In the spring of 2021 my best friend Lola told me I needed to come with her to the northwest corner of Nevada, where she was traveling with a team of designers and architects. Their destination: Fly Ranch, a piece of land owned by Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that runs the eponymous event. The team had won an RFP run by Burning Man in concert with the Land Art Generator Initiative, a nonprofit, to imagine regenerative design and development on Fly. Reeds still grow around the property because it’s an ancient lakebed; the playa where the Burn happens is the ancient lake itself. You have to watch out for wild horses and in the first week of July we got up at six a.m. to make rammed earth for an in-situ prototype, before temperatures inescapably rose past 100 degrees by noon.

Alfalfa farms hug Fly’s northern border and it’s geothermally active and once a drilling expedition accidentally generated a geyser and there are dozens of miniature mountain ranges and islands of rock and yet still bigger mountains rise in distant view of the property, which is a two-hour drive from Reno. The moony desert landscape comes out of nowhere. It’s impossible in the late summer or early fall when the air is still and warm not to feel like you’re on the precipice of a discovery, some series of events that will transform your worldview.

One way we sought refuge from the blistering heat on that first trip was to visit an old agricultural reservoir nearby. This is another case of an unexpected thing hiding behind big objects: a dirt road descends suddenly to sparkling turquoise water, surrounded by sloping, craggy hills. Campers park their RVs, go fishing, kayaking. One afternoon a pair of conservative-looking geriatric vibe-killers admonished our party for skinny dipping and “causing a disturbance” or something, so we drove to the reservoir’s other side and encountered a jubilant group of naked people with beers and floaties.

On Fly Lola and I felt like we’d severed the connection to our former lives (not permanently), and at least for the time being some visual documentation was necessary. I was in fact on hand to film everything the design team accomplished, and mostly Lola and I responded to environmental stimuli. We found a cabin on chicken legs transplanted from the playa where we filmed a scene for Sankyo Stream, the web series I made throughout college.

That December Lola called me and said that we needed to make a feature film together: she would produce and I would write and direct. The declaration was not explicitly related to our Fly Ranch trip, only the time we’d spent together having that precipice-sensation over and over again. Within five minutes I said yes, and though for a while the idea of realizing our plan felt abstract, Lola’s ambition was already known to me as uniquely effective and concrete. It has since become superhuman.

A few weeks later we went to Reno, which we soon decided should be a counterpoint to the reservoir, whose significance collided with a script I had written a year before, about a teenage girl who discovers that a swimming pool in Las Vegas is a time portal. The reservoir became the time portal and Reno the locus for teen ennui and afterward I collected the memories and pieces of emotion that resided within my still-recent adolescence. I had for a while been planning on constructing periods of just-past life as containers for feature-length writing. Sparks, a suburb of Reno, became a site of projection, whose locations could house an ensemble—a sprawling ensemble was also an early priority—that voiced questions about the future, senses of insecurity or sexual desire or queer belonging, questions I could divide across dialogue and set pieces.

Lola decided on a month—October 2024—when Reno was especially temperate. And we moved backwards from there. Lola started out as and has remained the only producer on Sparks. We hired the crew and cast the film (partly by talking to the friends we knew who knew great actors, people like Miles Emanuel, Christian Palomares, Max Wittert, Naomi Rubin) and scouted and secured the locations ourselves and built a network of dozens of folks on the ground in Reno, San Francisco, Paris and Gerlach, Nevada, which is the most remote town in the continental United States.

It was indeed October 2024 when we shot the film across 23 days, plus an extra one in Paris a few weeks later and another three days in Reno last September. Sparks follows teenagers in the namesake suburb who are convinced that this reservoir I have mentioned is a time portal. But the film starts with a character named Cleo, who is new to Sparks when she discovers a cigarette vending machine which inexplicably expels a book on Jean-Luc Godard. As summer kicks off Cleo meets the Crop, a rag-tag group who has commandeered an abandoned drive-in theater, and by this point she has morphed into a cinephile. When she learns of the Crop’s reservoir visits, she’s certain that she could time travel and meet Godard in 1960s Paris.

Sparks stars Elsie Fisher, who you may remember from Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, as Cleo; and Charlie B. Foster in his feature film debut as Antoine, the Crop’s de facto leader. The ensemble is rounded out by personalities whose quirks and chemistry I will treasure forever: characters played by Denny McAuliffe, Madison Hu, Simon Downes-Toney, Thomas Deen Baker and Julia D’Angelo. Keldon Duane-McGlashan, my high school bestie, is the director of photography and was his own camera operator. Naomi Rubin was our assistant director, Natasha Parbhu our production designer and Claire Easton our costume designer. Jane Paknia composed an original score for the film which includes two live pieces recorded by ten instrumentalists each.

What I can share today is that Sparks will have its world premiere at South by Southwest (SXSW) next month in Austin, Texas. I have long envisioned South By as the festival launchpad for Sparks, partly because it’s the first film festival that swept me off my feet, which introduced me to the pastime of exploring ideas and images as if I can know them all. The festival’s programming instincts also overlap pretty perfectly with the optimism and openness (and restlessness) that’s core to the film’s DNA.

South By will mark the beginning of the Sparks festival journey. I have a lot more to share and literally hundreds of people to thank who delved into the world as it developed and worked further to build it or support it from the outside, whether in the first few months of me and Lola saying “yeah, we’re making a movie” to the most recent stages of postproduction. This written space will be—as it has been since I started Fergstack, though in a more cryptic way—the home for reflections on the experience of making Sparks and processing it and learning from it and planning for the next project.

But don’t expect any reflecting quite yet: WE’RE MOBILIZING FOR AUSTIN!

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Until next Thursday,
Fergus

have you missed a recent Fergstack?

Catch up on the two-part story I wrote about my dad’s career in the world of ski movies…

….or the piece I wrote about Disney’s multiplane camera (a tale of deception!)….

…or the listicle I made of the best advice I heard in Richard Linklater’s Godard homage Nouvelle Vague.

In 1990 the French skier Jean-Claude Killy told Sports Illustrated he “always believed that skiing was something serious.” He knew good skiers growing up in Val-d’Isère, an idyllic alpine village, including a dude named Gerard, who was better than him but didn’t understand how skiing “could actually form your life.” This is a remarkable way of explaining dedication to a sport, especially given that Killy spoke in English (a language I bet he mastered to more seamlessly become a star), which does not immediately ensure an understanding of the belief in practice, if it does not merely mean being a world-class competitor and three-time Olympic gold medalist, also known as structuring one’s schedule around events, benchmarks, record-beating. People who do this commit as tweens and rarely possess the vocabulary to encapsulate a narrowness of purpose that hinges on honing a skill until you’re on the verge of defying physics or until you tear your ACL.

But formation might indicate there’s something in the style of skiing that tells you how to react to all experiences—how to self-express. I was searching for evidence of this influence as I watched 13 Days in France, the Claude Lelouch-produced film that covers the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. As I noted in the first installment on this subject, Grenoble is where Killy left his deepest mark and also the first games attended by my dad, who had ambled around with a broken leg in a kilt in Portillo, where Killy won his first downhill race.

Dick Barrymore hired my dad for his first-ever camera-operating gig in Grenoble, but was effectively sneaking in, as he and the self-designated “dirty half-dozen” working alongside him did not have official clearance to shoot Olympic events. On the one hand, Grenoble was among the last Olympics attended and gatekept sparsely enough for almost anybody to stride up to a race and photograph it. But Dick wore disguises throughout the games because he knew so many officials, which meant he knew they would react badly to seeing him, and he wanted to make it out of Grenoble with some material.

Lelouch was the sanctioned sculptor of the Olympic film, but he too seems to have bristled at authorities, the specter of their oversight, as his most significant contribution from Grenoble is 13 Days in France, a side project he refashioned from original footage. The sequence of events in 13 Days is chronological enough, but Lelouch and the 28 (!) other credited directors1 weave in the exploration of parts of the Olympic apparatus that are like alleyways between thoroughfares. Spaces accumulate and allow in a pretty singular way for the spectrum of emotion the filmmakers stumble upon, the displays of curiosity, unruliness, devastation both good and bad, total focus and its inverse. The images don’t concern skiing exclusively, but skiing’s speed and form feel like the model everywhere that some kind of elevated energy is at stake.

The film starts as the Olympic torch is run around France, and the fixation is on the faces: moderate exertion and more notably dispassionate participation. None of the figures smile; neither do they look uncomfortable in the cold. We already sense a collective buy-in to the ritual. I personally bought in instantly, since passing off a talisman is an easy pattern, and easy to track from an adjacent car on long-ish lenses. One tightly packed ensemble rides bikes in burgundy tracksuits; a young boy’s breath billows against cold air; a runner warming up waiting for the torch sneaks in a quick smoke. The journey ends at a vast, glassy stadium, rendered glassier by the petrochemical blue in the film stock and vaster by the ultrawide lens. Nearly as fast as we’ve established an organic participatory spirit, we’ve introduced the unfamiliar (because newly constructed) and uncanny symbol of the games’ desired girth. But nobody’s here yet; what will we do when they’re gone again? (Perhaps dismantling is not out of the question. When policemen patrol the stadium, the scene resembles Fellini’s sci-fi set in 8 ½—ready to go but perforated and impermanent.)

The toggling between freckled, blushing, willing people and artificial and striking infrastructure and organization becomes constant. Dutiful men in black uniforms link arms and march down the pistes to pack them, before more dutiful men in blue uniforms further pack the piste with their skis in pizzas. This before we observe the silvery sharpness and clear edges of a chairlift mechanism, which might as well be the cogs buried within an incomprehensible industrial machine. The intent is to scene set and to marvel and maybe to develop an ethnographic pulse; we linger on Charles de Gaulle as he watches the opening ceremony, amused but not unbothered, before we watch more youths prep the bobsleigh route, a miraculous diversion from their normal existence.

This is the most natural argument for and agent behind the survival of the Olympics, not even in the long term but literally in the twelve-day span of the Grenoble games: everybody’s, well, game. Is that what Killy meant by “form,” that sport could be a beacon, its magnetism trickling down to even the innocuous action unfolding in proximity?

We have to wait for the skiing, but when the rest of the sports kick in the footage does heighten our sense of their generating ecosystems, dependent ones. The cinematography that the filmmakers unleash via athletic subjects has staggering verve and is more importantly weightless. I first mentioned this post’s thumbnail two weeks ago—it’s a picture of the Austrian skier Pepi Stiegler with a provisional point-of-view camera that Barrymore fixed to his helmet—but the rig is more relevant now, because Lelouch and co. make magic with it.

One of my favorite early sequences is a series of rhapsodic cuts between shots of a figure skater. We get a staid, tight angle on the skate that’s sudden sepia stock, then the sight of the rink as it whips by in POV, then that same wide-angle lens from the stadium zeroing in on a sit spin, and then another whirlwind turn, now with the skater’s fixed body anchoring the frame, one leg crossed over the other like this is a state of repose. In sepia and in color we’re under the skater, they dominate the camera, before they’re in possession of it again, and then they stop their whirlwind turn. As if to chide the viewer for thinking that motion was inevitable. No, a force was at work.

A POV shot also defines the ski races, but courtesy of a discrete cameraman who rockets from the gate in front of the competitor, in the woman’s downhill. The cameraman shoots through his legs, I mean maybe it’s not intentional but that acknowledgment of a human instrument ensuring this perspective—not that the shot feels airborne without calves or ski tips in frame—is a nice reminder of how far our mediators are willing to go to keep us with the skiers, to bring us all the way into a “world of their own.”2 At the bottom of the run we careen past spectators to zero in from a low angle on several competitors, who lean into their poles like they’re peering out over this new world.

The adrenaline rush of the downhill sets a precedent. Skiing comes into focus as the pinnacle of momentum, momentum we’ve seen bunched up in other arenas. There’s not much structure to the smattering of ski races in the remainder of the film and even so skiing’s surroundings add texture that’s fundamentally supplemental. I tried to pin my dad on whether he’d shot in POV like our daredevil operator but he said he’s only skied down unoccupied race courses (while trying to match the average racer’s speed of course, sans need for frame rate manipulation!). My dad seemed positive that a cameraman would not have been so close to a skier for a real race. Later in the film POV shots from dry runs are more transparently intercut with the competition, but here I’m not sure. Maybe the dreaminess, the further world invasion happens if we don’t interrogate context.

And all this time, I know, we have not had eyes on Killy. When we find him we’re right there next to him, we’re in the funitel on the way to the men’s downhill. But right as he heads to the gate the editors splice in filmed footage of a TV playing the race, which would be formally cool if we weren’t so hooked on the intimacy moments before. The reason for the omission is probably footage loss or a logistical hang-up, but it nevertheless prevented me from assigning Killy’s invocation of form to just his technique. Skiing is already so stylish that beyond a certain skill level it’s clear you’re making marginal adjustments to win—or inventing new tricks, as Killy did with his catapult jump, “which gave him as much as a half-second advantage over racers who used the conventional starting style.”3 My god, that’s happening before the skis touch snow!

Lelouch’s world coheres and coheres, has split off entirely from the land mass that’s the world I know. Experts sharpen bobsleigh blades in the middle of the night and again in sepia (the two stocks are so opposed it’s like some kind of reaction is being provoked by their correspondence), before races that mix the dusky with the nocturnal, we’re not sure how far apart they are. Revelers chug oversized jugs of lager in an oversized beerhall (sepia, ultra-wide) and laugh at the camera and do this bit where they leap up and sit down and leap up and sit down in unison. Perhaps most evocatively we watch slalom competitors with their eyes closed turning their hands through the air. The route’s been set but imagination is required, in fact in ample supply. It dovetails with the suspicion that you could shape this world to your liking.

Barrymore and his team had nothing to do with Lelouch’s images, but I had a fun time picturing my dad at the same races, focused on a narrower band of matter: if skiing is the pinnacle can we disregard the rest? Barrymore tried to smuggle out a piece of the world that Lelouch liked whole in service of his own. In the fall of 1968 in New York, Barrymore screened a new ski movie (I wish I knew the name!) which included races from Grenoble. As my dad recalls, a representative of the French tourist office saw the movie and assumed this was the official Olympic film, later waxing lyrical about it to a colleague. Lelouch’s picture had not been released yet, and Barrymore was served an injunction. New York was the last place he played that movie in a theater.

I wrote in the first part of this story how my dad was more concerned with being present to record a race than with the fate of the projects that would contain his footage. This seizure and disappearance of an illicit Barrymore flick he had contributed to felt like the cartoonish apex of that priority. Surely my dad did not grow tired of his trademark practice, his “matching the action to capture it” (that’s a self-quote), but what about the containers?

One Light, One World is the official film of the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, a town that had no standing before Killy and a business partner became obsessed with the idea of bringing the games back to the French alps and mounted a long-shot campaign. It is with Killy’s involvement in the administration of the games that I second-guess the meaning of his beliefs about formation—what if for him it ended up just being the apparatus?

By 1992 the Olympic film—and to be fair and as a reminder, 13 Days in France was not the official Olympic film—had developed some interest in personal narrative and a love affair with Dom Casual. Between my dad’s two winter Olympic credits—A Turning Point, which covered the 1984 games in Sarajevo, and the 1992 film for Albertville—Americans had landed the International Olympic Committee’s commission. (My dad didn’t know how the IOC decides which nationals produced which movies, since there was clearly not a guaranteed correlation with the host country).

The Albertville film is distinguished by a flood of talking heads (the athletes and their hangers-on) who in their analysis of the before and after of particular races spin yarns of doubt, despair and triumph. Killy himself is turned into a talking head! In a dimly lit conference room with blinds in the background, where he looks ready to do some private investigating. My dad’s role as a “venue producer” suggests he might be chilling on a mountain far removed from the editing suite.

With this narrativized structure, One Light, One World takes the games at their word, which is to say that the games are a forum for either personal redemption or transformation. Decades earlier Lelouch was concerned with reformulating a world on celluloid, a world he understood to be strange (David Goldblatt also calls the Olympics “strange” in The London Book Review). It is enough to veer from one expressive detail to another, because in aggregate those details ensure we will not mistake the environment for another. But in reformulation Lelouch achieves exposure, and once exposed does the curiosity linger? It’s the ‘90s, Claude: you can’t get so close anymore and people are too aware of the camera.

I don’t think anybody—not Barrymore, not Lelouch, not my dad—had everlasting allegiance to the IOC’s version of things. Right after Albertville my Dad started producing Visa’s Olympic coverage; the partnership would last eighteen years, through the 2010 games in Torino, and he added summer, which turned him into a next-level globetrotter. Visa’s ongoing investment was a sign of the number of actors jumping into the content swirl, how the diffusion of access as the games grew would eventually make the average fan wonder what an Olympic film was. Meanwhile I couldn’t believe that the maturation of my dad’s work didn’t equal a bigger team. It was still always him with a camera, flitting around to races; Visa hired him one assistant. Presence secured, stabilized, planned for. He got into the world and spent a lot of time there.

Need a refresh on what happened in part 1 of this story? READ IT HERE !

When I was driving to Southern California from the Bay Area two weeks ago, I was routed along Highway 101 for the first time in maybe fifteen years. Even though reaching Los Angeles on 101 takes two more hours than the straight-shot Interstate 5, it is so much richer in detail, so much more representative of a populous California—while also exhibiting t…

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There is such a thing as the ski movie, which first emerged as the instructional, documentary mode of filmmakers like John Jay and Warren Miller, who released “annual” ski films and who traveled a circuit of resort towns to present them as “lectures,” which I think means the films mainly offered instruction on technique. Miller pumped out the pictures, but the format is not well remembered, perhaps because, as noted in the Skiing Heritage Journal, it has already accomplished the specific—and not very cinematic—aim of getting Americans interested in the sport. One project my dad worked on is a television program called The Killy Challenge, which featured the French superstar skier Jean-Claude Killy competing “head-to-head” (meaning side by side) against local competitors in towns like Jackson Hole and Heavenly, Nevada. I couldn’t find a record of the show except as listed in an old TV guide.

Skiing has been filmed as an answer to cultural phenomena like The Endless Summer: that would be The World on Skis, which my dad shot most of, which he has loaded into a 16-millimeter projector at home and screened for me before. Locations include the classical (St. Anton in Austria) and the unexpected (Mauna Kea in Hawaii). Or the ski crew has been parceled as a second unit on Hollywood films like The Soldier, also in St. Anton, where a cable car was blown to smithereens.

The animating principle behind being on mountains with skiers and capturing their action on film and matching the action to capture it seems to be the realization that skis and cameras just go together. A zany family friend is sure she saw my dad once glide down a mountain backwards while shooting an avalanche, which he says is baloney, but the sentiment, the certainty that my dad’s crew were superhuman maneuverers, is more important. How do you find yourself a makeshift dolly as smooth as the machine except for when you have snow? I couldn’t pin down the fates of a lot of the films my dad has mentioned, and he doesn’t keep a catalog of his credits. He cares mostly about his presence, his confirmed use of a camera, at dozens of major skiing events in the second half of the twentieth century.

I concede the difficulty of recollecting information about films produced fifty years ago, but one thing my dad has never done is narrativize his biography. He’s a piecemeal guy: you activate his memories by mentioning proper nouns in passing, which unlock key details you can link together into an origin story, and then the story of the rest of his career. To this end, and despite it being an imperfect vehicle for remembrance, my sister and mum and I bought my dad a box set of every “Olympic film,” a collection comprehensively restored by the International Olympic Committee and distributed by the Criterion Channel.

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Why imperfect? Because ski films and Olympic films are distinct species. The concept of the Olympic film is hard to pin down, a bit insistent on—and defensive about—its own existence, outside of a duty to document. And in fact that documentation, as with the ski movie, was a practical tool for the judges, coaches, and data analysts at the games, at least until the development of more customized technology. In the London Review of Books David Goldblatt explains how, from the “willfully romantic” inception of the modern Olympic games by Pierre de Coubertin, the IOC has fought to manufacture relevance, first by including popular sports, i.e. attracting the working class—and blunting nationalistic associations—then by allowing women to participate, then by dropping its ban on professional athletes, which allowed American basketball players to go to Barcelona in 1992 and drive up viewership. Then, because the newfound absence of amateurism created an “ideological void,” the IOC staked a claim to liberal-progressivism, introducing commitments to “human rights, gender equity and the pursuit of environmental sustainability.”

This shapeshifting relationship with athletic scope speaks to the erratic and even flimsy motivations for re-founding the games back in 1894, even though now it makes sense (I guess?) that one gargantuan event should pit countries against each other through sport. Rule 27 of the Olympic Charter is that “each organizing committee must make a film record of its games,” according to the coffee table book that accompanies the Criterion set, which reads as a sign that the IOC figured to lean on filmmakers and help them stick together the verbiage and organization of elements and balance that could define the games. It helped that the Lumière brothers invented cinema literally a year after Coubertin’s Olympics started, thus Olympic narrative development could be invigorated by the more organic exploration of a transformational new medium.

In 1999, Chris Vanocur, a reporter for ABC’s Salt Lake City affiliate, broke the news that the city, due to host the 2002 Winter Olympics, had bribed IOC officials to win its bid. The scandal led to the discovery of either dubious transactions or “criminality” involved in almost every bidding process dating back decades. Goldblatt writes that the 2014 Sochi games, which cost $51 billion, were “primarily an instrument for transferring some of the Russian state’s hydrocarbon money to oligarchs and their underlings.” Killy, an Olympic nut whom Sports Illustrated once called a potential IOC president, complained of Putin being “unfairly treated,” and that he and the despot were “very good friends.” (Putin is known to be a great skier.) Goldblatt wonders if the whole Olympic enterprise might eventually and deservedly fall by the wayside.

As far as the winter games go: what if we kept only the skiing? No knock on the other sports, speed skating’s cool and bobsleighing has the vessels destined to show up in your dreams, but then there’s figure skating, which Ipsos reckoned was the most popular sport at the Beijing winter games in 2022 by a wide margin, but I wonder (without evidence) whether this engagement is not one of the main byproducts of the IOC’s confection campaign. The costumes! The drama! Why are they all married couples! Killy may be forgiven for a tunnel-vision dedication to getting the games on their feet, of knocking aside the ever-insurmountable logistical challenges that accompany a bid, given that he fitfully and almost single-handedly secured France the 1992 games in Albertville. And Albertville itself was the full-circle home-turf moment for Killy, then the veteran nearly thirty years removed from his formative Olympics in Grenoble in 1968, where he won three gold medals.

It is because my dad’s movements in this period crossed over with Killy’s that my writing on skiing will focus on Olympic films from Grenoble and from Albertville, as well as from Innsbruck in 1964. Together the three films work both to help me access the first big steps in my dad’s path through the ski film industry and to understand some part of how the artistry of filmed skiing developed and soared, before it frayed, got confused, infiltrated by consumer tech and user-generated content and sumptuous broadcast coverage.

Innsbruck is a wonderful Olympic setting and a charming Olympic film because these games occupy (the back end of) a limbo state between the Olympics being provincial and the Olympics being a lucrative technicolor spectacle. Killy had joined the French ski team in the early sixties but, as his coach Honore Bonnet put it, in those days he “never finished a race.” Innsbruck is still probably an environmental ideal for the concept of accessible spectatorship (almost absurdly so) and can-do perseverance on the part of the organizers. Maybe Killy always wanted to go big (he would make so many ads), but he also grew up skiing over rooftops in a village in the alps.

The official Innsbruck film, directed by the Austrian Theo Hörmann, structures a conventional account of the games, interpolating cultural facts about the Tyrolean region (Olympic films are somewhat obligated to spotlight the host city) and telling us the significance of pretty much everything on screen, either helpfully or pedantically, depending on your tolerance level. Are there some mistranslations from the German narration? Billy Kidd, who won a silver medal in the slalom (and who once stayed with my parents in London!), is described as a “carefree loser” with “nothing to lose.” My favorite line was the declaration that the goal of the Olympics is “perfection,” which lands despite the self-seriousness as shameless—and accurate. Indeed the breathless IBM product placement reminds us how in 1964 the firm’s analysts call contests at the smallest fraction of a second. Cutaways to IBM offices hundreds or thousands of miles from Innsbruck—tiny people pressing buttons—put me in mind of Inside Out.

But clearly the nerds can’t do everything, because in 1964 judges were still using cameras to check skiers’ finishing positions in the frames of film rolls. And in one lovely sequence Hörmann throws an arced line on screen, like it’s a slide in a PowerPoint presentation: this line is superimposed over the bobsleigh route, and we learn how if racers fall below it they’re guaranteed to lose. Experimentation hovers at the edges of Hörmann’s mandate, but we are treated to weird kaleidoscopic double-images, where a closeup of an athlete’s face in one corner of the frame bleeds into a wide-angle shot of a crowd. There’s no explanation for this choice, but hey, why not try it out?

The most flabbergasting things about Innsbruck are that spectators didn’t need tickets and that mere weeks before the games the city had no snow. The army was called in to transport powder from nearby villages; as observed in a contemporary Times article, “hundreds of Austrian soldiers clambered over the hillsides, packing them by hand with snow…hauled up the ski tracks in wooden sleds.” Counterproductively, it’s Tyrolean custom to blow a horn from the top of a mountain to ward off harsh winters, which Hörmann shows the Tyroleans doing, could you stop that please!! And then there are the teenagers on their cross-country skis ambling from their homes along narrow pistes to greet their heroes in the middle of a race, basically at arm’s length. At one point the camera fixates bizarrely on a steep section of mountain where standing onlookers lined up in rows keep losing their balance and falling, quite dangerously, down the slope, sometimes bowling over as many as five or six others in the process. Can you imagine a sporting infrastructure that barely accounts for the people watching the sports, which actually means giving them total freedom? How would you feel about total freedom as a spectator?

By 1966, two years after Kidd’s medal and victorious Innsbruck performances by skiers like the Austrian Pepi Stiegler, Killy was a minor celebrity winning a lot of races. 1966 is also the year that my dad left his hometown of Edinburgh to intern on a cattle ranch in Argentina. I already knew this part of his story: he loved skiing and wanted to squeeze in a trip to Portillo, Chile, a mountain that bottoms out on a small lake and striking yellow hotel. The owner of the hotel was impressed enough by my dad’s abilities that he offered him a job on ski patrol, so my dad delayed his arrival at the ranch. Early in the season he broke his leg, which was a huge bummer but not a dealbreaker for employment at the hotel, which also had a pool, a discotheque and a cinema. For the whole season he worked simultaneously as a projectionist, a lifeguard and a DJ. There is no triptych I’m more obsessed with.

Extending his stay in Portillo meant that my dad was in town when the Alpine World Skiing Championships descended there that August. The event was so fateful for his future that I’m almost moved to tears by the knowledge that it might not have happened that way. Portillo is where Killy won his first downhill race, where he set the stage to dominate the next winter games. It’s where my dad went out on the mountain—in a kilt, to flaunt his heritage and spare his broken leg, but he was still on skis so…not so spared; his photo was taken with athletes and ran in The Scotsman back in Edinburgh, where his parents saw the photo and learned of his injury for the first time.

Most consequentially for my dad, Portillo is where he ran into Dick Barrymore, a ski filmmaker who modeled his approach on Warren Miller’s and who was on hand to shoot the championship’s official film. There is a brilliant photo from Portillo of Stiegler, the Innsbruck gold medalist, to whose helmet Barrymore jerry-rigged a camera and a counterweight with bungee cords and duct tape for a POV shot. Cameras fixed to surprising objects so that they bulge and glisten is like the best form of camera-awareness, of cameras bursting into a composition, into a worldview, mercifully (though inevitably) spotted by others of their kind.

Dick and my dad had met at Aviemore, a Scottish resort town, and in Portillo Dick told my dad he should come to California. He would then ask my dad to Grenoble to help him shoot the 1968 Olympics, where he was not commissioned by the IOC (as my dad said, the Olympics do extend beyond skiing) and not technically permitted to shoot the races, but he wanted to use Grenoble material for his own not-exclusively-Olympic ski film. My dad went to Grenoble with a Kodak K-100 camera alongside five other videographers including Dick; the group called themselves the “Dirty Half-Dozen,” a name I had thought applied to work on multiple gigs, but it was just this one. Dick wore disguises so that he would not be recognized by officials. Meanwhile the French director Claude Lelouch, fresh off a Palme d’Or win at Cannes for A Man and a Woman, would shoot Grenoble’s official Olympic film with Éclair Caméflexes, the same that Godard used for Breathless.

My dad had never used a motion-picture camera before Grenoble. It was his first job in charge of one. He had been bound for a cattle ranch, and was introduced to the idea of filming skiers while on skis, an idea I associate with the resorts of North America and Europe, in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t think he’d considered the possibility of such a job before this moment. And before this month I had not linked these parts of the story together.

In two weeks’ time I will return to 1968 and to Lelouch’s film 13 Days in France, which is a “personal project,” a recutting of the footage he used for Snows of Grenoble, the official Olympic commission (which he did not direct). 13 Days in France is a container for transcendent images and for awestruck yet also probing observation of all the corners of Olympic infrastructure and participants and strangeness. And while Lelouch’s team watched and rolled in the wings…so did my dad’s. At the center of everything is Killy, whose overnight fame will lead to my analysis of One Light, One World, one of two official winter Olympic films where my dad was credited as a producer, which covers the Albertville games that Killy spearheaded and which occupies a drastically different visual mode than Lelouch’s Grenoble.

This writing will be interrupted by next week’s thoughts on the Oscar nominations.

JANUARY 30 UPDATE: JUMP TO THE NEXT installment of this story now that it’s been published.

Have you missed a recent Fergstack?

Catch up on last week’s writing about Disney’s ingenious (or stolen!) multiplane camera.

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One confused phenomenon that has defined my remembrance of California since moving away seven years ago is periodic attachment to places and objects that I hazily, mistakenly recognize as relevant to my coming of age. One example: the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, a shooting location for Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a fading movie palace …

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Fergstack will not run on Christmas next Thursday but will return on the second day of the new year.

Recent editions of Fergstack have explored Netflix’s acquisition of the Warner Bros. film studio (gross!), November candidates for theft (no I’m not going to summarize what that means!) and the joys and mundanities of working from home.

Check out these posts and all who came before them at fergstack.substack.com !

It’s easy to harbor skepticism toward a film that looks like a nerdy cinephile’s exploration of trivia and personalities which require prior knowledge to enjoy. Since the period Richard Linklater covers with his new film Nouvelle Vague originates (or operates near the beginning of) a “world-historical” cinematic movement (in the critic Richard Brody’s words), a viewer might worry she’ll have one of those encumbered experiences where the meaning of the action has already been so indisputably reinforced by critical and academic establishments that failing to recognize it would mean being a cinematic, well, dunce, and forcing the recognition would sap all the fun out of watching the film.

Even if you minimize the obscure references or labor to invite an audience into a world, you have to allow them to watch first. Linklater already has a relationship with Netflix (they bought Hit Man on the 2023 festival circuit), and introducing the streamer’s vast user base to a body of work it has possibly never engaged with might be what Linklater figures is in the same cultural-historical-dissemination ballpark as Gatsby on a high-school lit syllabus.

Beyond spreading awareness, what are the priorities that govern Linklater’s accounting of how Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, was produced? Brody writes in The New Yorker that recreating the settings and having real-life figures portrayed by lookalikes trained in mimicry amounts to a form of “documentary” mythology. And indeed the impression that develops after perhaps twenty minutes of Nouvelle Vague is not (as various press blurbs have claimed) a stylistic imitation of Godard’s actual filmography. We don’t see wild jump cuts or characters breaking the fourth wall to address the viewer; when the camera watches handheld, the image is still easygoing, not excoriating. In that way Brody is right about myth-making, since Linklater allows his characters to present themselves, an act that always adds fiction to biography.

But because the simulacra of Paris apartment interiors and location shoots from Breathless are so precisely constructed, and because our ersatz Jean-Paul Belmondo can be hard to tell from the original, I found that the “documentary” part of Linklater’s process resembled something like a lost document. Putting Roberto Rossellini in a car with Godard after giving a speech to the Breathless team is like getting reassurance directly from your idols, rather than in a book about them. Brody prefers the book—he doesn’t care about the veracity of the “details,” and in fact he wrote a definitive book on Godard. But the lines in the script are so dense with information, considered nouns, that I would find it shocking if each did not have some basis in recorded or printed interviews. (The New York Times confirms that at least a few of Godard’s lines are pulled from Godard on Godard, his book of criticism, which I haven’t read, and from Cahiers du cinéma, the famous magazine he wrote for.)

Affording these magical bits—bits of ideology, of practical instruction—the space for incantation, to be uttered into the open, all around the apparatus, the teeming life, that birthed Godard’s first film…that’s like placing yourself among the greats, so that you can be reminded of what you’re already sure you believe, or of what’s worth believing. But maybe this isn’t accurate—what if agonizing over the recreation of twenty days’ tournage on Breathless warped Linklater’s sense of spontaneity? Then again…what if the close study of the circumstances that led to that spontaneity mean that the orchestrator of this study will know very well when he’s close to discovering the circumstances again?

Because Christmas is less than a week away and my readers must have wish lists in their Notes app to fulfill or to pass onto loved ones, and because so much dialogue in Nouvelle Vague reads as straightforwardly as a—

—listicle—

—I HAVE MADE MY OWN.

Ranked below is the best advice I heard in Nouvelle Vague, or maybe not the best advice, but the most thought-provoking—advice that led me to question my beliefs, or which felt radiantly reflective of a feeling or experience I’ve had, or which can’t possibly be true if applied narrowly, which I may well reject after a long period of consideration, but if cheeky or absolutist in order to pry previously unknown material out of a production, which might be more useful, more devastating than advice defined by restraint.

6. “Short films are anti-cinema.”

—Jean-Luc Godard

Godard says this after complaining that he hasn’t made a movie yet, to which his friend Suzanne Schiffman says, “but you made a court métrage!” Godard’s best friends, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, have beat him to directing features. He wanted to do it by age 25. This feeling of having to play catch-up might be why Godard commits so wholeheartedly to his filmmaking philosophy on the Breathless set. If he had more time to settle into the craft, if he hadn’t had so much time to think about cinema before creating it himself, he might be more amenable to watching on-set conventions exact their impact before deciding to banish the ones he hates.

Why didn’t Godard play with more shorts before attempting a feature, as is the contemporary habit of upstart indie filmmakers? What’s the inherent problem with a short film? Aside from its frequent and reasonable aim of serving as a proof of concept for a bigger project, the omnipresent indie short of 2025 is a method for testing whether a person is good at directing—directing actors, assembling teams, shooting in blandly decorated kitchens. The indie short is made possible by accessible film technology and digital tools, and its proliferation has dovetailed irritably with the endless cycle of self-promotion on Instagram.

But directing a short, while perhaps useful for testing aesthetics, doesn’t really augur a knack for handling a feature form, the balancing act of pacing and character development and payoff (naming the constituent elements feels absurd so I won’t add any more). It’s hard to tell whether a short film is fulfilling, and that’s because it isn’t strictly a medium: what can be eight minutes can also be eighteen or thirty. I think Godard, in thrall to the form of a feature, would bristle at any visual art claiming to hold even a sliver of the power of a long-métrage. That claim would indicate that the whole can be broken into parts, which ignores the feature’s rigorous standards: a director must mold her trove of ideas to fit the crevices of a beginning, middle and end, whether across a 90-minute runtime (the studio-system average) or unwieldy arthouse spans. Television, with its arbitrary assumption of eight or twelve or four or 24-episode runs, continues to amplify the misconception that any length can work for a story told with a camera. Godard might want us to remember that the feature is good because it is challenging, hard to nail, because there is something startling—something perfect—about what can start and end when the only information we have was given to us recently.

5. “All you need for a film is a girl and a gun.”

—Jean-Luc Godard

Godard says this off-handedly to his producer while in Cannes for the premiere of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. To me this piece of advice can be construed as a warning, that the film you think you want to make might be better contained within stakes and situations which lend themselves to specifically cinematic tension. Put another way: simplicity, however tried and true—and a viewer is hardly sick of spotting their hundredth gun—can re-contextualize a filmmaker’s obsessions.

I only figured out recently that an object like a gun (I tried to think of a less violent object, but the gun is the most effective) could give structure to a script that I wanted to be about, I don’t know, tortured queer love. It’s not the same flavor as formula (not the dreaded “hero’s journey”) but it means that, even if you drop the gun into the story without care or foresight, its presence could still wreak something awesome. Take, for example, Gun Crazy, one of my favorite films, which should on paper develop like a hoary B picture—the plot is as silly as a guy and yes, a girl falling in love over their shared pathology for shooting pistols, but not to kill (not strictly), instead as an object fetish. The film stealthily becomes magmatic, pushing into corners it finds because its paramours are hungry, then unstoppable, then delusional, then afraid and sincere.

I also thought the Godard line highlighted the main weakness in Linklater’s portrayal of the Breathless shoot, which is the power of Godard’s actors, particularly Jean Seberg. Linklater’s is essentially a confused position. Raoul, the cinematographer, comments offhandedly at one point that the actors will save the movie, but he’s not the auteur—perhaps he’s not much more than a technician (his main experience shooting with the Éclair Caméflex camera used for tournage was during World War II). I was unsure whether the comment coming from him was a sign that I should assume the opposite, but I waited for more clues about the Breathless team’s views of our actors’ power and they did not appear.

The worst scene in the film is the last, and I knew it would involve the shot where Seberg refuses to pick Belmondo’s pocket after his character dies. That’s because this moment on set produces the harshest standoff between Godard and Seberg, who can’t stand Godard’s lack of preparation or his inscrutable maxims. Eventually Godard lets Seberg make her own choice. We’re denied a view of that choice until a test screening of Breathless, where Truffaut, Schiffman and Chabrol are present. It is, as the film’s fans will remember, Seberg imitating Belmondo’s trademark move, to rub his thumb over his lip.

But why is this the button of the entire Linklater project? I took issue in general with the glimpses of Godard calling shots on set, of doing the reacting he has so many words to describe, because the shots never went on for very long. But I think it’s really wrong to frame Seberg’s sudden choreography as the endpoint of all Godard’s directing decisions. It’s such a quintessential example of actorly instinct, of a performer summoning a memory or a new or recycled image and searing it into a frame. This happens even on sets with bad directors. We believe, take for granted, are relieved when we retrieve that instinct, confirm that it’s in an actor’s bones. I wish that Linklater had acknowledged it more affectionately.

4. “Feel free to ignore what I’ve said. That’s what advice is for.”

—Jean-Pierre Melville

The director Jean-Pierre Melville (thirteen years older than Godard) says this to his friend when Godard visits the set of his film in the lead-up to tournage on Breathless. The advice is reflexive, visceral and triggering enough to me that I don’t want to dwell on it too long. All I will say is that upon hearing it I immediately remembered boiling down the experience of receiving advice while having a beer with a writer friend a few days ago. I told this friend that understanding my own feature (called Sparks, which I wrote and directed last year) proved a matter of knowing that I couldn’t do it alone—I needed to hear notes from friends, experts, veterans, as much as I needed to spend months without revisiting or rewatching any part of the film.

But then I had to balance this knowledge with the realization that at least 50 percent of the feedback I got shouldn’t be used (with the other 50 percent supremely valuable). Separating those two halves had me feeling unmoored, moody, unpredictable for long periods which never led to closure...they just kind of petered out until they were forgotten. I now think seeking and receiving postproduction notes is the hardest part of making a film.

3. “Genius is not a gift, but a way out invented in desperate cases.”

—Pierre Rissient / Sartre

Godard’s assistant director Pierre Rissient quotes this line from the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on the first day of tournage. He is doing that AD thing where announcing a tolerance for trouble is a manifestation of resolve, though we never do see Rissient particularly stressed out, maybe because when Godard wraps a shooting day after two hours of shooting, Rissient doesn’t have an unfinished schedule to review, whereas Godard’s producer knows to fear that there won’t be enough material for a movie.

Sartre’s words may also be a preemptive cover for everything Godard does that seems insane and unsympathetic. Even though (as I’ll address with a “better” piece of advice) the “leisure” component of Godard’s filmmaking approach doesn’t exactly reek of desperation, we witness an urgency in his insistence on certain conditions which almost suggests that if those conditions were not met, he might suffer a breakdown. The quietude and cheekiness core to Godard’s self-expression might also signal a fragility, the end result of working through psychic questions and conclusions which are I guess conscious of how easily they could be attacked, felled.

On some level, Breathless itself is “the desperate case,” the last possible vessel for Godard to reify his beliefs. His aura of influence is inseparable, as is noted by Brody, from his aura of cool. He might know, savagely and uncompromisingly, that he can’t stay cool past a certain age, not without building a filmography. Breathless was always going to be the starting point for everyone looking to collect their Godardian sentiments, whether or not they saw many Godard movies.

2. “Reality is not continuity.”

—Jean-Luc Godard

It would be nice if as a culture we welcomed breaks in composition, in a jar moving from one surface to another, in the sky “suddenly” turning pitch black between shots that concern one contained conversation. Godard says this line when the script supervisor is indeed fretting over a viewer realizing that objects have shifted without explanation. If Godard has his way, then reality without continuity is exclusively the domain of the camera. So…the camera creates its own reality? Can a viewer accept this? What if we want a world that feels true to both the camera and to its characters’ lives? Is that impossible?

“No” is the easy answer, since all the time we believe in films whose images we adore, films whose continuity is wholly accounted for. But because the statement is obvious from an emotional standpoint—why would we want the perception of our lives to feel like a consistent, predictable sequence?— Godard is probably egging us on, especially because allowing his script supervisor to move the object in question would have an imperceptible effect on his shot. But if the effect is imperceptible, why bother disrupting the precious molecules in the air around the shot?

This is the piece of advice I will most seriously consider, because I think—unless a scene has many complex moving parts and maybe a flying elephant or blimp—the viewer does so much filling in of the blanks on their own that they’re liable to invite a change of color in a tee-shirt, a movement of spectacles from forehead to the V-neck in the V-neck sweater. It sounds nice to welcome these shifts, whether or not their combined imperceptibility adds up to perceptibility, or in the event that their background ambience leads somebody to do something crazy.

1. “Art and crime both require leisure time to flourish.”

—Jean-Luc Godard

The romanticized association of his new, real profession with a pastime his publicist works to invent—by planting a story about Godard holding up a garage—is a classic slippage between Godard the filmmaker and Godard the personality, but the contingency in the phrase also lumps art with crime. One’s flourishing would seem to bolster the other, which kind of means that for Breathless to turn out well, criminal activity should germinate, maybe spill over into Godard’s next films (it does).

But committing crime is about seeming innocent, which is often the same as laying about, sitting idle. The notion of failing to pack a shooting day with every possible cinematic idea you can imagine feels conversely like an affront to filmmaking as a furious, feral method for trying and executing, for using the momentum of one idea to blast off into fevered mini-eras of productivity. Is Godard wondering when he says this line—and when he feigns sickness to march about a bar and play pinball—if all that momentum is wrong, if it’s enacted as a capitalization on an adrenaline rush, rather than as an exploration of an intellectual stance?

While on the Sparks set I wondered (it wasn’t too often) whether I should be more fastidious, take harder stances on the environments I wanted. I was mostly decisive, but sometimes I couldn’t pin down the wrong parts of a scene. Were the performer and their lines mismatched? Was the performer’s charisma missing? Maybe those were unfixable realities. But when we got rained out for a half day in the desert—the only instance of running behind schedule—I hardly found that I could relax and indulge in some heretofore uncared-for rumination. I was worried sick. My producer Lola and I begged our DP to grab two slo-mo B-roll shots, which actually immeasurably helped the sequence in which they featured.

This attraction to making use of every inch of the production timeline doesn’t mean I’m not intrigued by down time, a.k.a. off days. I wonder what would happen if we chose our off days spontaneously. I loved watching the cast and crew indulge in Lake Tahoe (a 45-minute drive from Reno) and dive off rocks and chatter on beach towels. There are probably too many boundaries between that comfort, that intimacy, and the shift back to stressing over whether you’ve had enough time to dress or light a giant school-bus interior. If we had more time to ponder, more time to get it right, more time from more money (“money is time,” another Godard line, was cut for time), maybe carving out pseudo-salons would collapse distance between the critic’s corridors and the creaky low-budget set. Or maybe the really hard thinking was what Godard distilled into his aphorisms, which became his advice, without allowing them to take a toll on his energy. If our stints of leisure have been preceded by a rich, unhurried intellectual discourse, maybe after a point—and while on set—we won’t need to think at all.

The opening scene of Jay Kelly, the new Noah Baumbach film, swoops through a soundstage, burnished by neon hues and a glassy body of water which, when we swivel around a few more corners, we’ll realize stands in for New York City’s East River.

Despite its hyperactivity, there’s little about this shot that feels outright evocative; instead the characters we witness flitting in and out of shadows catch our attention. Emily Mortimer, who plays a makeup artist, tells a story to another crew member about her crisis of eye dryness, while Adam Sandler, our protagonist’s talent manager, uses a break between takes to call his kid. The ensemble’s introductions suggest family life and mundane self-discovery to be had when the cameras stop rolling.

Although not for George Clooney, playing Jay, a veteran who strikes the right balance of being finicky about process (don’t let that dog enter frame so early) and mellow. Jay is uncertain, as he will be throughout the film, whether or not he likes the performance he gave. I never could tell whether that uncertainty resulted from a lightly nagging sense of self-doubt—of impostor syndrome—or from perfectionism, or from the unfocused excitability which the movie star ego produces.

The paean on this soundstage, to the magical experience of shooting a movie, immediately reads as exaggerated, implausible, and not solely for the question of why a production would go to such lengths to recreate an urban waterfront that’s neither inaccessible nor especially stunning (the viewer could argue the recreation is a little stunning). The bigger implausibility is that the movie we find Jay Kelly wrapping is surely an extinct species—a character drama hinging on a A-lister’s top billing, budgeted somewhere in the $50 million range, where care is given by a skilled team to calibrating tight structure and maybe even a competent narrative identity.

But what follows, while mostly being a written movie that happens to feature some directing—some delightful directing!—is a combination of ideas and images made uniquely possible by Baumbach’s behemoth benefactor, Netflix. Baumbach started his career crafting intimate dramas about human fallibility and regret, and he’s still doing that, only now the drama is situated, among a few European settings, within an ostensibly real train car elevated to near-fantastical heights of realism. No act of expression on this train—and it’s figurative expressiveness which Baumbach excels at capturing—is unaccounted for.

The train, which Jay Kelly boards to follow his teenage daughter on her senior trip, is the film’s most important set piece. Because Jay Kelly the movie was developed and produced by Netflix (as opposed to something they bought at a festival, like the newly released Train Dreams or Nouvelle Vague), I had a hard time watching without fearing for an uncanny or queasy lighting rig. And indeed harsh yellows and whites abound aboard this train, caught between simulating a natural golden hour and evoking Golden-Age technicolor artificiality. But elsewhere I thought the film looked wonderful, especially in its haunted last quarter, which brings us to swimming pools of the Tuscan countryside and also the region’s lonely blue-black forests.

It’s almost guaranteed that Netflix gave Baumbach more money than he needed, and maybe that’s why we get those doses of unnecessarily bright light: why not pack every composition with the most expensive tech? Suffice to say Baumbach has pioneered or at least exemplifies a new form, the peculiarly well-endowed iteration of a longtime filmmaker’s bread and butter, an iteration which legacy studios would reject as recklessly indulgent and which would not turn a profit during a theatrical run.

Baumbach’s situation is a feature, a bug, a contradiction, I don’t know, a consequence of the contemporary “content” landscape, which will apparently, in the opinion of every American social-media user and almost as many media outlets, be horribly compromised, even destroyed, by Netflix’s purchase of the Warner Brothers film studio and the TV streamer/producer HBO, a deal announced last Friday.

The Warner empire has cycled through various incompetent owners: AOL, AT&T, now Discovery. As explained last week by Matt Belloni on his podcast The Town, Warner and HBO are considered to be the most mismanaged assets in Hollywood this century, and yet despite the constant corporate chaos the film studio and the prestige TV brand have maintained their reputations as “crown jewels” of creative output and intellectual property.

It’s hard to know, in this fractured, angry, very online age of consumption, what the American public thinks would constitute an irrevocable change for the Hollywood ideal—the triumph of original, considered and unpredictable storytelling, which demands intelligence and trust from its audience. We are, after all, closing out a year when the Warners studio released a mere eleven movies theatrically; five of those were franchise or IP-driven films, and of the rest, only three—Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons—did not totally bomb. At first glance, it seems that this is what’s being (prematurely) mourned: a system whose meager original output the average moviegoer has watched perhaps three times in 2025.

And where did we watch those three films? Paul Thomas Anderson himself complained on the SmartLess podcast in 2022 that multiplexes suck. If you don’t live near a boutique cinema that got revamped by some real-estate capital or a nonprofit, the main-street single-screen you frequented through the late aughts probably went bust. AMC, the country’s dominant exhibitor, charges exorbitant prices for admission and for popcorn and nestles their screens in hollowed-out malls and fronts their content supply with a full half hour of mindless advertisements. I can’t imagine that’s the status quo we’re fighting to protect.

If on the other hand we’re fighting for HBO, we must account for the fact that, as shown by The Economist’s number-crunching, the streamer was always destined for consolidation. HBO is a prestige brand that originated as an add-on in cable TV packages. Amazon and Netflix now behave like cable networks, routed through the “economics of the iPhone,” as Bloomberg columnist Lucas Shaw puts it on The Town. And, because the internet-mourning I’ve witnessed centers images of the water tower on the Warner Bros. studio lot, I’m pretty sure most sensible people can envision a future where HBO—whose shows have never lived anywhere but the small screen—does fine. Ted Sarandos loves HBO. Is it inconceivable that he will let the brand have its own “tile” within the Netflix ecosystem? Is that what’s worth fighting for?

There are so many cultural realities which don’t map onto that Hollywood ideal, realities which have me thinking that this conception of a Hollywood that will be lost is simply made up. We live, after all, in the time of low-brow content being analyzed fastidiously, if cheekily, in the pages of The New Yorker, of the culturati confessing unabashedly to their love of Real Housewives, of Gen Z pop stars gushing over and interpolating Britney Spears circa Crossroads and The Princess Diaries and even Hannah Montana.

We live in a time of speculating that the monoculture died only ten years ago, and that all we have left to conjure a critical mass of engagement is the vestiges of this recently dead monoculture, and so the studios revisit properties as young as Moana—which they revisited twice! Though not popularly, as is evident in the YouTube comments on the recent trailer for Disney’s truly gobsmacking “live-action” rendition of a movie whose sequel arrived one year ago, a sequel itself Frankensteined together from episodes of a scrapped “direct-to-consumer” series. All this bumbling, from a supposed industry titan!

Of course the background problem is the havoc wrought by the real sinister players, the tech giants. Netflix will argue in the inevitable antitrust challenge to the Warners acquisition that it is not a monopoly because it is competing against YouTube, whose content engagement levels dwarf those of any media company, whether old guard or interloper. The algorithms which in-house Netflix relies on to develop shows optimized for passive attention are algorithms comparable to the ones that send weirdo subcultures into the micro-stratospheres of virality. When we complain about AI and about the state of the culture on X or on Substack or on Instagram Reels we tell a lot of heartrendingly, even profoundly funny jokes.

How could real people and their big mouths ever be subtracted from the equation? The cottage communities of amateur punditry—obsession over box office numbers and breaking even or over who’s smearing who in which toxic shadow PR campaign—underline how Hollywood, as a network of signifiers and innuendos, still looms large in the public imagination, as a strange corollary of the functional Hollywood which might be dying. One of the most popular “non-news” New York Times articles of 2024 was a rundown of that year’s Oscar nominations. How many watched the movies?

In contracting with the biggest streamer in the world, I think Baumbach has proved his basest desire, which is to create with minimal friction, i.e. limits on his freedom. No matter how many famous directors proclaim the essential business of watching movies in a theater, we must count those 30 directors (is it fewer?) against the thousands of creatives who will at the end of the day pair the artistry they treasure with whichever beach of code and keywords they’re able to infiltrate. It’s not a pretty picture. And it’s sad, but also predictable, that capitalist interests would stop allowing for the earnest production of popular art.

But everybody who is delusional who writes or thinks of stories isn’t ideating (to borrow a tech buzzword) with the state of the industry top of mind. I’m pretty sure most of them are ideating because they can’t stop, because committing themselves to a concept and to expression is in fact an involuntary compulsion. Artists may be dissuaded by dim job prospects, by contraction or collapse, by the unappetizing transformation of the creative world they assumed they would inhabit. I’m just not convinced that would be enough to make any of them give up.

Spoilers abound, especially Bugonia spoilers.

When I went to see Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia on November 1, I remembered why I sought out films as a high schooler—because of their Oscar chances. As Bugonia opened on Emma Stone’s stiff and calculating girlboss, I was reminded of how Stone anchored my bygone attachment to the Oscars, because she made smart choices and didn’t try too hard, and when she cornered a Best Actress win for La La Land she was already a star.

When I look back on my months-long obsession with La La Land, I remember watching the film at a special screening at the Castro Theatre and running a red light on the drive home because I was, embarrassingly, still in a kind of trance state. But that probably had more to do with waiting mindlessly in line for three hours to secure a rush ticket. A classmate came up to me and my friend Annabel in our second hour of waiting, having just arrived and aghast at her slim odds of entry. We were proud when she didn’t get in. We had done more work.

I paid attention only to the details that elevated the screening, like the Castro’s lush ornamentation, and not the ones that detracted, like the sound system that wasn’t equipped to reach the far depths of the mezzanine where we were sitting (there were lines I literally couldn’t hear), or the mezzanine’s pitched angle, which distorted the screen. I was so impressed by Damien Chazelle’s panache. I knew he was going to win something.

It has now been perhaps four years since I started watching films for a different reason, which is to catalog their pieces—compositions, sequence structures, camera movements, worldviews—so that I can steal them. But because I hadn’t been distracted by a strong awards season since at least 2019, the year of the The Irishman and Marriage Story, I leapt sentimentally at the prospect that Bugonia could be the prestige package which revived my affection for the whole Oscars apparatus.

Bugonia so quickly becomes a drag—lazy and obvious in its deployment of contemporary cultural phenomena—that I decided around the half-hour mark to pivot to my more comfortable mode of theft. But the sequence which I should have stolen, which juts out from the rest of the film’s architecture like an archipelago, captures a turn of events I found upsetting and hypocritical. Our girlboss, kidnapped by Emma Stone’s co-lead Jesse Plemons and accused of being an alien bent on enslaving humans, turns out to actually be an alien, and after the whole saga of internment by Plemons, decides that humanity is a lost cause. With one prick of a wispy bubble, Stone wipes out the species, ushering in a series of carefully populated dioramas of collapsed, freshly dead bodies, strewn about museum atriums, fish markets, a classroom, third-world rubbish piles, a real archipelago.

The sequence betrayed a curiosity about the world—its ugly underbellies, its patterns of mindless activity, and its more noble pastimes, like sunbathing with the Sunday crossword—which Lanthimos stubbornly declines to explore right up until this point. His is another contemporary example of a European director “doing” America (see Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt); in this scenario an auteur packs together iconography which in the international media must appear to wholly represent American life (elite universities, the opioid crisis, incel conspiratorialism), then uses the size of these icons (they take up so much space) to avoid any perspective or environment that feels deeply meaningful or true. Everybody’s toast in Bugonia’s last four minutes because the man who put them in their hermetic, striking spaces couldn’t be bothered to think further about what their pasts or futures might contain.

This tease of a bounty, underlined by towering production design and an impulsiveness which momentarily reads as bravery, increased my desire and desperation for the eminently stealable. So I spent November evaluating candidates for theft.

Though I am perhaps most aware of this tendency toward theft, it became apparent while watching a second film in November that there are other less predictable or controllable pastimes wrapped up in my film-going. The first is an inescapable immersion, a nestling within a film’s space-time, which is not the same thing as wishing I lived within a film, but which has the effect of rendering whatever happens after the film ends (a return to activity outside the theater) a distant and abstract concept. This immersion is often heightened when I fall asleep, as I did at the Metrograph, during their screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

There were other people who fell asleep during Stalker, because it is a film that is hypnotic, confounding but also quite temperamentally sensible. Stalker concerns a world—possibly a dystopia, but I would prefer if it was an alternate reality—where the state has cordoned off a mysterious and dangerous “Zone.” Here a supernatural incident killed a bunch of people and left survivors disabled. The “Stalker,” our protagonist, leads a curious professor and writer into the “Zone,” where their aim is to reach “The Room,” which has special powers.

When you fight sleep in a theater, you inevitably miss out on more of a film than if you commit to dealing with the urge as soon as it’s detected. I was convinced I could conquer my fatigue and instead picked up spots of a descent across a green hillside, before waking up right as the Stalker and his clients enter the Zone. This timing brought about the sensation that the Zone surrounded me, too, that I’d been aware of its existence for hours, if not longer, rather than 45 minutes. And miraculously, right after the threshold is crossed, our trio curls up, supine, on various outcroppings of rock. I couldn’t believe that I’d emerged from semi-consciousness to witness characters settling into it.

There is no explanation for why the Stalker would not immediately persist forward in his journey to the “Room,” not that it’s inconceivable that the trio needs a rest. The attitudes also suggest an atmospheric compulsion, which is perhaps to acclimate. The image sequence that follows could either be called an acclimation, or the total opposite—a dizzying merry-go-ground of connected ends. We watch the Stalker sleeping, returned to the sepia monochrome that defined the film’s first quarter, before toggling back and forth between there and sepia, upside down and right side up. Sandwiched between our views of the Stalker are tracking shots or pans that survey 1) in sepia, a shallow pool of detritus, including a gun, a pile of thick coins, an algae-encrusted pistol, a telephone cord, and is that a fishbowl? and 2) in color, either a wetland or a mass of lava, above which swirl snowflakes or pollen or foam.

I wanted so badly to internalize this sequence, to discern a pattern or decide whether the images could have followed one another in any alternative order, that I ran out of headspace to decide what I could steal. Perhaps one of Tarkovsky’s designs was to ensure that theft would not work very well.

I also fell asleep a day after watching Stalker, during Babylon XX, a Ukrainian film directed by Ivan Mykolaichuk and made in 1979 about a Bolshevik-era commune. But my somnolence in this case felt less predestined: it failed to line up with a narrative arc. I also had no idea what was going on in Babylon XX, which made it a candidate only for theft and not for immersion. The film toggles between summoning colorscapes and compositions I think Bruegel would have admired and succumbing to a hippie aesthetic which is easy to write off as boho-chic. During a steamy hook-up session on a mountainside, I felt like I was watching Zabriskie Point.

There’s this shot during a social dance where the camera is fixed to a swinging canoe which is perhaps spiritually akin to a maypole (and which is later ridden, solo and melancholically, by a white horned sheep). The camera swings up and down like a drunkard, catching sight of the dancers on each ascent. Then there’s this tracking shot foregrounded by shameless rain, where the commune’s female co-leader pulls a horse through a field of dry grass. A glorious windmill rises over the horizon line behind her, a pretty clear sign that Malick is on the mind. It would be cool if this film preceded his work, but it doesn’t. I decided to steal of all these shots. I decided also that I wanted to steal a sudden downward tilt used to capture the aforementioned tryst, which is nearly blown out by pinkish flare.

I nodded off yet again, but for a shorter amount of time, during Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola X, also at Metrograph, which in retrospect looks like an inflection point between immersion as a secondary pastime versus theft as an exclusive pastime and an as-yet-undefined desire for personal replication. What I mean by this is, and as distinct from a tendency toward immersion, is that—and believe me, I mean this unironically, totally literally—my desire to steal from a film sometimes morphs into wanting to have what happens to the characters happen to me.

The reason Pola X does not fall into this category is because it is too grim. Up for debate: only how many siblings or cousins are having sex with each other—the incest itself is a foregone conclusion. A young girl is struck on the head by a suddenly menacing stranger, and dies overnight. Even when the set-pieces are decadent, they are still violent or distressed. And yet I will steal the soaring jib lift that reveals a heavy metal/orchestral hybrid band jamming cacophonously amid the stairwells and sparking machinery of the inner-city warehouse and resident cult we are discovering for the first time. This kind of production value is hidden until more than half of the film has elapsed, which I found restrained and strong-willed, but less stealable than the camera move itself.

The films which did produce that fully formed desire for replication provided as generous an array of compositions as, say, Babylon XX, but each was anchored by a star’s performance. Die, My Love is the new Lynne Ramsay feature, which stars Jennifer Lawrence, and it is my favorite new film of the year. From it I planned to steal all the frames where Lawrence, a new mother suffering from postpartum psychosis, and her husband (Robert Pattinson) are casually but remotely placed, on asphalt outside a psychiatric hospital he’s “committing” her to, or on the porch of their modest house, not moving much but still bent over or standing with vibrating knowledge of the size of their bodies.* And also I planned to steal the mesmeric look at water glimmering on the drab beach visited by Lawrence and Pattinson soon after she finishes treatment. We’re almost witnessing a Stalker-esque sequence on the beach: the threshold, in this case of recovery, has been crossed, only for the protagonist and the viewer’s perceptions to melt and swirl in a sleepy, sinking haze.

What I didn’t want to steal were the day-for-night passages where Lawrence keeps encountering a motorcycle rider, first helmeted and then unmasked; he finds her in a field and leans right over her face, and on another occasion she asks him to cut his lip with a kitchen knife, either to prove that he can match her kink or that he’s real. I always want things to be real, no Bridge to Terabithia mumbo jumbo, and I was so relieved when Lawrence ran into this man and his family in the daytime. When the pair later consummates their nocturnal relations, I was overwhelmed by the idea of a night in the future where I myself will know that somebody is wandering the same field that I am, on a farm somewhere in America, and we will be there together because we like imagining the parts of each other that we can’t see, and on the other hand touching the limbs which confirm that this is actually happening.

It’s likely, based on this sensation, that theft happens separately from this desire to replicate. As much as I was drawn to the day-as-night and its blue hues, its void-like quietude, I couldn’t conceive of putting it in a film as well as hoping that it would appear in my life.

From L’homme de Rio, a 1964 espionage spoof starring my hero Jean-Paul Belmondo which I saw at Film Forum as part of their “French heist” series (Film Forum was the nonprofit fiscal sponsor for Sparks), I planned to steal the silhouetted outline of a romanticized shantytown in Rio, where Belmondo, on location to rescue his abducted fiancée (Françoise Dorléac) befriends an adorable and resourceful Brazilian boy who presents his makeshift bungalow to Belmondo, impressively pulling down a comfy bed and a dining table with strings from the walls, like he’s Mary Poppins. And I planned to steal the wit (is it melancholy? Industrious?) with which the whimsy of smuggled treasure in the mountains gives way to bulldozers and wide clay paths, the rainforest felled for suburban development.

This film, whose script is ripped plot-point-for-plot-point from Hergé’s Tintin, is too silly for immersion. The grander the photography gets, the more it channels the spirit of a pop-up book. But some details are confined to a car, like when after Belmondo rescues Dorléac they encounter a torrential downpour in their convertible, lose the top off the convertible, find two tree branches and string their clothes on a laundry line between the branches in the convertible’s backseat. Belmondo drives and smokes, shirtless and carefree, as if to say that inspired problem-solving is not only easy but obligatory.

Based on my analysis I doubt it’s possible for a film to possess stealable elements and also the ability to immerse a viewer (maybe submerge is a better word) and also the capacity to incite a desire for replicating (or seeking out) the film’s scenes and constructions outside the theater. The sample size is small, as it only includes November candidates. I guess I don’t really want to get a convertible hood blown off by a storm just so I can blithely merge the domestic with the vehicular. But what if I could do it, and in the short term? Of course if I can’t I will simply plan to steal the scene.

*I put “committed” in quotes because that’s the word Jennifer Lawrence’s character uses to describe her stint at the psychiatric hospital.

Arranged in front of me are two beautiful screens: a MacBook on the dining table and an iPad in my lap. Often there is a third screen, my phone, which makes a trifecta, since, in order to limit distractions, I’ve disabled iMessage on the two bigger devices. (I don’t even have location services activated on the MacBook or the iPad; both think I am in Tulsa, Oklahoma.)

When all three screens surround me, I feel comforted, even swathed, in an expansive and synchronous landscape. Reference material sits full-screen on the MacBook; my eyes dart from there to the iPad, then to an incoming text on the iPhone (I almost always respond immediately, terrified that otherwise I’ll forget about the message forever). The other day, after feeling a strange resistance on my MacBook’s trackpad, I literally lost my cursor, only to discover that it had floated contiguously, and I guess helpfully—though without my consent—over to the iPad. This feature is called Sidecar.

Such has been the professional setup in recent times. Though I once freelanced as a videographer, I’ve found managing and upgrading my own gear to be stressful, and, given the limited budgets of projects I’ve been hired for, that I’m typically overstretched, lugging around lights while my cross-body camera bag bumps against my hip, relying on the tiny monitor of a DSLR, really bummed when a favorite shot ends up out of focus. My new arrangement—sticking to editing and graphic design gigs—is much smoother: less room for error, high-performing tech bought cheaply, on installment plans sold by Apple with zero interest and at a cumulative price-point no different from the amount charged upfront.

Many freelancers set up shop in cafes, which are encumbered by any combination of bad music, really loud music, bad pastries, intentionally scarce seating, intentionally uncomfortable seating, or breathtakingly low temperatures. My roommates and I conversely order giant bags of whole-bean Peet’s coffee from Costco, and ever since Radio Bakery—the Tiktok sensation originally confined to Greenpoint—opened a Prospect Heights location, I’ve had country batard slices waiting in the freezer. Add an egg and cheddar and you’re approximating a $15 purchase in the real world.

I always start my day reading, and I also take breaks from labor by reading, and sometimes these periods of time merge into one long journey through words and numbers of varying importance. Because I know I have to get back to editing or animating, my aim is always to read one or two articles, but toggling between sites is a deeply absorbing compulsion, and it can happen so fast (I am drawn to speed) and articles by The Economist, accessed via a friend’s corporate credentials, are short, and that’s me cosplaying as a finance bro, which shouldn’t count toward my textual intake, so I then veer toward the London Review of Books, whose articles are too long, so I pivot to Vulture and The New Yorker, whose paywalls are fun to circumvent, then to Deadline, because they update their site so often (that’s me cosplaying as a film industry insider).

Then I check Oscar odds on GoldDerby, then the weather in San Francisco, Stinson Beach, Austin, Reno, Berlin, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Zurich, London, Melbourne, Savannah, the Washington Heights Wunderground station of New York City (I live in Brooklyn). Then I review my own music-listening statistics, because I can track play counts on Apple’s desktop Music app. I can also see the date I added a song and the date I last listened to it, and I now often picture this information while consuming music on the train, perhaps as a means of making a track more memorable, but less nobly because I am happy to be increasing the play count, to be making the numbers bigger. In this same way I am disappointed when on a given day no film joins the “millions club,” as the Box Office subreddit calls it—daily grosses exceeding a million dollars.

The Music app generally leads me back to digital media: Pitchfork album reviews (still no paywall there—alarmingly, for the publication’s staff) from the early 2000s until the present, which in tandem with my review of personal listening statistics actually do the most to compartmentalize my day. This is because I am an album-oriented listener, and I queue albums to accompany my labor. Sometimes the music has no words, like when I want to summon the feeling of endless dancing at a rave, to incite a propulsive strain of productivity. When the music has words, I am always singing. I am actually convinced that the amount I’ve been singing amounts to some kind of vocal training. I belt while I cook, I hone my falsetto on the toilet, I strain to reach that Janet Jackson tonality during my bursts of cleaning, which is like being in a Mad Men fever dream on MTV. Wiping down surfaces, vacuuming my room—these are all necessary acts, and household order starts to feel like my calling, until I realize I’m doing it as a small respite from whatever project needs completing.

I listen to album after album after album. I’ve become resentful toward editing that involves cutting audio, because I’m so reliant on continued melodic accompaniment, though eventually I do tire of music, yet I berate myself when I can’t naturally think of the next album I want to hear. I haven’t always been at a loss; until maybe a few years ago I could within minutes identify the sounds and mood I needed. It might be the infinitude of availability of music on streaming services that’s catching up to me.

I also get tired when I have been dancing to music, if the song in the air is “Ring Ring Ring” or “People” or “How to Stay with You.” Dancing usually follows a lunch break. I get myself into states where I think I’ve christened choreography that’s destined to go viral, and I spend five minutes recording a video of myself replicating this choreography on my iPad. Then I feel ashamed for wasting that time—also, the quality of the iPad’s camera is horrible—and I AirDrop the video to my iPhone then text it to my sister because I know she’ll find it endearing.

Throughout the day I receive social-media content from my friend Pierre. Pierre is my conduit to the truly online world, because his Twitter feed is perfectly curated, populated with heartrendingly funny people and videos. I could never make up for the time Pierre has spent cultivating this content ecosystem, which makes me really dependent on him. Meanwhile my self-constructed schedule allows me to go to the gym or to play tennis whenever I want, when those spaces are mercifully uncrowded. Inevitably I put off projects until a deadline is near, but this isn’t even a problem, because I know that once I’m in a flow state, I’ll knock the whole thing out from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. More important than laboring efficiently is, for example, laboring aesthetically, which is especially possible in my apartment because it is full of the most gorgeous light you’ve ever seen. I follow the light like a cat, imagining when it hits me that time has stopped, and in some sense it does, because I myself cease, for just these few moments, to consider everything I’ll keep needing to do when the light disappears completely, or (for an hour) is hidden behind the hulking new condominium across the street.

Upon realizing that this environment is a bit dull, and then despairing (despairing is maybe too strong a word) that this dullness is insidious and perhaps impossible to escape, I remember a passage from The Idiot, the novel by Elif Batuman, whose protagonist Selin keeps thinking about “the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was…But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.” This quote puts me at such ease that I’m driven by a burst of motivation to execute one of my tasks.

I also know, in remembering the passage, that I’m counting backward from the experience of making Sparks, my first feature. It’s now been a year since production wrapped. What I sometimes struggle to comprehend is the manufactured nature of that experience. My producer Lola and I went onto set with the suspicion that being there might change the way we felt about our lives, that it might dizzyingly elevate our lives for as long as it lasted. And that’s not what Selin is describing, which is instead the way the heights of life are suddenly foisted upon you, in the unassuming depths of tedium. To be fair, I couldn’t have predicted how right it felt to be on set, the vibration—not tension, because I wasn’t stressed in any sense that was familiar or precedented—that made me certain I was enacting and fulfilling a deep sense of purpose. In the year 2025, when events can be minutely planned, when spontaneity is evasive, I wonder what the circumstances would have to be for spasmodic, bracing life to feel totally surprising, not at all accounted for or enabled by choices. But it is probably precisely this circumstance that is hard to imagine while working, three screens before my eyes, from home.

And in fact the intensity of this bafflement peaked several months ago, egged on by the summer, by the high temperatures exaggerating the mindlessness of standing over an already-hot stove waiting for the water to boil for my lunch. Now, at the end of November, every corner of my apartment glows like it’s full of purpose, like there’s anticipation seeping out of the walls. All day, without leaving the apartment, I feel like I’ve just come home. It is hard to believe that before last week, I hadn’t considered ascending one extra flight of stairs to my building’s roof, which no other resident is interested in either, apparently, even though it’s quiet and spacious up there.

One afternoon I brought a notebook, my laptop and a novel and a patio chair which my old roommate Mabel left behind, and I set the chair to face the sun, for what would probably be the last day for a while on which I could wear only a t-shirt. The breeze made me feel like I was close to a beach—and really, in South Brooklyn, I am—and I closed my eyes for five minutes and again, in the light, time landed like it was stopping, and then I wrote this piece.

Fergstack will not run next week due to Thanksgiving.

Have you missed a recent Fergstack?

From last Thursday: iso: my own western
….wherein I think about adapting a Western and revisit Bend of the River, Anthony Mann and James Stewart’s spellbinding addition to the genre.

From November 6: Why don’t I want to write about New York?

From October 16: How to dance on the big screen. considering the ideal pop-cultural platform for inspired choreography.

Soon after we wrapped production on Sparks, my first feature, I started fantasizing about how the arc of my filmography might develop, and, modeling the possibilities on the careers of filmmakers I admired, I figured that sooner or later I should adapt a novel.

I predicted this adaptation would not occur until after I’d proven no fewer than three times that I could formulate an original story with my own characters and plot beats, formulaically in the worst-case scenario, but nevertheless absent the guiding light of source material. Though this prediction was thoughtless (meaning I did not question it at first), and though it arises amid an epidemic of authorial intent among young filmmakers, I realized upon reflection that I am in fact concerned I’ll need as long as the production of two more features to discover the material I’ll want to adapt.

The desire I developed around the time I was thinking about adaptation was to make a Western, since I couldn’t get enough of and afterward craved the desert landscapes where we shot Sparks, and since, for reasons I’ll explain below, high Western form seems so unassailable. My first course of action was thus to search for a Western story—a novel—worth adapting.

This search was narrowed after a MoMA screening of Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River, which stars James Stewart, that happened almost a year ago, as part of the museum’s annual film preservation showcase. I was in thrall to the iterative tautness of the central relationship in the film: two cowboys with equally checkered pasts whose undulating camaraderie—and ongoing exchange of live-saving maneuvers—inhibits the assignment of a villain label to the more opportunistic of the pair.

Bend of the River is based on a novel called Bend of the Snake by Bill Gulick, who has an obituary in the Yakima Herald-Republic because he was a resident of Walla Walla, Washington, but little else in the way of a public biography. Why not adapt a Gulick book, I thought, as Mann and the screenwriter Devin Borden had done? In February I ordered a fragile paperback copy of Gulick’s novel A Drum Calls West, published the same year that Bend of the River was released. This edition, by the “low-priced” publisher Bantam Books, is prefaced with a hooky one-page excerpt from a climactic scene, and includes a gravely yet goofily described “cast of characters,” led by Mark Bradley, who “had enough of bloodshed, but death rode his trail.”

The task may now be to read the Mann picture’s novel of origin, because it seems possible that Mann and Borden were responsible for conjuring the nuance and complexity which defines Bend of the River; it is completely missing from A Drum Calls West. The stock Western characters are present, but not archetypally undermined or allowed to be unpredictable; Bradley sets out to homestead in Goldtown, where his estranged lover, Amy, has taken refuge, the reason for her retreat from established society being that her father, Judge Crittenden, is a staunch Confederate still in denial about losing the Civil War. The Judge cut ties between his daughter and Bradley, a Union soldier, so Amy initially refuses to see him after she hears he’s in town.

Bradley, like Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, finds the lawlessness of Goldtown an obstacle to living peacefully. The villain fomenting the lawlessness is the unsubtlest kind, at least to the reader, because from the time Bradley hears about the “Ring,” a criminal gang with secret members who kill the first friend Bradley makes in Goldtown (yes, a gold miner), it’s clear the Ring has a powerful and conniving leader with access to resources. That this leader, Preston Stone, is masquerading as a benevolent merchant merely brings about impatience, a sense of being strung along, as Bradley starts an investigative newspaper to unmask Preston’s evil. There are fun showdowns, like when Preston’s cronies start to turn on him, but too much repetition, as with Gulick’s treatises on the saving liberalist graces of a free press. Why should an unblemished hero like Bradley hold our attention? He’s a man who doesn’t possess past regrets, only lost love, and no reason to savor wide open plains as a means of relief, of starting over.

The landscape descriptions in A Drum Calls West are a little tempting, though—vivid and eager, stuffed with enough simulation of fact to feel like history. And these descriptions beg the question of whether Gulick’s books were in some sense fodder-in-waiting for scripts that major Hollywood studios could produce. Since the book is not worth adapting, however, I figured I would try to absorb and internalize the structure of the adaptations themselves. I’m not saying I would remake a Mann-Stewart feature, but perhaps instead collect plot twists and personalities before undertaking a re-assemblage, instead of privileging literary roots which turn out to be rotten.

Because it followed a year after Bend of the River, and to freshen up the recency of the activity in this post, I watched The Naked Spur last week: that’s Mann and Stewart’s third Western collaboration (the first is Winchester ‘73, which I haven’t seen). The conceit in The Naked Spur is as rich as you should expect from these “reinvented” Westerns, as MoMA calls them. Stewart plays Howard Kemp, an Eastener on the hunt for Ben Vandergroat, who’s wanted for murder in Abilene, Kansas. Though Kent sets out to source only small favors from a wannabe prospector and a discharged cavalryman, once they learn of the bounty on Ben’s head, they demand to be cut in on a deal.

The group also includes Lina (Janet Leigh), the daughter of a slain friend of Ben’s, whom he’s taken under his wing, though not without uncomfortable sexual intent. The group’s dynamic is endlessly giving, because Ben is wanted “dead or alive,” and, if returned to Abilene alive, he will be hanged anyway. The cavalryman and the prospector argue on several occasions that Kent ought to shoot Ben, especially after Ben proves his own willingness to kill in order to escape his captors. Lina repeatedly points to the hypocrisy, or I suppose the convolution, of Kent’s conviction that death at the hands of the state somehow absolves him of wrongdoing, even though it will be Kent who delivered Ben to the state. Lina also, more fustily but still compellingly, has her own inner conflict: the obligation to remain at Ben’s side butting up against her attraction to Kent. While taking shelter in an Indiana Jones-pilled cave, Ben means to cause a rockslide that will cut him off from the rest of the group, and give him time to find another exit from the cave. But Ben needs Kent distracted while he kicks at the cave wall, which Lina can do, by pretending to flirt with the bounty hunter, only it’s not performed flirting but honest and wistfully smitten interrogation. Of course we see a basic version of this setup all the time—false and real intents meshing, a big lie providing an excuse for the truth not to matter—but rarely in the context of this (Kent’s) higher-level moral confusion.

In the long run, the foils to Kent’s ego and purpose are equitably provided by the ensemble cast, meaning electric, singular rapport has too little time to develop in any of his relationships. And though I couldn’t place this dissatisfaction at first, I decided about halfway through the film that the landscapes in which Mann conducted principal photography, which emit the tame atmosphere of, say, Indian Rock in Berkeley, are nowhere near as transporting as the snow-capped Oregon mountains of Bend of the River.

I then hesitated to return to a film that I saw all the way back in January, but there’s too much that’s good in Bend of the River not to want, after assessing a few alternatives, to make this the beacon for imitation and reproduction. The film’s beauty is of course a big part of its irresistibility: it starts out in dense forest as a lush Western, as opposed to the arid ones that Ford made, before spanning sandy beaches, a bustling frontier-town set (which looks like it was built on location!), and, most strikingly, snow-speckled foothills. But the film also does (I think) what few Westerns do: it shoots night scenes on elaborately build soundstages. The Naked Spur goes the more conventional, less expensive route: shooting day-for-night exteriors, where the frame is too blue and you can sometimes see perfectly formed clouds in the sky. Conversely, I’m not sure that the Bend of the River production design team would welcome my compliments, as the aim with their sets was probably verisimilitude, but each time dusk fell in this film I felt like I was slipping into a dream. There’s a bite-sized waterfall against which the main characters at one point set up camp, and a shot where Arthur Kennedy crawls across verdant, fern-laden soil, trying not to be spotted by Indians. The camera tracks backward, almost acting to envelop him in the wilderness, and with the same wonder and tactile attention more popularly associated with the Avatar movies. The mountain that dominates the skyline during the day is painted in the dark, which inevitably brings that skyline closer to the action and renders the mountain watchful and intimate.

Anyway: the film opens in the company of Stewart’s Glyn McLyntock, who’s leading a caravan of farmers hoping to plow a valley near Portland. McLyntock’s charm, the reserved and unfussy kind, is soon offset by Emerson Cole’s, which is far looser, more roguish. McLyntock finds Cole (Arthur Kennedy) while charting the caravan’s route; Cole is literally about to hanged by fur traders for allegedly stealing a horse (he later insists to McLyntock that no such theft took place). McLyntock stops the hanging and brings Cole back to the caravan with him. In an early back-and-forth, Cole asks McLyntock his name, and his eyes widen when he hears it, because the name is familiar. I shuddered with pleasure at the prospect of expressing a past using only two words and a glance.

It’s not long before Cole does his own saving. Indians attack the caravan the night of his arrival, and McLyntock and Cole go after them, with McLyntock in front. An Indian lunges to pounce on him with a knife, but Cole tosses his own knife square into the Indian’s back. This act erases Cole’s debt to McLyntock, but more importantly, even texturally, it elevates the cowboys’ shared ability and dexterity, which, if not for some choice dispositions, could perhaps be interchangeable. Cole and McLyntock are both animated, rejuvenated by the simple pleasure of having a lot in common. But Cole signals, with his mutable plans for the future and with Arthur Kennedy’s de facto expressive move—to smile cheekily—that he doesn’t like being reined in by staunch moral ideas.

Later, the crux of the drama is tied to the delivery of food to the caravan’s settlement—but food, in scarce supply in Portland, has been marked up exponentially due to a sudden gold rush, which has also caused an influx of new residents. Cole, who parted with the settlers to go to California, has been roped into a job as a pit boss in the Portland casino where Tom Hendricks, the man who sold the caravan the goods they still haven’t received, does his accounting.

McLyntock demands that Hendricks give him the goods the settlers have bought, and Hendricks, who wants more money for the goods, tries to shoot McLyntock, but Cole saves him again. Now the debt is McLyntock’s, and the urgent subsequent aim—rescuing the settlers from starvation—has been overlaid with the outcome of the cowboys’ swashbuckling friendship.

What McLyntock and Cole did in the East, it turns out, was work as “raiders” on “the Missouri border,” and that phrase is literally the extent of the history offered, which is awesome, because the characters in the film who hear the phrase recognize a famous and dangerous pastime which, if it involved you, can never be overcome reputationally. It’s easy to see how Cole’s perspective, that the settlers won’t shake a dismissive, even hateful view of a man who used to kill and steal, is preferable to McLyntock’s—that redemption can be achieved through virtuous action. After all, Jeremy Baile, the settlement’s leader, says over and over again, before Cole commits any kind of betrayal, that he doesn’t believe men like Cole can change (McLyntock has until this point managed to shield his own border-raiding past from Jeremy).

The tenuousness of getting supplies to the settlement, once they’re forcibly taken from Hendricks, is constant, throbbing enough that we need our belief in Cole and McLyntock’s auras to be reinforced. Stewart does this reinforcing with one of the best line deliveries I’ve witnessed in my life. After hired hands balk at continuing on to the settlement, they accuse McLyntock of extortion. One of them exclaims that “the law won’t let you get away with this!” But Stewart assumes an impenetrable and also chiding stoicism, even a darkness. “What law?” he asks, his head bent forward, his mouth made circular, pointing up the right side of his face. Mann cuts away before Stewart chooses to change expressions.

Cole’s eventual double-crossing does the reinforcing too. It is captured by a series of shots so deliberate and bracing in their composition, amid scenery so breathtaking, that the scene lands both with the sense of danger intended by its narrative position and with a stunning, high-altitude sense of possibility, of neutral potential. McLyntock’s laborers have been itching to overtake their boss since miners from a nearby gold camp made a lucrative offer of $100,000 for the settlement’s goods. Cole perhaps registers how McLyntock, being outnumbered, might also be overpowered, and decides to take the lead on this new journey. But Cole hasn’t previously rolled over to temptation, so long as it’s been moderate ($100,000 is quite a dumbfounding number, isn’t it?) He has just been playing the odds, has been looking, casual and unbothered, for advantages. The only marginal sacrifice in securing this particular advantage is committing more violence than usual.

Perhaps I’m being generous. It’s true that Cole wanted to kill all of Hendricks’s men, after he and McLyntock ambushed the entourage, and McLyntock stopped him. But Cole’s only real miscalculation, or indeed his only decision which reminds the viewer of the insufficient space for two cowboys who possess his and McLyntock’s powers, is thinking that his overtaking McLyntock will prove a permanent development. But when McLyntock again gains the upper hand, Cole isn’t easily felled, and not by gunshot. No, these peaks of masculinity we’re witnessing demand a fistfight, which happens when Cole knocks McLyntock out of a covered wagon and into a rushing river. The sounds of physical contact are almost drowned out by the rapids, and the sun’s glare is so hot that it turns our opponents into silhouettes.

What, at bottom, do I want that’s in this structure which Bend of the River contains, which culminates in brutal physical contact? I already mentioned the essence of it: the past summed up with a glance, with a recognized name, a reputation that’s a hair too mysterious to be infamous. I want that economy of meaning, and also those densely layered tensions built from protagonists who are survivors, who are uncommonly able, swaggering, who can go the distance with some combination of clear effort and sufficient good fortune. I want to replicate the pretense to brawl in water, which is having no other recourse, which is having the duty to kill. I want the airtight array of chess pieces, whose paths are plain for the eye to see and yet still not one path could be called a foregone conclusion. A survey of the bare essentials, the narrative equivalent of the first stage of that canonical Western homestead-building: the beams alone.

Which, if I’m being absolutist, Bend of the River can’t claim to possess in the extreme. It’s undercut in a few scenes, which go some way toward muddling the film’s perspective on the characters whose moralities it works so hard to gradate.

There’s this moment where Jeremy thanks the captain who helps the settlers transport goods upriver in his steamboat (that’s how they get ahead of Hendricks, who pursues the group from Portland). No payment is necessary to the captain, because, claims the captain, this is a case of essentially good folks helping other good folks. Jeremy’s clan has come to plant apple trees, you know. But what about McLyntock basically entrapping those Portland layabouts in order to get the food to the settlement? Isn’t Jeremy turning a blind eye to forced labor, or is he ignorant of McLyntock’s methods, and if so, is naïveté more excusable than outright cunning?

But asking these questions is like avoiding the fact that I’ve strayed a bit far from my initial incitement. What I’m describing—my parsing through this film which is based on a book whose author is, in the single instance I observed, not at all convincing—that’s admiration…and really the early consideration of borrowing or stealing the whole or part of a set of ingeniously constructed cinematic rules. If I’m in need of a Western I didn’t create from pieces, then look at the examples of pieces I have to guide me! The least I can do, the next thing I should do, which is indicative of the nascence of this process—and I did promise to give myself the duration of production on two more features, before finding the right source—is jot down a list. I need not limit its use to one genre.

When I think of what I love about New York, I think of all the young people here—and I mean the sheer numbers, which make the dating apps usable and only slightly repetitious, which ensure the eternal possibility of spying someone cute from a distance, or meeting a friend of a friend who was literally just hanging out on an Italian movie star’s farm or whose dad was in a dreampop band I binged when I was sixteen. I think of how I love the subway, which should define a city’s infrastructural identity but which, stacked against my Californian upbringing, always feels futurist. I think of loving Citibike—the rentable bikes you can activate at hundreds of stations in all five boroughs—and how (the service’s app tells me) I’ve saved $1400 with an annual membership. Whenever I ride a Citibike, I’m convinced it’s one of the great technological innovations of our time.

I love winding up in a leafy neighborhood like Fort Greene the same day I trekked to the Paris theater, where Netflix performs cinephilia to Motion Picture Academy members, and which faces the Plaza Hotel, and that’s because I enjoy these competing signifiers of age and renewal: the stubbornness of Midtown values versus the flexible, tasteful ways a new restaurant in south-central Brooklyn could almost be swapped out for any of its competitors. I think of loving the new artisanal sandwich shop that’s two avenues away from my apartment, because if a New Yorker should have anything within five minutes’ walking distance, it’s a blockbuster sandwich.

Maybe this kind of love is different than love that has a little mystery or yearning, because whenever I try to translate my contemporary experience into a narrative concept, or the beginnings of a film script, I flounder. I don’t want to write about New York.

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In trying to understand why, I first conjure up the New York-based media I’ve seen, and identify their indelible images. The first movie to enter the mind (for a long time my favorite movie): Enchanted, which traverses Central Park and the Upper West Side and crests atop the Chrysler building. Enchanted knows exactly what to do with its landmarks: it arranges them as a representation of upper-middle-class lifestyle, then tells us that lifestyle can overlap with full-blown fantasy. Then I think, indiscriminately, of The Fisher King, and then Moonstruck: we’re outside the Plaza Hotel (meaning across from the Paris!) in the former, at the Met Opera in the latter. What I find about these three films is that they deploy existing romantic notions of New York to romanticize their own narratives. They’re not interested in the kind of penetrating exploration of spaces that’s often possible only when the viewer has never seen a building, or at least its insides. Even though the Chateau Marmont is famous, in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere it’s the apartment suites which emanate all the intrigue. The Plaza meanwhile has The Fisher King and Bride Wars and, well, Home Alone 2 for surveyors.

Why hasn’t Coppola—or Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson—shot features in New York? Of course they’re not New York auteurs. Wes Anderson, for his part, has The Royal Tenenbaums, and Noah Baumbach has many more, including Frances Ha—sorry, that’s really Greta Gerwig’s movie, and the worlds built in these films do hold together, on the basis of wondrous, irrepressible spirit. Anderson historicizes and meshes period details with a contemporary setting in Tenenbaums, while Frances Ha relies on one person and her perspective and her singularity. Okay, I’ll bookmark those options: 1) to scramble temporality, to give all action a past-tense sensibility, and 2) to depend entirely on a character—more importantly, an actor—who’s a force of nature.

The problem for me with the second option is that images—compositions, rooted in place and among specific objects—tend to be the germs of my stories. Or I need to meet a force-of-nature actor, and I can’t rush that discovery. I could get behind the first option, but Anderson’s historical textures indicate a big budget, and an important qualification for the New York writing I want to attempt is that it should be produceable, like, right now, partly because writing without a sense of financial constraints means that I could just build out a dystopian alternate reality, which sounds a bit reckless.

Even though my focus is often on the past, I do care a lot about contemporary life, and what’s often unavoidable in my contemporary life is a sense that popular New York is either unspeakably bland or unspeakably expensive or, in the case of Dimes Square (a locale I am not ashamed to admit I love), just barely balancing overexposure with a resilient and scrappy attitude of aesthetic rigor. There is perhaps a hint of an undertone of malaise, in my fixation on the parts of New York I love avoiding.

The mutating anchors and moods in the city seem in my head to mirror this borderline-burnout, a fear that centers of city life have become random and unfocused. Brooklyn is almost like Los Angeles in that it now has that hamlet-constellation sensibility, better connected but intent on far-flung smatterings of new wine bars and cafés which do gentrifying work much more aggressively than spotless, close-to-post-gentrification Williamsburg. That...is how that whole thing works though.

Isn’t it weird that only two of my friends live in Manhattan? That when I think of young residents of the borough I picture the West Village girl, an insufferable finance/tech bro, an NYU or New School student, or a postgrad transplant who will leave the city in two years? I mean, I know why: the housing stock is terrible and unaffordable. But there’s almost a problem of the wrong level of density in Brooklyn: I read about Tokyo’s permissive zoning keeping the city young and modern, a stark contrast to New York (and all American cities) which the writer of the linked piece feared would turn (had already turned) into architectural museums. People want to live in Park Slope and Clinton Hill because of the historicity, the timelessness and uniformity. And I don’t know anything about the economics of real-estate development, but I don’t understand why every new building I visit in Bushwick or Dumbo has to have paper-thin walls and doors that are too short for their frames and lobbies that look like spas in Lake Tahoe. There is greater temporal diversity in California, where the butting up of old and new isn’t the Plaza next to a supertall (which is not, to be clear, uninteresting) but a nineteenth-century Victorian on a steep hill next to a gas station from the seventies.

This state of being doesn’t prevent the images that I need—for the next story, the next script—from appearing, without warning, but I am more likely to doubt the images, when they appear in this context of hopscotching between pretty bars and managing my network and unlocking my phone 400 times a day. Is that irrevocably my relationship with New York? Even if not, it’s what I think about every time I’m sucked back to a fake-marble lobby or every time I need Apollo Bagels and scarf my whitefish down in a West Village park full of blue jeans and limited-run baseball caps. And yet I am complicit, I am scarfing down the whitefish. Look: the food at this price-point is better than it’s ever been. And it’s not like other cities don’t suffer from the same problem. Critics are complaining that Rachel Sennott’s new HBO series I Love LA makes only surface-level references to the city’s culture— like Courage Bagels and Erewhon—but these critics don’t understand that for young people in Silver Lake and West Hollywood those institutions do vie for centrality in the culture.

Maybe, on a less apocalyptic note, contemporary New York is the best place to get ideas, because you’re always at the movies, it’s just that those ideas tend to circulate other cities, because New York is the center of American culture, which means…it’s okay for the culture to merely get summed up here? Or (and this undulates between being a conviction and a question) I’m just not built to be the New York guy. If I gravitate toward my home state or the broader American West or Paris (the city, not the theater, in which I set a feature-length script that I wrote soon after wrapping production on Sparks), I should trust those impulses.

But at the same time: I’m writing about New York right now, and I enjoy (even if I’m exhausted by) interrogating the city’s narrative potential. With lowkey but still meaningful wonder, I take the shortcuts through all those tunnels in Midtown that connect the numbered streets, and I marvel, while Citibiking, at the sparkling utopianism of the waterfront buildings on Kent Avenue, whose decadence is so new and overpowering that I almost invent a whole backstory on my journey, where I’m a messenger delivering a holographic artifact from a nearby kingdom to another king whose throne looks upon the East River. This idea would, however, break my reasonable-budget rule. Maybe (heck, naturally!) the kernel for a story will come piecemeal, and consist of ideas and people that didn’t originate from one reference period.

Or maybe New York is all about ideation as brute force, willing a concept onto the page, even if it’s the wrong concept that leads to the right one. Writers spend decades developing their projects, right? Why should I be any different? Well, because I want a twenty-million-dollar budget for the Paris-set feature right now—I’m ready! And the city is telling me—since (I am told) it will be the city, the present-tense auto-fictional slice of life that only I could write, that sells, or gets me an audience—the city is telling me, shaking her head, wagging her finger: not so fast.

Portugese summer fades and…Midwestern winter emerges? Two days after being bowled over by João César Monteiro’s À flor do mar, which I wrote about last week, I went to see The Mastermind, the new Kelly Reichardt film, at BAM. Those letters stand for Brooklyn Academy of Music, which also has a cinema in a building that used to be a playhouse, and before that a music hall. If you live in South Brooklyn, BAM is probably your favorite place to see movies.

Reichardt was present at the screening, and called The Mastermind her “fast” film, which she knows is funny because her filmography defines American “slow” cinema and is considered by a lot of people to be boring. This film has an almost inconceivably momentous narrative engine (by Reichardt’s standards), because when someone is setting out to achieve an illegal and time-sensitive aim—and then survive the aftermath—it’s hard not to stay engaged.

What I’m describing is, naturally, a museum heist. The BAM screening happened the day of the Louvre break-in, an event which, rather than rendering The Mastermind more relevant, serves to highlight how un-glamorous and un-complicated the work of stealing art is in this film. Our protagonist James Blaine, or JP, is a young father and husband with scarce job prospects in a small Massachusetts town in an economic recession, which is maybe the film’s most important constraining detail. Boredom or lightly active living has been forced upon our characters, and produces a restlessness that isn’t spacious or imaginative, but desperate.

Because JP has seen—when visiting the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art with his family—how easy it is to remove artworks from the walls or from cases without anybody noticing (the guards are dozy), he hits up some friends to steal several paintings by Arthur Dove. He asks his mother to write a check (“I’m not made of money, JP!”) for what he tells her is the cost of supplies for a design gig, and uses the money to pay his ramshackle accomplices. Larry bails after procuring JP a getaway car, and Curtis, the last-minute replacement, is a loose canon. JP told him to leave his gun at home; he did not listen.

JP pulls off the heist, but his plans—and their gaps—unravel in the ways the viewer might expect. Reichardt seems to be waiting for the moment when JP hits rock bottom, when he abandons the kids, hops on a Greyhound, and bats for anonymity, so that she can steer the action into her trademark interrogative zone. But because she is preoccupied with the mechanics of anticipation and release until that point, the viewer might wonder why she chose this subject matter.

It might simply be that Reichardt wanted to try her hand at kinetic action, and seeing tension build but still feel muted, embedded in the atmosphere, is an enjoyable if not totally remarkable experience. Reichardt does eventually reach a spacious level of profundity: when Arthur seeks refuge with his old art-school friends Fred and Maude. Here the scale of Arthur’s action—his folly, in everyone’s mind but his own—is cast into the most wintry and hermetic relief. It’s as if Maude and Fred are spies, such is the sophistication and convenience of their farm somewhere on the way from Framingham to Cincinatti, where Arthur has still more pals he plans to lean on.

To me the most memorable character in this stretch of the film was Maude, played by Gaby Hoffmann, whose discomfort at a fugitive being in her house—the risk of arrest she could face, if Arthur is discovered—is conveyed almost entirely with body language, the act of shuffling around a kitchen. But after Arthur’s been crashing for a few nights, Maude tells him he has to leave. This is when we finally get a revelatory look at Arthur’s self-serving delusions, which are all the more breathtaking for how they’re contained in a slight, superficially deferential, and gently expressive personality.

What I haven’t yet mentioned is that the person doing JP’s expressing is Josh O’Connor, who has made his name on quietude, or on a brand of slyness and rakishness that disarms with its warmth and restraint. Arthur is stupefied in response to Maude’s request—he seems to literally not understand the danger he’s putting her in, and his experience convincing the people in his life to do what he wants appears, despite being limited, to have given him a dizzying (but unaggressive!) confidence.

I’m not sure if this opposition of confidence—and the conniving it allows—with JP’s inherent small-time-ness is enough to sustain his arc. In Paper Moon, which has a similar plot and which also dances loosely through a period setting (it was made in 1973 and concerned the Great Depression), we’re treated to two narrative forces: one is the various scams that Moses attempts, but the second is his and Addie’s relationship. No deuteragonist materializes in The Mastermind, which is fine because O’Connor, despite the fact that I already know he’s good at this, does command spaces where we have little more than his eyebrows and his hunched shoulders to grasp onto.

But I wasn’t thinking about Paper Moon for long, because O’Connor is in this other film about theft, where he’s an outsider, and it’s mostly the same season as The Mastermind, and a lot of the same hues abound (bricks are to blame).

The film is Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, which means when a Portugese summer fades, perhaps a…central Italian winter emerges, in place of a Midwestern one? La chimera has been my north star since it was released in the U.S. early last year. I had actually been trying to see the film since May of 2023, when I attended the Cannes film festival; due to a cutthroat online reservation system, I failed to secure tickets. Though I find that films which I’m prepared to worship and which then deliver are more likely to dominate my memory (Little Women, Call Me by Your Name), in an effort to disprove that bias, I have rewatched La chimera to sift through familiar scenes and find new treasures. I haven’t been disappointed.

In an inversion of Reichardt’s sequencing, the specter of imprisonment is past-tense for Josh O’Connor’s character in La chimera, named Arthur, who we find picking up pieces from his past and reassessing whether to reengage with them. JP, on the other hand, is mostly seeking out new pieces to replace the ones that can’t get him anywhere. Arthur was arrested for cavorting with tombaroli, or tomb-robbers, and feels betrayed by them, since they all evaded capture when Arthur didn’t. The decade is the seventies, the location is a tiny Tuscan town, as picturesque as a travel brochure and yet marked by signs of encroaching industrialism, and of poverty. Pretty soon the tombaroli have convinced Arthur to rejoin them, and for good reason: the troupe bandies about the Italian countryside finding hidden ancient graves via a supernatural ability of Arthur’s to detect where they lie. Arthur usually uses a branch, ripped matter-of-factly from any nearby tree, to guide him through field or forest, until he’s overcome by the sensation that a bounty is underfoot.

While O’Connor’s performances have tended recently to be coated in some kind of residual layer—the mud of a barn in The Mastermind, sexy sweat in Challengers—La chimera wins the prize for dirtying O’Connor most thoroughly, head to toe. He barely showers, he lives in a shed pitched against the exterior wall of the Tuscan town, he has one blazer and his beard grows long over the course of the film. Like JP, he is aware of his emotional and temperamental distance from those around him, but we soon learn of the heartbreak that is disproportionately responsible for his disposition: Beniamina, his presumed former partner, died before the film begins.

We never learn the cause of death, and we wonder, based on a smattering of allusions, whether she got caught up with the tombaroli, or suffered a catastrophic fate whose trauma might explain why her mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini) believes she’s still alive. Do we sense guilt from Arthur, or merely a deep longing to be with Beniamina again?

Atop this history sits Arthur’s singular power. He’s grieving and he’s magically endowed and he was recently in jail, so he’s mistrustful. Thus we have a package with a great cinematic activity—digging with instruments, then crawling underground—punctuated by a near-endless array of ideas and images which build from the premise of ancient objects, their secrecy, their invocation of mortality. The boldly and funnily named Italia (the whole movie is funny too), who becomes Arthur’s new romantic interest, declares that stolen artifacts were not “made for human eyes,” and so we wonder whether we’ve been catching sight of images which soon enough may be hidden away for good. Early opening titles appear inside a Viewfinder toy used by a little kid; the borders around the titles are then matched by every shot—slightly overscanned (or uncropped) 35, 16 and Super 16-millimeter formats. The niece of Spartaco, a shady art trafficker, breaks the fourth wall to tell the viewer that if the Etruscans were still in Italy, machismo wouldn’t be a problem. When Arthur stumbles upon grave sites, the camera tilts and tilts until it turns upside down. Random and fevered time-lapses betray little respect for what narratively demands a speed adjustment, instead operating on Rohrwacher’s attunement to spare, staticky bits of anger and adrenaline.

This muchness of content, imagination and formal experimentation is almost overwhelming, and a critic might declare the need for more curation (a friend told me he found the repeated appearances of a red string, which trails Beniamina’s dress in Arthur’s visions of her, to be overly literal). But in aggregate—and this is something I hadn’t fully felt in past viewings, because the film is so teeming with energy, with adventure—many of the film’s symbols remind us how close to death Arthur is from the get-go. Isn’t anyone spooked that his gift means dead bodies are in a sense communicating with him? Italia hates the premise of tomb-raiding, but for the sake of the raided, not of Arthur. Reunited with the tombaroli, Arthur agreeably goes along for the ride, is anti-authoritarian and mischievous, but is that only to pass the time? He ultimately can’t commit to staying put, whether with the tombaroli or with Italia, and although this waffling reads for long periods of the film like a constitutional restlessness, during my most recent viewing I wondered if Arthur is looking for the all-clear—to move closer to death than he already is.

In this context of singular power and grief—and interacting with all the set pieces Rohrwacher has laid out for him—O’Connor makes the case that he is indispensable, that action must travel through him to find meaning. O’Connor’s quietude remains necessary, but in La chimera it’s astonishingly light-soaked; he renders exhaustion, completely believably, like it came from something like heat stroke, because he was out sunbathing on a roof all day. He’s often surprised, then pleased, by affection from others; if he thinks it is disingenuous, he waits until some strain of the disingenuity is swapped out for tenderness, even if not to turn the sentiment pure. And then he warms up. When Arthur marches (so carefully) with his tree branch, trying to find a new grave site, O’Connor creases his forehead and lifts his eyes like he’s about to sneeze.

I don’t think O’Connor is indispensable in The Mastermind. I’m not saying a lot of actors could play the part as well, but (perhaps by design) our sense of Reichardt’s world isn’t nearly so dependent on how JP processes his surroundings. O’Connor reuses tics and demeanors from other roles which, though probably only producible by him, often land like facsimiles.

A mode missing from La chimera is monologue, or extended dialogue, and I did like chewing on JP’s phone call to the long-forgotten wife Alana Haim plays, where he puts in the work to apologize, is almost sure he’s nailed the rhetoric by implying selflessness—he pulled the heist for the family, he insists—except not quite so sure. His folly was “three quarters for you, one quarter for me.” The transparency slips into sheepishness, and it just keeps on revealing ignorance.

A late-in-the-game analog from La chimera—when we’re reminded of themes, of how far we’ve come—picks up with Arthur and the tombaroli on the train back from a meeting with Spartaco, the feared art smuggler, where they presented the stolen head of a bust she intended to sell. Faced with blackmail—the tombaroli threatened to tell Spartaco’s buyers where she got the bust if she did not buy the head for a high price–Spartaco entreated Arthur to turn on his comrades and work for her. Instead Arthur threw the “priceless” head into a lake, foiling both sides’ aims. We noticed how the head of the bust looked vaguely like Beniamina, and Arthur thought so too.

Arthur now wanders through the train carriage looking for a lighter, and nabs one from the conductor. A shocking shot I hadn’t clocked is so brief, but it’s a closeup of the lighter in Arthur’s hands: we see that the lighter is gold and has a clock embedded in it, what looks like a watch face. Are these lighters normal? They do show up on Amazon. Then the conductor tells Arthur to keep the lighter—“you might need it”—and asks Arthur to check on his grave goods. Behind Arthur, a gaggle of girls appears: we recognize them from the opening scene, when they shared a train car with Arthur on his way to Tuscany. And in fact the conductor was also on that train. The girls likewise ask Arthur to check on items left for them at their burial sites. Arthur is confused, stricken—is O’Connor playing it straight?—and claims to not know what any of the figures is talking about. But he also neglects to recognize the girls, one of whom he earlier told looked like a figure in “ancient paintings,” and immediately after the encounter, Arthur departs the train, abandoning the tombaroli, either shaken by the ghosts he just stared down or sure, despite his performed naiveté, that they were being…encouraging.

Even if La chimera is an auteur’s film, even if Rohrwacher only let O’Connor do one thing in the carriage with the lighter…O’Connor’s grip on the object, on this patent manifestation of ticking time, is, counted cumulatively with all the other things he holds, awash in texture. Maybe he isn’t performing that naiveté when he tells the conductor and the girls that he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, maybe he’s just scared, and maybe he isn’t thinking about where he’s going or what his intentions are, only what he misses and what he loves.

La chimera envelops Arthur/O’Connor in an architecture whose fantastical disruptions and conditions—the fourth-wall breaks, time lapses, and on a deeper level, Arthur’s powers—blend seamlessly with realistic style and real stakes. Arthur’s interaction on the train presents as a conventional hallucination, but one that’s nestled deep within a world which surprises but does not alienate us. We end up pondering Arthur’s intentions and his comprehension, not because we doubt him but because we’re feeling so generous. It goes without saying that Arthur would never steal from a museum. He already went straight to the source.

In the introduction to this Substack I wrote that the internet of 2025 affords a viewer unparalleled—and astonishingly controlled—access to films. Our ability to scrub and capture and analyze in granular, unhurried detail: that’s a reality I’ll be exploring throughout Fergstack.

Even accustomed to these digital standards, I was gobsmacked at the full availability, on YouTube, of à flor do mar, a film from 1986 by the Portugese director João César Monteiro, which I saw at MoMA last week, as part of the museum’s comprehensive Monteiro retrospective. The YouTube stream I found is definitively standard-definition—it looks like a VHS rip—but it’s also not the only version; users have even created English subtitles on a website called Captionfy. I soon realized that this must mean the film is not part of any valuable content library, which is weird, because à flor do mar looks like other high-brow European output (Antonioni and, occasionally, Tarkovsky) which firms do pay semi-big bucks to license.

It’s true that Stalker is on Internet Archive. But what I also struggled to find for this film were reviews, or a situating of the film within Monteiro’s body of work. A Film Comment article, which tells us Monteiro was less interested in the realism exhibited by his Portugese New Wave contemporaries than in the “materiality and poetics of the image itself,” doesn’t even mention à flor do mar, though the analysis fits the film like a glove. Screen Slate similarly forgets the film in its coverage of the MoMA series.

Viewers can probably blame the lack of a comprehensive understanding of Monteiro on the repression of the Estado Novo, the dictatorship that was only overthrown in 1976. Screen Slate calls Monteiro both anti-fascist and anti-bourgeois, so I guess I need to watch more of the series at MoMA, because I don’t necessarily see those tendencies on display in à flor do mar. Most of what I see is staggering beauty, in fact some of my favorite compositions ever. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in a way that’s almost never true when I’m watching films (and browsing stars’ Wikipedia pages and finding reviews), I’m flying a little blind here. My reaction, while well-remembered, can’t be so well-contextualized.

Doing justice to the images in à flor do mar would require dozens of pages. In liberally pulling stills and excerpts from the film on YouTube—the shots and camera moves I liked most—I found myself continuing to screen record after one shot in particular had ended, because it was followed by another earth-shaking composition, and then another, and then another. So, although I’ll probably write more about this film in future Fergstacks, the entry-point to reflecting on à flor do mar will be a close reading of these seven minutes.

[Below I have pasted the entire seven-minute sequence from YouTube. You can refer back to the clip as you continue reading or watch the whole thing now.]

à flor do mar centers itself in two opening shots on a country estate belonging to Laura Rossellini, an Italian widow with two picture-perfect children and a teen-like sister named Rosa and some kind of secretary…or is it a family member? Her name is Sara. She looks nothing like the rest of the characters. There is also a maid who cooks the most wonderful seafood.

The film’s English title is “hovering over the water,” which might refer to the house itself, built on a bluff over an inlet of sandbars and gently moving ocean, not like the more craggy and cliff-dominated beach where Laura finds a bloodied man in a lifeboat who we quickly suspect, based on radio reports Laura hears in her car, is a covert operative, who may have just killed a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The beach where Laura finds the fugitive, Robert—he also goes by Roberto—looked almost orange on the 35-millimeter print that MoMA screened, like it had a spray tan. What’s almost funny but still magnetic in Robert’s first scene is how immediately the sexual tension between him and Laura registers. They are both striking to look at. Smooth and bronzed, Robert sports a single gold earring, like he’s a pirate, or a skater boy. He’s laconic even after recovering his strength; Laura, while drinking from a large plastic bottle, earlier looked like she was in a Dasani ad, and before that, while sunbathing, like she was in my favorite Versace ad. She is a young widow, which makes her beauty more tragic, and when her hair is up she seems as glamorous as and more untouchable than, say, Anouk Aimée. Of course it should be ridiculous that Laura would find an acutely dehydrated man with a head wound and fixate on when he’ll kiss her; instead the pair’s instant, sensual chemistry establishes a kind of fated togetherness.

In spite of some swirling specifics, it doesn’t really matter who Robert is: the important factors are that he’s foreign, and he’s American, which makes him seem put together, that he’s not going to stick around forever but that he needs shelter right now.

My sequence of choice starts the night after Robert’s arrival, in what I think is the kitchen, which in its current unfamiliar iteration reminds the viewer how difficult it is to reconcile the film’s spaces with one another. Light hits the walls in faint squares, but Laura wears sunglasses like it’s blinding, or because she’s mourning, but most likely just because she’s chic. The walls’ plaster suggests cream cheese, blue abounds in the plates, the tablecloth, and in the wall tone, like we’re on Santorini: a contrast to the foreboding military-esque exterior of the property. Robert sits the wrong way round on the chair, carelessly and comfortably. All matter has fallen into place as if attached to invisible string and also with the static energy of a still-life painting.

Laura and Robert are cutting melon and discussing its taste—more ripe sexual subtext. Laura knocks on a melon and tells Robert that it’s hard, which means it’s good—not an “infallible” method, in her words, but one that reduces the chances of “deception.” I found a latent romantic charge in these words, a sign that Laura is on some level thinking about what could happen next, but the following phrase, about old flavors disappearing and her children not knowing them, proves inscrutable, and a bit like filler, because that’s when a dolly track starts: we’re not looking at Laura but at Robert as he gets up, plops down next to Laura and kisses her neck. He’s been waiting to do this, has practiced the movement in his head, I bet. That’s why the action matches the camera movement. But now the mourning as explanation for sunglasses makes more sense: intermittently it’s as if Laura has consigned herself to sober self-abnegation, and she does not accept the kiss at all. “Scusa,” she whispers, and exits frame.

A few things happen now. Music returns, a violin sonata by Bach which is the film’s only piece of score, and Monteiro makes what I take to be his only truly out-of-time narrative choice, which is placing Laura in front of an ornate mirror, and also on some kind of dolly, so that she gets closer and closer to the mirror while the mirror remains static.

I was left speechless by the movement. What does Monteiro mean by rendering Laura as a ghost? Or maybe not a ghost, but borderline-supernatural? Laura is being abstracted in this shot, perhaps so that her singularity comes further into focus. Even with a family, she’s isolated: why didn’t she join them on their trip to the countryside? Maybe that’s a bourgeois give-mummy-a-break maneuver by Sara—Laura’s maternal instincts are certainly warm and natural when she enacts them—but shifting into that mode might just mean pivoting from this absolute, uncompromising independence. When the shot is blinded by a new, inexplicable light source, the whole composition gets blown out. But Laura’s not going to disappear—if she is at risk of losing definition, she’ll take the whole picture down with her.

I wanted to find out if there was a painting that resembled the mirror shot, because the form of the composition is so symmetrical, and because art is everywhere in the film: a marble sculpture in the house’s stairwell, what look like medieval portraits of the Virgin Mary. Maybe there’s a touch of John Singer Sargent here, though none of his subjects are so olive-skinned, or Goya’s girl with jug, since jugs are in the film’s vernacular by this point. But the timelessness of Laura’s expression is maybe what also sets in motion an imaginary remembrance of works that resemble her.

In any case, we cut hard out of this shot, drop the music and the lighting rig and find a balcony looking out onto the beach. Remember that Laura has the beach right there, at her doorstep, and yet she went to a different one, the one where she found Roberto, like she was looking for him.

“Ah, a guest,” Robert muses, flipping the script. “It’s always nice having visitors.” An off-screen remark, the film again doing nothing to help us situate ourselves. We’re focused instead on Laura and Roberto’s movements around each other. We track toward the balcony for the first time when Robert enters frame. As in the kitchen, his blocking is so precisely confident, his smooth, almost uninteresting line deliveries perhaps betraying a lack of imagination, and yet: every time he gets close to Laura I am sure he has with a single gesture made her fall in love with him.

A second camera track follows the couple to the balcony. The camera insists eagerly, even affectionately, on being this distance from the pair: not too close, but no changes, please. Even though there still hasn’t been a kiss on the lips, Roberto acts as if consummation already happened, by referencing the melon, the ripeness. The camera tracks backward, the way it came, as Laura exits frame, leaving Robert on his own, the second time he’s been left on his own. For being so intimate, the two are treated to a lot of solo time.

Even given the beauty of the shots so far, and the natural beauty, the next one might be the the most breathtaking. The shot takes spatial denial to a whole new level. It is supposedly the reverse shot in a shot-reverse-shot sequence, but it’s totally confounding, because it’s a painting, a blurred vision of the same view we had on the balcony, a blue-to-white gradient.

The colors of the painted beach are muted, solemn, perhaps because now Laura is going to talk about death. Laura’s painter husband went crazy, she says, after Robert asks if the painting is his (it’s not). “He only painted birds,” amid this sky where there are none.

None of the husband’s paintings remain on the property. Laura tells Robert that “he could have sold them all,” rather than explaining right away that he burned every canvas in a manic episode. Laura gestures here toward the possibility that we might all make up stories, that in this momentary yet acute absence of context or history, Robert doesn’t need to know the truth. For the third time Laura exits frame, and Robert compliments the gun she tells him her husband used to shoot himself.

Why should we remember in this moment that Robert is familiar with violence? Well, his past operates kind of like the swashbuckling analog of Laura’s tragedy. He’s alone too. Meanwhile Laura’s not really committed to her equivocating stance. Our chosen sequence’s last shot is a repeat of the third, on the balcony, and she spills the beans about her husband’s suicide. She found him badly burnt and recalls an “immense glare”—immediately recalling the glare that overcame her in the mirror shot—and an acrid smell. Nobody else was on the property at the time.

“Can you think of anyone else?” Robert asks. “Or is he all you can handle?” But Laura’s grief isn’t by any means apparent everywhere. That’s why I interpreted it as another symptom of her immanent solitude. She tells Robert that in order to heal from her husband’s death, she must first answer the question: “what part of me did it burn?” But when Laura asks this, it almost seems like she’s already figured it out: the part of her able to accept new love. She retreats from intimacy, even while desiring it, as if she can actually feel a burn on her skin, like it’s still sensitive. Why else would she use the language of the physical circumstances of a death that wasn’t her own, rather than “harm” or “injure” or damage”?

We soon hear the sounds of a car’s tires on gravel and children laughing. Laura exits frame yet again—her kids have returned—and we get a gorgeous rack back to the beach, which ends the shot, meaning we’ve had four shots in the chosen sequence (five if you count the repeated balcony composition). We started with the kitchen, and the swivel that allowed the kiss, but only the kiss, then Laura abandoned the scene, only to flood it with her tragic, solitary confrontation of the camera (via the mirror), before we were cast into the similarly painterly frame of the balcony and the beach behind it. The only true featured painting brought the sequence to its climax, before a tail-end back at the balcony. With the off-screen presence of children, we sensed the irrevocable end of Laura and Robert’s isolation.

Because these scenes refuse to be spatially linked, Laura’s storytelling is what we have to connect them. We are platforming Laura’s story of her dead husband, in order to marvel at the full formation, the readymade maturity, of a bond between two solitary people.

So the locales, while it matters that they orbit the beach, the horizon, while it’s true that they’re near each other, even across from each other—though of course the mirror shot is an aberration—we know that the shots belong together because they are underlined by a recollection that is an excuse for a totally unrelated connection.

The husband was a painter but it’s not his painting: even as Laura remembers, the film negates, even as she rejects Roberto, we watch him become the center of her world, and ours. Laura puts her face in Roberto’s hand like she’s gotten used to it over the course of a long relationship, like parting with it would mean losing a piece of her life.

Of course there is an immediately satisfying erotic undercurrent charging the sequence: getting closer to letting the object of your desire overtake you, a gentle subgenre of edging. And then there is the simple sensory experience of beauty: I always ask myself, watching films this beautiful, whether I just want to be in the setting, whether I’m being voyeuristic. Why do we want to observe nice houses in movies particularly, rather than in real-estate catalogs? Those are realer, right, more suggestive of a place we might also inhabit?

But the beauty and the eroticism aren’t the sole points—they’re at most like 80% of the point. Sandwiched in between their significance, their overwhelming (in the case of the beauty) or ebbing impact (in the case of the sensuality), is the condensed togetherness of two figures, who are wholly individual, independent, on track for different destinies. That’s why it’s so energy-intensive, or productive, like nuclear fusion, that these figures, Laura and Roberto—they are also souls—should be orbiting, pressing against each other. So many gestures are made toward the fleetingness and implausibility of this fusion. But we keep seeing it happen. And in the digital realm, when it dissipates (only as the credits roll—it lasts until the film’s final frame), we can scrub back to the beginning and watch again.

If you’re not familiar with Tyler, you should read this (somewhat treacly) profile of him (I think it’s dismaying that he still hasn’t received the top-tier New Yorker treatment). Tyler started as a rapper and co-founder of a collective called Odd Future, and graduated maybe eight years ago to the mainstream, with Flower Boy, his first pop-leaning album. What has been clear since Tyler’s early career is that he has a knack for visual storytelling; what’s indisputable now is that he is one of the most original, expressive and inventive artists working today.

How did I know this, before watching his Outside Lands set? From his array of ideas committed to music videos, like “Sorry Not Sorry,” which electrifies the overdone “Eras”-type retrospective framework (avatars from past album cycles gathering to address each other) by boxing the characters in a natural history museum-type diorama, and by slowing the action to something like 60 frames per second, so that we can see the transitions between Tyler’s facial contortions, true sentimentality veering to anger, then to dismissiveness. Or “Sugar on My Tongue,” the most recent Tyler video, where he gets to be uncontrollably desirous, and also submissive, and also shy.

Importantly, the album Tyler dropped shortly before his Outside Lands performance is all about bodily disinhibition—letting loose, sans urge to reach for a mobile device—and the album’s rollout included footage of listening parties where Tyler is among a crowd of revelers, perhaps not meant to stand out but still concerned with controlled, fluid choreographic movement.

I was intrigued by this album framework because I love dancing, and I love watching dance, and I’ve repeatedly incorporated dance into my projects, from ballet and a musical number in my web series “Sankyo Stream” to a choreographed dance in a pivotal scene in Sparks, my feature film (all incidentally choreographed by my friend Samantha Sacks, a company dancer with New York Theatre Ballet). Since my obsessions are of the pop-cultural nature, it’s in the pop-cultural sphere that I’m on the hunt for inspired choreographic moments. At Outside Lands I was ready for the more visceral, real-time version of reacting to choreography.

About twenty minutes before the start of Tyler’s show, a long storage container associated with “Chromakopia,” Tyler’s 2024 LP, appeared, before a new banner billowed out over the top. “Don’t Tap the Glass,” it read, caps locked (that’s the name of the new album). Eventually, a figurine-sized silhouette appeared atop the container, which worked as a giant runway, a blank canvas for gyrating, if not quite transcending, to the beats. Tyler’s emergence was breathtaking for me. On stage, he seemed (has not always been) one of those stars with discernibly accumulated power: all of the time I’d spent thinking about, watching, listening to him operated inescapably in service of that moment.

At least…that’s how I felt for the first four or five songs. Then I started wishing some kind of new element would be introduced on stage. Backing tracks dominated the sound design, even when Tyler rapped vociferously over them. He was alone the whole time, the focus perhaps being on his capacity for endless hip-swiveling, endless pseudo-moonwalking…but here’s the thing: it wasn’t moonwalking. And it’s not news that today’s culture doesn’t produce the live artistry of Prince or Michael Jackson, except for perhaps via Beyoncé, though overproduction is another problem, and her tours suffer from that. And I’m not expecting Tyler to look possessed—though it’s not as if he’s incapable of that!—like Michael when he moonwalked for the first time, but the fact that this performance (Michael’s) was not just about skill, but the discovery of movement, reveals how, even if Tyler is a great dancer, he’s not a deeply studious one.

What I wanted to see was more play with the choreographic form: perhaps cede a transition to a prodigious backup dancer, like Beyoncé did at her Renaissance shows. Or bring in an ensemble for just one number, where Tyler’s own impressive moves could be magnified, more easily distinguished, appreciated by being broken down into parts. I get that that’s awfully redolent of boy band theatrics, so what about a giant party, à la Bad Bunny’s San Juan residency? To further summon the dancefloor atmosphere that’s central to “Don’t Tap the Glass”?

Maybe the problem stems from festival constraints (though judging by MSG footage from last year, Tyler likes doing this thing solo), but the set had me wondering what the best contemporary forum for executing dance should be, and I’m talking about the kind of dance that feels like a slice of the sublime, because (for example) figures interlock in a way that shouldn’t be possible, or correct.

Naturally my first thought was that the movies used to be the home of great dancing. So I sought out the first dancing movie that popped into my head, which was Singin’ in the Rain, and proceeded to wait and wait until choreography materialized in frame. I just read that the film is a hodgepodge of recycled songs by the composers Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown—it’s practically jukebox! Like Moulin Rouge!—and you can tell because none of the songs have any bearing on the narrative. In the case of “Good Morning,” the content is almost stupidly nonsensical—like, is that phrase supposed to signal some kind of metaphorical alarm clock, after Cosmo has the epiphany of turning Don’s silent film into a musical? And the beefiest dancing—apart from Cosmo’s “Make ‘em Laugh”—is plopped into the container of the film-within-a-film…rather, Don’s pitch for the film within the film.

The iconic Cyd Charisse-Gene Kelly pairing still delivers, because how did they get a fan under that billowing chiffon? And how can I forget the below moment, a horizontal, almost-limb-free landing, which implies total attraction and total remove simultaneously, which in its figurative directness makes the clever dialogue and metatextuality of the surrounding parts look like afterthoughts? Singin’ in the Rain led me to conclude that essential dancing requires more than a few transcendent minutes within a heaving 90-minute runtime.

What about La La Land? Remember when people got angry that Damien Chazelle said he wanted the choreography in La La Land to be so simplistic that the average joe could comprehend it? As if a viewer is only able to tolerate a skill level on screen that matches their own? Well: it’s true that Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling scuff and scuff again, but the music is so bound up in their screwball romantic tension, and so maximized by their shared charisma, that, when cinematographer Linus Sandgren adds in the soaring jib shots, you’re kind of convinced that you’re watching complex movement.

That’s not what I mean, though, not what I’m looking for. Where’s the charisma, packaged with the rigor? That’s when I remembered the remake of West Side Story, which flew under the radar in the early days of what we now call the postpandemic period. This film was choreographed by Justin Peck, “the third important choreographer to have emerged in classical ballet this century,” as labeled by the New York Times. Peck got his start at New York City Ballet, and his collaboration with Spielberg and DP Janusz Kamiński yields staggering new spatial arrangements and roving compositions. Some critics found the cinematography overactive, but I thought that weaving in between dancers and letting their movements cascade over the lens was almost a representation of how the choreography was displacing particles, literally cutting through space-time.

Anita (Arianna DeBose) and Bernardo (David Alvarez) are at the center of the film’s best sequences. The actors/dancers have resolved to absorb the stylized yet still useful tableau of 1950s New York that Spielberg gives the viewer, to be both feisty and weathered and hopeful. The precision in their dancing, and in the dancing that Riff (Mike Faist) does—almost as thrillingly, with his hoodlum friends rather than a romantic partner—build the pieces of narrative/kinetic energy which promise to hurtle us toward new heights of emotional and inner life. Unfortunately the trio is interrupted by the dead-on-arrival A plot, that of Tony and María’s romance. It’s here that the film forgets its strengths. Admittedly the material already does a disservice to the leads, because their songs are stagnant, boring, they soar when an audience hears a real voice hit crystalline notes in a Broadway venue. But Spielberg becomes preoccupied with dreary homage and respectfulness, and the film all but suffocates in the shadow of that preoccupation.

I shouldn’t forget that dancing is hard, grueling. Ansel Elgort as Tony can’t do it, nor can Rachel Zegler as María, so the more able cast builds around them. And in a live context dance is tiresome, and expectations run high, which means the performer might have to lip sync, or save the most exertive dancing for an instrumental break. Last month that’s exactly what Sabrina Carpenter did, in her VMAs performance of “Tears,” the second single from her new pop album “Man’s Best Friend.” It’s beside the point whether or not the VMAs, which boast some of pop music’s most memorable live performances, can still provide a viable route to imagery and expression that will, as much as anything in our distracted age, linger in the cultural memory. If you’re a pop star you have to act as if yes, the route is unassailable. And Carpenter milked the contrast between embodying the gravitas of a personality and being the center of an organism, which is to say a dance troupe. Though she occasionally has that problem where she doesn’t extend her arms fully (like she’s marking…or not making an effort), Carpenter executes semi-demanding choreography better than almost any of her contemporaries.

In hasty summation, this is what I’ve dealt for you: a concert whose dazzlingly expressive protagonist couldn’t quite fill the space, and who was shortchanged by some production design decisions; the music videos that proved that protagonist’s capacity for expression in the first place, which are perhaps better avenues to enjoy (delight in) a performance; musical sequences in movies, a part that doesn’t fit with its whole, which makes the part not so different from music videos; and various kinds of televised live performances and/or stadium tours where the orchestration of live elements can be refined more elaborately and expansively than ever before.

This spectrum of pop-cultural dance is full of detail, and intention, but (apart from Beyoncé) I don’t feel totally fulfilled. And I have a hunch, given these tastes of revelatory choreography that I get from Tyler, or Sabrina, or from Justin Peck doing cinema—and surely Arianna DeBose is itching to move like she did then, after an Oscar win led to no good offers!—I have a hunch that some more lasting form of resonant dance can be delivered, if its makers focus on pushing the dance to its limits.

Maybe I’m missing the likelihood that it’s hard to make dance mean something within the context of visual media that gains meaning from so many other types of action. Maybe I should follow Peck’s roots and just focus on New York City Ballet. Or maybe great dance doesn’t have to consume an entire film’s purpose, and can instead work the opposite way. Take Holy Motors, the bonkers Leos Carax vehicle, in a scene where the eternal cosplayer Denis Lavant does some kind of motion capture dry-humping courtship with a figure resembling Iggy Azalea. That dancing chiefly serves the infinite weirdness that follows.

While watching the music video for Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” the lead single from her nearly intolerable new album, I thought of a different explanation for my frustration, a way out. No, the answer did not come from Swift, but the clip is very well-structured, and full of stunts—fire-breathers and oil painting backdrops that turn into backstage passageways. The movement is broadly too slick, but it gets at the dopamine rush attending synchronization and impossibly perfect timing: a visual phenomenon closely approximating joy, and maybe causing it. Swift can barely dance (like so many stars before her, she lets people around her give the impression that she’s dancing) but the aesthetics in the video make me wonder if Swift (or someone on her team) watched the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, a film which includes all the hallmarks of the media I’ve just discussed.

Like Singin’ in the Rain, Hail, Caesar! is a film about a fictional studio, and swerves within soundstages for the purpose of catching complete in-world singing and dancing. The melodies may not compete with Gene Kelly’s film, but the lyrical content is funnier, the commentary on the period more attentive (you can blink and miss the Hedda Hopper type who tells Lina Lamont that Don’s conspiring against her, but in Hail, Caesar! there are basically two Heddas—Tilda Swinton as twin gossip columnists, constantly taking advantage of being indistinguishable from one another!)

The momentum of sailors tapping on counters and Scarlett Johansson diving into her mermaid lagoon spills onward, into the comic antics not just of the characters but of the way set pieces and props respond to and envelop them. In Hail, Caesar! I remembered, rapt, all this movement which isn’t dance but which levitates like a dancer.

There’s a reaaaal cowboy in Hail, Caesar! played by Alden Ehrenreich, who giddily if ineptly makes the transition from B Westerns to serious pictures. He brings his lasso everywhere, and while waiting outside a mansion for his date to a premiere, spins that lasso around and around, without any evident effort. The choreo hides the practice, the toiling to get the action right, which is what, sub-textually, I might look for in the dance I seek: I want to see labor, the trial and error and more error that precedes a clean, voluminous take. Later, post-premiere, at a restaurant, our cowboy uses his talent to spin spaghetti just like his lasso. The pasta may as well have been Cyd Charisse. I was mesmerized.

For the four years I was in college I poured all of my energy, ideas, and free time (I even pulled liberally from the time I should have spent studying) into a web series, “Sankyo Stream,” which followed two film students on their quest to find and stage an interview with the director Paul Thomas Anderson—or PTA, as he’s more affectionately known. Though this narrative focus on PTA was abandoned just as often as it was foregrounded, and though I took pains to skewer any cinephile pretentiousness in the series—I often say that PTA became the object of the protagonists’ desire only because he is the stereotypical favorite director of my (well, maybe the preceding) generation—at the end of the day…Phantom Thread is one of my favorite films, I treasure any number of shots and sequences which populate PTA’s work, he seems to possess the truly inspired combination, relative to his contemporaries, of being both fastidious and spontaneous, referential and uninhibited.

But I’ve been a little embarrassed by the texts from friends about the new action spectacle from “your guy,” as one message put it, since literally everybody loves this guy, and since I engineered my claim to affiliation by being kind of relentless. And if I were in a room with PTA, I would have to tell him that a formative creative experience revolved around him, that I really wanted to sit him down and ask him some questions, even if I was mortified to do so, and when other fans in this room could probably boast of much more sophisticated theories about his films.

I put up posters around Los Angeles in the fall of 2022 asking, half-jokingly, to be put in contact with the auteur—a move that remarkably produced a call from a high schooler and alleged family friend of the Andersons. I contact this person every few months, and have faith that I will meet PTA someday, and if I get that chance, I’ll need a comprehensive and still passionate knowledge of One Battle After Another, his tenth film, his most expensive, his widest release, which debuted last weekend.

Because my feelings about the film are chaotic, I’m going to synthesize my analysis in the following sequence: the context and impact of the film’s contemporariness, the way its present-day and near-future settings differ from the loose source material (the 1990 novel Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon), why the film is an example of the right kind of adaptation and also a far duller, less profound piece of world-building than Vineland, and how the various set pieces and locales amount to a singular, beautiful collection of images, which perhaps excises the need for narrative qualms about the cogency, history or depth of the content.

One Battle concerns a fictional revolutionary group called the French 75 (a wonderful name, I wish it was the name of the film). The film’s first scene is a carefully planned mission: familiar faces assemble, like Alana Haim (star of 2021’s Licorice Pizza), Teyana Taylor, even Dijon, current poster-child for boundary-pushing indie pop—before Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pat Calhoun, or the “Rocketman,” appears. He’s the explosives architect.

The French 75 nimbly ties up federal troops stationed around the tent-like structures of a detention camp near the Mexican border, before loading migrants into a van and freeing them; fireworks literally go off, on account of Rocketman, and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor) concurrently snoops around executive offices, as it were, to detain Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who is hopelessly aroused by Perfidia’s intentionally arousing exclamations. She literally orders him to “get it up!” before leading him out of his trailer, his hands zip-tied, his member levitating. In the getaway car, Perfidia and Rocketman can’t get their tongues out of each other’s mouths, and it’s really sexy, because the two are in love.

Thus does PTA establish the film’s most important circumstance: the French 75’s activity is large-scale, braggadocious, and possibly doomed. That the entry-point to this element is so convincing makes the encroaching murkiness all the more disappointing.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, in his review of One Battle, wrote, somewhat preposterously, that “at a certain point, Anderson’s seeming attachment to the past became conspicuous enough that it began to appear as if he might be mystified, scared, and/or bored of the modern world to some degree, and therefore arguably less relevant to it.” Never mind that great, enduring cinema often takes the viewer out of time, or that history can be transformed by a contemporary perspective. But it is understandable that PTA would want to prove to, say, his own children, that he cares about the here and now, and about the future. The ideas in One Battle are blunter than any PTA has so far wielded, announced from the get go, and also so clearly personal: he is a father, and the father of a biracial daughter, in a political landscape which many Americans believe is descending into authoritarianism.

It’s still likely that PTA was also drawn to Vineland’s analog sparkle. The novel opens on a post-counter-cultural milieu—a former revolutionary (the character who becomes Rocketman in One Battle) named Zoyd Wheeler, who gets benefits from the state for being mentally ill—once a year he has to throw himself out of a window to prove his insanity—and who lives in fictional Vineland County, near Mendocino, after retreating from the weed-infused and densely populated Southern California of the 1960s and 70s. Zoyd is only foregrounded for maybe the novel’s first quarter, before we travel with Prairie, his daughter, and meet Darryl-Louise, a former best friend of Prairie’s absent mother Frenesi. We take turns learning the stories of DL, the Sensei she almost killed while screwing, of Frenesi and her snitching, her falling in love with Brock Vond (the literary Lockjaw) which led to the murder of the head of Zoyd and Frenesi’s erstwhile subversive clan, which was a kind of documentary crew. These are stories either told to Prairie or feverishly remembered, and they cloak Vineland in an aura of missed opportunity, of revolutionary failure, of holing up in the middle of nowhere because everyone kind of lost focus (much is made of “the Tube,” its brain-killing wavelengths, the fact that people are literally addicted to watching it).

Vineland also deals in classic Pynchonian fantasy: there are Thanatoids, who are, like, dead people with their own villages, and there’s DL’s trip to Tokyo, which is how she got acquainted with Sensei. Some elements seem primed for someone like Tarantino or maybe pre-Disney Tim Burton to riff on them; for the most part they accumulate into a mass that is too convoluted and diffuse to be translated to the screen. That’s why it’s so bold and economical of PTA to strip away something like eighty percent of the novel’s details and characters, and replace them and repurpose them. Sensei is maybe the most delightful example of this: in One Battle he’s just Benicio Del Toro, a totally chill and reassuring subversive. He runs a dojo in Baktan Cross, the town where Rocketman, now Bob, and his kid Charlene have been in hiding since the French 75’s dissolution (the film jumps forward 15 years at what feels like the half-hour mark, after Perfidia is captured by Lockjaw and, like Frenesi, rats on her team). Sensei never describes his past, but in addition to the dojo he owns a convenience store which fronts a migrant sanctuary—a plotline missing from Vineland—and anchors one of the film’s most inspired sequences, which Rocketman stumbles upon spontaneously: the ferrying of these secret migrants to a new location when the convenience store’s secrecy is compromised.

Apparently this concept of Sensei’s Underground Railroad was Benicio’s idea (I would marry Benicio), but it speaks to the exhilaration—the breathless, deliberate, almost no-nonsense way in which PTA is reconfiguring and interpolating some of the pillars of Vineland in service of an ideas movie that’s designed to make the viewer shudder at the banal state violence that’s pervasive in real life. Of course one couldn’t place the filmed Vineland in the past! Because doing that and still cleaving off so many parts (an essential task) would likely be indiscriminate, impossible without coming off as simple-minded. PTA pushed the book’s matter through a time portal and the matter that didn’t fit in 2025 never made it to the other side. So why—besides the visceral discomfort of confronting our current moment on VistaVision, instead of, say, the front page of the New York Times—could I not fully immerse myself in the 2025 of it all?

An early montage in One Battle shows Perfidia making various calls from telephone booths, alerting targets to the French 75’s imminent attacks, during which she invokes Black power and abortion rights. Maybe it does make sense that Benicio thought of Sensei’s side hustle, because this montage puts the French 75’s objectives all over the map. Perfidia’s monologuing sounds ripped from one of those libtard lawn signs the Economist sideswiped recently. Why couldn’t sabotaging ICE, an urgent and narrow focus, be the French 75’s singular form of resistance?

Junglepussy, another comrade, monologues about Black liberation while the French 75 rob a bank in an unnamed downtown area, which has the abandoned air of Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight locales. Junglepussy’s queer-coded, very charismatic performance—delivered as if for social media—further scrambled my sense of what made these individuals band together. We don’t know where they grew up or what their socioeconomic backgrounds are, beyond an unhelpful glimpse inside—is that Perfidia’s mother’s suburban home? Alana Haim, welcome an expressive presence though she may be, looks just like a Weatherwoman…that is, she invokes the 1960s and 70s, and has the film, at least in the moments where she is gunned down outside a supermarket, betraying a love for a different era, one in which the generalized call to revolution would, admittedly, comprise enough backstory for an ensemble cast.

A bigger problem of vagueness, of chronological incompatibility, attends the jump in time, to 16 years after the bank robbery (which goes off the rails). Perfidia names names—seemingly all the names—then disappears in Mexico, though Lockjaw, furious that his briefly captive paramour slipped through his fingers, labels Perfidia dead. In Vineland, the post-countercultural milieu of Northern California is a reflection of a widely observed phenomenon: the hippie retreat. The movement failed, the imperialists won. The question, asked by kids my age and younger, is what happened to the revolution? Aren’t those radicals still alive? Yes, and a lot of them sold out or they went where Zoyd did. The phenomenon is what makes Vineland melancholy, and it happened in the back half of last century. So when One Battle instead brings us to…I guess it must be some time in the 2030s, we know no precedent for the way Rocketman turned into a paranoiac, for the military-industrial renaissance that paralleled his descent underground. If the film’s initial topicality maps directly onto the real world, that topicality disintegrates once we pick up with Rocketman and Charlene in Baktan Cross: we witness no illustration of the ratcheting up of military or political oppression—which would naturally develop from today’s fears—nor do we hear about the erosion of civil liberties, about a crackdown or a martyr.

The viewer could read the sameness in this near future—the business-as-usual atmosphere, though punctuated by a crazy military commander’s agenda—as PTA trying to lower the temperature. Maybe he doesn’t think society is going to blow up or be picked up in tatters next decade. It’s just hard to differentiate such a perspective from one that hasn’t been thought through, one that’s guilty of the same shapelessness that undermined my belief in the French 75. Which slice of imagined future history are we missing? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to build out a vision for what could happen?

The weird thing is that despite my struggles to believe in the world, I was drawn to the realistic settings, by which I mean, and am again admiring after re-watching Phantom Thread last week: PTA’s commitment to lived-in interiors, chipped and re-painted walls, early afternoons and weird, immediate times of night. Altman is an influence, sure, but PTA makes the looseness look richer, more suffused with potential while still being dirty and mundane (Altman is of course not always looking for potential). Even though I didn’t really believe Perfidia when she tells Rocketman that she’ll always put herself first, before walking out on her family—Perfidia’s acute underdevelopment as a character is another barrier to belief—the framing of that overhead shot of Rocketman and Perfidia in damp orange light, wrapped up with their baby, that’s almost enough to render a sense of family as more than plausible, as a live transposition to the historical record.

The styling of subsequent interactions and exchanges takes the intimacy and realism in this shot as its jumping-off point, even when PTA eases back into higher style. The redwood trees reaching up toward the helicopter, as Charlene stoops in (quickly fleeting) obscurity; the mesmerizing journey through Rocketman’s secret tunnel, which deploys another redwood, this one a carcass, at the tunnel’s exit, before we reach a nondescript playground which summons the innocuousness and ennui of being a child in the Pacific Northwest, the closeness of stunning beauty absolutely irrelevant since the public infrastructure could be in Iowa. These geographic textures and idiosyncrasies rekindled my belief in the story. They seemed to outline Rocketman and co. (maybe with the exception of Del Toro) as abstract concepts, rightfully taking up space but not on their own able to fully communicate high stakes.

That job would belong to the eternal road in the car chase that is the centerpiece of the film. Maybe the characters are symbols so that they can more efficiently be deployed in service of plot mechanics, because the runway toward this climax is lean, restrained, complex enough to require masterful pacing, and then easily disentangled. And this scene—where an assassin tails Charlene, and then lo and behold, Rocketman enters the fray, determined to save her—may well go down as a canonic sequence of images, a totem of dread, of kinetic—no, truly inescapable energy, whose fine-grained position, close to an asphalt surface, gets into the depths of feeling which sometimes it seems whole films should be built around. Their dialogue, their beginnings and ends, bent so that the viewer is prepared to relish an unbroken idea (very likely wordless) dependent on movement (say, three engines), not beholden to fate but still committed to sequencing.

These hills, how have we never seen hills like this, journeyed over them the way we do here? But it isn’t just novelty, it’s the rolling (indeed hallucinogenic) certainty that the hills are real, and death is on the horizon, and somebody is going to live.

In all likelihood, when I find PTA, I’ll first ask where the hell in inland California (or perhaps Southwest Texas?) these hills are hidden. I’d like to ride them myself!

This Substack was going to be called “Gone Tomorrow,” after a phrase which described my grandmother (my mother’s mother), though the circumstances which originated the phrase are unclear, as is the phrase’s author. “Mildred Morrow, full of sorrow, here today and gone tomorrow.” What a maiden name, and what a melancholy declaration of transience! I wanted to relate the Substack to my film work, and in Sparks, the feature film I’ve just written and directed, I gave the name “Gone Tomorrow” to an electronics store the main characters visit. Even though the store has been around a long time, and thus predates the digital retail revolution which endangers its survival, in this heightened reality—this version of northwest Nevada where nostalgic skepticism, irony and impossible adventures are projected onto the desert landscape—Gone Tomorrow’s proprietors might have always taken pride in the fact that they won’t be around forever.

I thought “Gone Tomorrow” was a good Substack name because it’s an entry-point to the overstuffed world of cultural production, which is actually swimming with product by definition—how could a listener/viewer/visitor have possibly consumed everything that’s available to them, at any point in history?—but of course our current era exaggerates this reality because user-generated content (UGC, as the corporations call it) makes flooding the marketplace a more exponential phenomenon, because much of the marketplace is now designed to cycle through images almost as fast as possible.

But the lesson of this first post is that even to dwell on the right name for a Substack means indulging the fantasy that more than 10% of anything I write here will be read in its entirety. On the other hand, since my instinct is to think hard and execute painstakingly, I’m going to operate as if every piece is read all the way through. That desire, however, is beside the point. “Gone Tomorrow” is already in use by some guy named Jack Andrew (frustratingly, he’s still calling it Jack’s Substack), and then I thought that I’ve already got too many proper nouns in circulation: “game the finch” is my production moniker, Sparks is the feature, “Sankyo Stream” is that web series I made for five years, Sankyo is the series’ protagonist, but Fergus Campbell is my real name, etc. etc. That’s how I wound up with fergstack/Ferg’s Stack. In your busy inbox, you won’t have to remember who the words are from.

Few projects will end up as long-form as Sparks—with luck, production on the second feature might span three or four years—so it’s really a breath of fresh air to share isolated thoughts about the films I watch and the parts of the creative process that I typically only place in the sprawling containers set aside for the Big Movies I’m planning. That’s the main reason I’ve set out to establish this newsletter: to take stock of and then write down the onslaught of perceptions, confusions, obsessions with images which define the work that I create.

The second reason that now is a good time to commit to Substack is that I want to harness the frequency of writing that has defined my postgrad life, and which immediately followed completion of the Sparks script. As a part-time—well, for several monthslong periods, a full-time script reader, I’ve written reports on almost two hundred feature and pilot scripts, as well as novels and nonfiction books. I have written essays for dozens of grant applications, squeezed loglines within the confines of absurd CHARACTERS NO SPACES limitations, mastered the art of the email, thus sent hundreds and hundreds of emails expressing different qualities of Sparks, customized it for various politics without ever mislabeling the film’s essential aims. I’ve also written two more feature-length scripts, one which no one will ever see because it’s garbage, the other being the dream sophomore project. In short: eighteen months ago I would have been scared at the prospect of committing to writing and publishing every week. Not anymore.

The last answer to “why now?” is that my producer/best friend Lola Lafia and I have just completed postproduction on Sparks. This period has been a whirlwind: from January, when I started the edit, through the summer, when we hired a new editor, Lygia Brubeck (whose credits include Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun), who re-tooled the cut and shaved ten minutes off the runtime, through test screenings and sound mixes and endless asset management (it’s unbelievable how much small-scale VFX is present in the film, from masking unwanted background elements to creating digital fruit debris on the lens to augmenting the splash caused by a body double hitting water). Of course our inimitable re-recording mixer Matt Rigby will still tinker with the project, but for all intents and purposes, we can now move on from the labor of making the thing.

The next steps on the Sparks journey are numerous and extensive. We need people to watch the film, which means festival attachment, distribution, and the hardest work of all—which we’ve already been doing since the first day of development—which is spreading the word. But the team does have a respite, which I’m seizing to set the precedent of sharing a combination of thoughts on films, the inspiration they provide, perspectives on cultural phenomena as they relate to film (or film-ish formats, like music videos, commercials, even visual art), how these thoughts fit into the scripts and ideas I’m ingesting and formulating, and how these thoughts influence my perspectives on the education that making Sparks brought about for me.

If you’re here, I hope this newsletter leads you to new films and new ideas and new images. The benefit of our overstuffed world of cultural production is digital availability: you’ll likely be able to watch anything I reference as soon as I tell (or remind) you that it exists.

My first post, materializing imminently, is about my idol, Paul Thomas Anderson, and his new film One Battle After Another.

What else to say except…until next Thursday!

-Fergus