#cinema
#philosophy
#art
#crisis
#retromania
#corecore
Nearing a month after the release of their film, Onty is back with an extension of their CoreCore arc. Wrapping up Trace 61, the creator of Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023 takes a long look at Angelicism’s Film01, a cult film that sits close to the heart of this CoreCore topic.In her review of Film01 for Spike Magazine, writer Madeline Cash details the arduous process of attending one of Film01’s exclusive screenings. An online form and questionnaire must first be filled out. Those few who make it off the waitlist receive details as to the location of the screening only hours before the event. Vague and alarming warnings are sent to the attendees — there may be the possibility of a mass shooting; the film is dangerous, it is a ‘cult induction event’. Only after hurdling these curated ritualistic entrées can the viewer -or critic- experience the main course, the three-hour Film01 itself. This induction imitates the style of its enigmatic director, who liberally flirts with esotericism, occultism, and lore-building. Attending Film01 mimics the structure of becoming a disciple - the trick is to catch the master’s gaze by playing his game. By then it is too late : you’ve become part of the art. I did not experience this induction into Angelicism’s oeuvre myself, however. This was not really my choice —it is doubtful I would have been able to attend a screening even if I had filled out the form. Instead, someone who knew someone who knew someone sent me a link to the film. They had read my recent piece on CoreCore for Becoming.Press, which mentions Film01, and mentions that I had in fact not yet seen it, and were generous enough to slip me in through the digital back door. So I experienced Film01 in my daylit studio apartment, through tinny laptop speakers, and with a lunch break — admittedly, not the environment the director had in mind.
“The mystic…[is like] the Pope in his own realm, and has the infallible power to open heaven and hell with his own key…[this is] a form of dogmatism…” — Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke [my emphasis]
“The logic of extinction is in question…the logic of extinction is simply knowing how you are going to die, the way we're going to die to live forever...there are no limits to the end of the world...the logic of extinction is an unbroken, divine sentence" — Film01
“If all footage is available to us, then film01 will be one of the greatest copyright breaches of all time. All footage belongs to film01, yes, but this is already the immanent state of everyday vision in the Internet Era. In fact, it would be more accurate to say: all footage steals from film01 and not the other way round. To go online everyday is to shoot film01 and this is why everyone is purely commanded to join in with film01. What we see each day online is already always ‘editing’—the zero one cut. All that film01 does is to film this (pure) cut.”In this way, every piece of found-footage, every film -why not this review, after all?- is part of the wellspring of which Film01 exhibits full expression. The ‘New York Cut’ is merely a part per se of the Film01 as such, which is film itself - all of it, all at once. The pretense of Film01 is thus first and foremost a universality which is itself an image of extinction, an ‘extinction pov’. These are the two structural elements in play for Film01 — on the one hand, a universality, on the other hand, the status of this universality as an image of its own destruction:
— Angelicism, Principles of Film01
“Thought under extinction has no plot, no dramaturgy, no twist, no opening or closure, no suspense. It’s not literal or theatrical. It’s, lets say, pure. It’s a pure cinema, play of light and darkness without a voice-over. It’s the camera indifferently recording glaciers melting. Film01 is the extinction pov. Cinema is a 20th century reality and angelicism belongs to the 21st century. This means angelicism is not cinema. It films cinema. It subsumes both contemporary cinema and the history of cinema. Film01 is not about film, it is about filmicity. It is not about the history of cinema, it is about geology. It cuts where pure cinema meets the TL, where media meets social media. It is what’s looking. It is is are…Film01 is a gaze from the extinction pov.” — Angelicism, Principles of Film01 [sic]