gets real sad in the last hour you can hear a pin drop in that room. There are no walk outs (in the past I always have walkouts, usually matched with people getting mad at me in the lobby). I never want to make movies that aren’t for this audience, who I fall in love with.
Riding high off of how good I feel screening Castration Movie leads directly into UNSEE as the the room fills with people and the 34 Louise Weard stans are given no opportunity to stand up between screenings. How many other filmmakers can say an audience is that committed to sit with their work in a chilly micro-cinema for six straight hours? I feel too self conscious to watch UNSEE with the crowd so I stand out in the lobby with Sean and Megan and attempt to have a conversation while simultaneously listening to the audience’s reaction. So much wonderful laughter, broken up by dead silence during the serious moments. I wonder about the Ryan Nicholson clip in the UNSEE program and after reading reactions I realize I should not have cut out the conversation I’d recorded about it. How should we reckon with one of the iconoclasts of the New Trans Cinema having in the past been mentored by the guy who made the most transphobic movie of all time? I suppose that is what I will be reckoning with in the next Castration Mixtape. No walk outs. It’s the first night that’s ever happened to me as a director and I went two for two.
Outside the venue I am showered with praise by dozens of trans women and I wish I could somehow maintain that level of emotional elation forever. I feel so humoured to be asked to sign some posters, like really me? I am also asked to sign two books that I did not write: some force femme novel I will need to track down and Eroticism by Bataille. I uber back to the hotel with Jaye and we continue a discussion about the small world of trans people in film (although I joke that the whole film industry is 50 people, the reality of the trans film industry — industry is too strong a word, let’s go with community — trans film community is that it is actually 23 people). At some point I express my interest for somehow being involved in the Manhunt tv show adaptation, which hasn’t been publicly announced yet. I think of the struggles of the trans books I’ve optioned and how stupid this industry is for not realizing that the best original ideas are coming from our community. I thank god my adaptation of Little Fish seems to be a realistic project to get produced. I’m excited to see how beloved Casey Plett is in the UK. I snap photos of her books at the trans bookstore and text them to her, and do the same for Logan-Ashley Kisner and Alison Rumfitt. Back in my hotel room I call my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Aoife and show her the Hi8 recording of the screening intro over facetime. In two weeks we will be screening the movie together in Seattle.
Back in March I’m in a town outside of Vancouver putting pieces together for my ex-wife Dionne Copland’s new movie Riding Shotgun. Everything seems tied up outside of a bunch of unexpected hurdles put in place by our bank manager, but nothing apparently unsolvable. We get Jesse James Keitel signed on and for a moment I feel like I might be good at this. I don’t know if I particularly surprise myself with my producer skills but it’s definitely always quite affirming that I’m not full of shit when I actually pull things off. Our casting director Candido specifically said “You did it” when I got the negotiating with her team in a place where we were all happy. I write in my notebook that I refuse to get overconfident, and that this industry can catch you off guard and take it all away in an instant. I turn 30 in a week. I step on a friend’s scale and discover that I’ve already put on forty pounds for the second half of Castration Movie. The thought crosses my mind that I’m doing too much. Is it possible to be the fattest and transest woman producer in Hollywood? I have an inkling that that combo might be a little too hostile to the industry’s status quo. But Serious Actors do this sort of thing when committing to a role all the time. I expect that someone will call me a fat tranny pig when the movie comes out. My knees would buckle. Instead, in December I’m on The Wrap’s 25 Best Performances of the Year.
I try developing motion picture film in my bathroom for the first time. 2024 is a year of finally doing all the things I wanted to do. In March I feel like my thirties are off to a great start. I’m almost ready for Riding Shotgun to start production in April. The film I’m developing turns out okay.
A week before production all of my planning for Riding Shotgun falls apart. I have contingent strategies but as those fall through too I discover very quickly why I haven’t met any other producers like me. I get unexpected obstacles thrown my way that no other (cis) producer I know can explain. All I can think of is how people’s tones would shift when I went from email to them hearing my voice. I’ve spent so much of my life since transitioning ensuring that I don’t hang anything bad that happens to me on my transness. I think of things in terms of personal shortcomings, it’s my own fault I didn’t get asked back for that job, that I didn’t get that apartment. It’s my other poor life choices why I’m living out of my car and sucking dick to get a job, right? But I can’t square the mental gymnastics this time. Producing quickly becomes painful, I want to die. I’m somehow chain-smoking to such a horrifying degree that Alice Maio Mackay, who I’ve hired to be my assistant, swears off ever smoking another cigarette. I somehow get the production done but am left with a mountain of problems to solve and with no clear path out of the shit I start thinking about dying. You get no respect as a trans woman in this industry. I think of how quick cis film people are to tell me about their beefs with other trans women, yet they ought to realize I have more solidarity with a trans women I might hate otherwise just because I also know how hard it is. I remember a time many years ago running a women in film event and a male director got up on stage to complain that it was just as hard for men because the film industry is just baseline hard. Would someone please teach film bros about intersectionality? I am left in such terrible financial circumstances by the production that I have to go off of hormones between March and October, effectively detransitioning as I rot in my roach infested apartment and drown in paperwork. A bunch of my facial hair comes back which I had for years spent so much effort purging with electrolysis and I worry about being able to afford a razor in time for the Castration Movie premiere. I get angry emails from people waiting on checks from the production about how bad of a person I am for going to my premiere. Well I probably shouldn’t be allowed to work in movies anymore at all, right? My reputation is so severely damaged in Vancouver in spite of my efforts to untangle the film’s cashflow delays that I effectively cannot participate in the Canadian film industry ever again. All I can think about is how much I hate movies and myself. Perhaps I am Job being tested by the movie God to see my faithfulness. But didn’t He curse me to be a cinephile?
I think about my manipulation of my body for my movie and how that seems to be one of the recurring themes of the cinema of 2024. As I continue to punish my body for cinema as some sort of self-flagellation for my Sins, many other filmmakers seem to be trudging the depths of similar themes from various angles as well. Not only is body horror hitting multiplexes in the form of The Substance, I Saw The TV Glow, and Terrifier 3, but non-horror flicks are all obsessed with the body too. I love Jessie Rovinelli’s film “Life Story” which maps the transsexual body in a way which is formally comparable to the film art of Yoko Ono, using the apparatus to transform the trans body into a celestial one. Carta Monir’s “Sideshave” is its antithesis, presenting a sublime abject jouissance as Carta has her head shaved and blood let. As a trans femme viewer with an aversion to haircuts due to childhood trauma, this is one of the most personal and powerfully affecting works of cinema I see this year. Lex Walton’s “Shame Music 2” similarly uses the body as canvas, projecting resonant images of her past on to herself as she unpacks her physical and ideological form through a vivid and raw self-aware exorcism. There is so much more to map and I anticipate future expeditions. I challenge filmmakers to seek out this new territory rather than continuing to return to the well of Possession’s subway scene. Dear filmmakers, that well is empty. It is obvious from the modern political crises revolving around conversations of bodily autonomy why so many movies revolve around these ideas and images, and more broadly questions about whether people can change. With the exception of Jane Schoenbrun’s film which is on a different and far more personal wavelength, I find the horror movies this year to be severely lacking in meeting the political moment. To me it feels like this year’s horror films are an excuse to allow the audience to enjoy watching women suffer without any complex interrogations of Why we are watching these women suffer. The American Horror Film is driven by the return of the repressed, but most filmmakers working in the genre right now aren’t very good at doing anything other than pastiche. There are excellent formalists, but not many thinkers. It’s sort of unbelievable to see everyone else in the space being talent-mogged by the twenty-year-old Alice Maio Mackay, who in three features released this year (T Blockers, Satranic Panic, and Carnage for Christmas) was able to draw a strong line between her narrative, themes, and the cultural moment. Suffice it to say, I feel horror is a soon-to-be dead genre when something as representative of what the worst-faith-straw man of what a “horror flick” is in Terrifier 3 is a breakout success and Alice is left begging Shudder to moderate the wave of transphobic horror fans calling her a man in their comment section.
Other films certainly met the cultural moment this year, and not in the way that some critics write about mega hit Wicked as some sort of movie needed for these uncertain and divided times or whatever braindead take gets clicks. Conclave is a movie that understands the political times we’re in and I was remarkably impressed with its adept handling of its conclusion. It’s the sort of Good adult drama I said I was excited to see the return of last year. The same goes for Juror #2 in its solid presentation of a moral problem, which alongside Emilia Perez, Anora, and Trap (a collection of Good movies), each pose questions about individuals’ internal contradictions and their capacity for change and how that change physically manifests through one’s body. One of America’s best ever film directors, Robert Zemeckis, delivered one of the great examples of this while also crafting the sole masterpiece of pop-structuralism with Here. It’s shocking to see a Hollywood filmmaker releasing a movie that can only be compared to the experimental likes of “I Miss Sonia Henie” and to a lesser extent some of James Benning’s work (like “Two Cabins” in its similar formal exploration of American’s bodies in space in time), while being entirely its own thing. The subdivision of the single frame across time adds a new layer to cinema I’ve never seen before, a literalism of the inherent application of the apparatus to its ultimate end. Modern filmmaking technology allows us to explore a fantasy facsimile of how the body changes on screen over time, with Zemeckis drawing out a balance of ironic and sentimental imagery and ideas in a way somehow even more devious than Forrest Gump. It’s exciting to see such daring work in a multiplex, which alongside In A Violent Nature shows that Skinamarink wasn’t a fluke and pop-structuralism is here to stay.
We also saw the theme of the changing body explored in the formation of a new micro canon of incel-core, where big studio movies like Joker 2, mainstream indies like A Different Man, and underground indies like A Grand Mockery did their best to figure out what exactly is going on with young men. Expect more of these kinds of character studies next year as late-to-the-zeitgeist filmmakers try to assign an archetype to Trump’s second presidency. I feel that Connor O’Malley gets a lot of the credit for getting in on the ground floor of this cinematic fascination, but to me it’s Dan Hentschel who made the most creatively invigorating work in this space this year. The shear audacity to do what he does, that complete assimilation with one’s performance, is a genuine sight to behold. Hentschel fully encapsulates the future evolution of transgressive art that I defined in my essay on Actors. His utilization of social media and online video platforms to consistently up the stakes of the joke, oftentimes by playing against other accounts later revealed to also be creations of his own, is nothing short of genius. To have someone on X pose the question of “is Dan Hentschel okay?” as a means of showing a confusion between self and character, only to then realize that it is Dan himself posing the question. Genius. His six month bit of creating a fake girlfriend and then revealing the ruse in an eight minute video in which he uses his gag as a springboard to discuss the inherent distance between all people was one of the best works of cinema I saw all year.
It’s fascinating what can constitute cinema in 2024, as we are certainly having more conversations about the canonical limits of the medium. I had a viral post in which I jokingly requested Letterboxd moderators to delete the page for Dan Olson’s “I Don’t Know James Rolfe” from their platform. This sparked outrage as if I was gatekeeping cinema, as opposed to me meeting the intent of the video which asks Are Youtubers filmmakers? To me, the answer is an obvious Yes, but very few are good filmmakers (at a rate less than even more traditional filmmakers, most of whom are already bad at at the craft). I’ve never been opposed to celebrating internet ephemera as cinema, and in university I was in a course in which I took the hardline opinion that anything captured on film or video was cinema. Hell, life is cinema, isn’t it? The best documentary I saw this year was Jenny Nicholson’s “The Spectacular Failure Of The Star Wars Hotel” which held my attention on a subject I couldn’t care less about for over four hours and had its own cultural moment where everyone seemed to be talking about it. One of the best narrative works I engaged with this year was the “Final Season” of Cate Wurtz’s Crow Cillers, a webcomic steeped in cinematic form and as referential to the medium as I Saw The TV Glow. We’ll always be drawing new boundaries of what cinema is as the internet continues to become our primary engagement of it. More people watched my movie together in Discord servers than they did at a cinema, so perhaps it makes sense to start tailoring movies for that means of exhibition.
In terms of being out of touch with the moment, the most embarrassing thing put on screen this year was Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, the ugliest and most brazenly evil movie released this year. An object that comes as the death knell for a generation of America’s filmmakers, the movie embodies every negative impulse that cinema allows. With the exception of some good performances by actors that understood exactly what kind of movie they were in, the movie is an absolute mess thats worst crime is having absolutely nothing to say. By trying to be unspecific in its targets, rather than being universal the movie’s existence feels like it exists void of reason. Why did Coppola feel the need to make this movie so badly? Entitled filmmaking from a director who leaves an epitaph that speaks to how his generation left the industry in shambles for the filmmakers that follow them. But at least Coppola and his filmmaking buddies of similarly incomparable Emersonian minds were able to make a few good movies (and a fuckload of money) in their lifetime before the industry implodes. An exception to my venom is Oh, Canada, which is made by a filmmaker who seems to face tremendous guilt over choices made in his career and his life, resulting in one of the most structurally dynamic works of storytelling this year. A movie that comes to the conclusion that people can’t change, that the remembrances that create the narratives of our lives are more meaningless and disconnected than are the patterns we piece together in healthier times, that some of us are broken in ways that make us cowards who will never truly love anybody. Paul Schrader got to finally finish what he started with Dark, and with it comes the most introspective work made by someone from his generation. Hopefully Coppola proves to be more an enigma than a rule, but I’m not holding my breath that anyone other than Zemeckis, Scorsese, and Schrader have the capacity to look inward to this extent. I wonder what will happen to the industry once all of these people are dead.
Thankfully filmmakers my age will be able to adapt. I’m excited to see new directors who grew up immersed in the internet, and with them is coming a new model of internet-inspired film formalism. I’m noticing two strands of internet filmmakers that in one dialectic could be deemed sincerity versus irony or more lazily Tumblr versus 4chan, but I’ll propose a better dichotomy in that of AMV and shitposting. The AMV internet filmmaker makes movies based around the more formally celebratory modes of the internet. Aesthetic boards, playlists, fanfiction and roleplay, a sort of internet poeticism birthed from the intersection of fandom and new technological tools for celebrating things one loves, constantly remixing and recontextualizing until all that’s left is empty citation. I Saw The TV Glow, Carnage For Christmas, and The People’s Joker are emblematic of this mode of filmmaking, for their reliance on pop cultural celebration (and at times a loving condemnation) interacts with a well-known genre (coming-of-age) resulting in a straightforward narrative which is elevated by the filmmaker’s love for their references. Red Rooms similarly plays with obsession and recognition within its highly assured online aestheticism, yet trades Buffy and Batman for Bundy. These types of movies feel so good to watch, they fire on fully greased cylinders of the best the internet aesthetic can offer, while all using that style in wholly distinct ways. In A Violent Nature similarly utilizes pop-structuralism in a similar vein to Skinamarink, recalling watching early video game let’s plays and best kills listicles as much as it does Elephant. I think the trap of the AMV movie is that lesser filmmakers might lose their point within their adoration. Lots of filmmakers love David Lynch, but let’s be real — there is only ever gonna be one David Lynch. If these filmmakers don’t keep their references fresh and find an assured voice we’re going to have diminishing returns on their work and this type of internet film will eventually burn out or at the very least lose its long term appeal and fall into a more niche place online amidst the old school AMVs. However, I anticipate this side of internet filmmaking as being the primary mode going forward, as it’s more palatable nature means it will attract audiences a lot better than the shitpost film.
Movies like my work, The All Golden, Dog Movie, The Code, Spirit Riser, A Grand Mockery, Stress Positions, Damon Packard’s AI shorts, The Sweet East, www.RachelOrmont.com, and The Beast are far more hostile to their subject matter, characters, and audiences. Some of these movies may not seem to have an obviously digestible point beyond their surface level provocations, which often alludes to a certain formal or ideological prodding as the whole of whatever substance might lay inside. Beneath the surface however, which is sometimes aesthetically hostile as to give the trick away immediately or is otherwise hidden by more traditional cinematography, we find movies that have a lot to say about how fucked up we all are. My favourite movie of this year was Peter Vack’s new flick www.RachelOrmont.com. When I chain-smoked cigarettes in the basement of Joe Swanberg’s micro cinema before doing the intro for Actors last year me and Peter talked about capturing the feeling of a 4chan thread or comment section on-screen, and Peter absolutely succeeded at nailing it in www.RachelOrmont.com. The movie is equally hilarious and horrifying, a picaresque nightmare of online hostility and validation which takes whatever baseline respectability The Sweet East clings to and stomps all over it. Betsey Brown is brilliant at doing her infantilization routine which she perfects here, finally breaking past the expected Isabelle Adjani impersonation of the abject woman into something freshly attuned to the current era. Perhaps 2025 will be the year of age regressor cinema. The film’s ideas of how the internet makes us all ideological babies susceptible to any intrusion is remarkably self-assured in its execution, honing in on the cinema space as womb as collective unconscious as internet in a way that hasn’t been explored this literally before. It’s off-putting and obvious to an extent that it becomes formally exciting. As Dasha Nekrasova’s influencer sherpa says in the film, It’s called being an edgelord and its the most honourable thing you can do with your life. The movie takes bold choices to make you hate it on the surface level with some of its casting and presentation, but that’s all a part of the whole. It’s a wonderful object of transgressive cinema, entirely thought through in a way few other movies I saw this year were. By the time Betsey was wandering around the “real world” and publicly pissing in a subway tunnel I was feeling excited about transgressive movies again. The scene when Betsey is connected to go-pros and forced to masturbate is remarkably comparable to the feeling of horror I experienced watching the green screen sequences in The Beast, which was the other shitpost masterpiece of this year (and like this year’s third masterpiece Here explores changing bodies in time). The Beast is everything that the shitpost movie can hope to be, aesthetically and narratively confrontational to an extent that it’s impossible not to have an emotional reaction to it. Like several of these types of films it even leans into its shitpost nature in its casting. Many of the movies in the general framework of internet filmmaking share cast, which I can only compare to the ways in which Youtubers would crossover between each other’s videos in the late noughts. The Sweet East is sort of the result of a mode of filmmaking which started with Suburban Knights. I’m excited to see where filmmakers who grew up with the internet go from here.
I have written many times that trans cinema does not exist, can not exist. I think that in hindsight we might form a trans canon out of this generation of filmmakers, similar to the 90s New Queer Cinema. I have used the terms New Trans Cinema, which in ten years will focus on about five filmmakers that the film history books decide to canonize. Yet I hate canons, for they are exclusionary and transness should probably not be exclusionary. I don’t know what Vera Drew, Theda Hammel, Alice Maio Mackay, Jessie Rovinelli, Dylan Mars Greenberg, Jane Schoenbrun, Henry Hansen, Aimee Armstrong and myself have in common as filmmakers that released movies this year besides a superficial idpol label. Lots of trans people released movies this year but we only really talk about two of them and then include a catch all of this being a year for trans cinema or whatever. I don’t see anyone talking about the criminally underseen Spirit Riser or Dog Movie in these conversations. Alice and Theda released movies around the same time that Vera and Jane did in the Spring, but outside of a few respectable trans film critics I didn’t see any worthwhile commentary on the Why now? of this moment. The interesting thing is that for a few months this year you could go see a movie directed by a trans person at a cinema, which in any other year would be exceptionally irregular (a few films by the Wachowskis and MJ Bassett over the last two decades are the only past opportunities to do so I can think of). Besides the trans experience of the filmmakers, is there anything in common between those films? Not really. There is more in common between my critical darling epic and the much reviled Envy/Desire than with any other movies made by trans filmmakers this year (with the exception of Dog Movie and Theda’s scenes in Stress Positions), but I don’t see anyone putting those works in conversation. Instead I see mention of I Saw The TV Glow or The People’s Joker in a year end capsule accompanied by brackets that celebrate trans cinema and mention a handful of other disparate titles. Let’s not talk about trans cinema anymore in the same way we don’t talk about “male cinema.” It’s just movies. We are making movies. You can celebrate that a bunch of trans people are making movies but don’t say they’re all functionally the same thing, please. It’s transphobic. Emilia Perez is going to win Best Picture.
Thanks to the Year of Trans Cinema I will forever be in print standing next to the words SISSY HYPNO. Could there be a greater punishment for a True Transsexual like myself? You can never say I’m not committed to my art. Thanks to my time in Glasgow I love movies again. Two weeks after I returned to Vancouver I am being driven to Seattle, packed in our friend’s purple Tesla that has a trans flag license plate. When our Castration Movie posse gets to the venue there is nobody there with about fifteen minutes until the movie starts. I tell my friends that “this is indie film” and that at the very least we can have some fun watching the movie by ourselves. Suddenly a girl emerges and asks if there is a movie screening and if I am Louise Weard. Am I? I am. She tells me that the only evidence of this happening was one sentence on the venue’s calendar. She had just driven 500 miles to be at the screening (and more specifically, to ensure that I could sign a copy of that force femme book that I didn’t write for her as well). After a few more minutes the DIY art gallery venue was full, several girls sitting on tables as we ran out of chairs. The room was cold. Once again, nobody walked out.
After those two screenings word of mouth spread fast and my directorial debut finally found its audience. I co-produce Alice Maio Mackay’s sixth feature film The Serpent’s Skin and it shoots in November starring Alexandra McVicker and Avalon Fast. I am unable to make it out to Australia to be on set, but the production goes really well. In December I finally worked out my lingering problems from Riding Shotgun and that should all be off my plate in the New Year (we shall see if my reputation recovers, but alas it should be clear to you all by now that my reputation is my lowest priority). I have decided that I’m going to retire from film producing and focus solely on my directing. My most important filmmaking lesson is to work with your friends. When I do that it usually goes well for me, or at least better than the times that I have not. On New Years Eve I go out to Vancouver’s new tranny nightclub and within five minutes I have people approaching me to tell me how much the movie I made meant to them. I’ve read messages from people in the Ukraine and Brazil and small town bumfuck USA telling me how much this shitpost of a movie I made affected them. I didn’t think I would survive this year either, but Thank god I did because otherwise this release would have been so awkward! Posthumous success is so gaudy. I am once again optimistic going into a new year after a year which was extremely rough on me, but I made it through because of my friends, many of whom made very very good movies this year. I am grateful to everyone who liked my movie. I am now obligated to finish it. I’m still working on loving myself, but trust that I do feel loved. I love you. I will also apologize in advance, as you must understand that receiving so much validation for my film just means that I am going to try that much harder to alienate you with the rest of it. The movie is a filter after all so that I can find those other cinephiles. I’ll hang a sign that says “Sickos Only” on the cinema doors. It’s the only way for me to hopefully finally feel less alone. Because Oh boy do I ever fucking love movies.
You can watch Castration Movie here.
My favourite films of the year (in alphabetical order)
The Beast dir. Bertrand Bonello
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps dir. Louise Weard
Dog Movie dir. Henry Hansen
Emilia Perez dir. Jacques Audiard
Envy/Desire dir. Aimee Armstrong
A Grand Mockery dirs. Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon
Here dir. Robert Zemeckis
In A Violent Nature dir. Chris Nash
I Saw The TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun
“Life Story” dir. Jessica Rovinelli
“The Man Who Wouldn’t Miss Screenings” dir. Damon Packard
Oh, Canada dir. Paul Schrader
Red Rooms dir. Pascal Plante
Satranic Panic dir. Alice Maio Mackay
“Shame Music 2” dir. Alex Walton
“Sideshave” dirs. Carta Monir and Sir Testimony
“The Spectacular Failure Of The Star Wars Hotel” dir. Jenny Nicholson
Spirit Riser dir. Dylan Mars Greenberg
Stress Positions dir. Theda Hammel
The Sweet East dir. Sean Price Williams
“Why I Pretended To Be My Own GF Online For 6 Months” dir. Daniel Hentschal
www.RachelOrmont.com dir. Peter Vack