Roundtable regarding the cinema on occasion of the screening ‘every day, had 52 films in his head’ taking place August 7 2026 at United Unlimited, presented by Quantity Cinema
And in the beginning we filmed what was in front of us: models of planetary movement, a horse, some trains and people leaving, and you were filmed leaving your workplace, some illegal adventures, some meals, some diagonals, and the model was in fact the thing, and it was actuality. And then there’s always a crisis in the cinema but we have to be precise: since sound, since television, since internet, since AI, since murder, since money, since the world, et cetera. But it’s a fact that we continue to make movies especially when no one asks us to. In Douglas Dixon-Barker’s work there is a rich relation between structural film, the diary, a diary of our structures (movies, television, video games, music, internet) and a structure of our diaries (blank spaces, empty pages of happiness), things of that nature, asks us how do we preserve our memories of that which is errant, where to place them (?) — on screen, online, in other peoples films (such as Summer (2014) in Kurt Walker’s s01e03), which is to say, how do we house our relation to these memories, and how can we house them in simple frames and cuts and blacks and whites and greys and blues — and I think Dylan Tachick found the most precise emotional relation we have seen to e-mails in cinema, how we carry the e-mail in our mind, in the club, elsewhere, and not just on devices, the difficulty of even opening some e-mails, trying to read and look away at the same time, how to look and not look, a break-up film that breaks up the space between inner and outer, a total war between dancing and reading, and there’s the suspension between digital and analogue in Isaac Goes’ films, and even a suspension between his own diaries and his visual log of moviewatching (or bluntly: the history of cinema as one’s everyday glances), the same light, or perhaps we can say there is a syncing between these twos, for I think Isaac’s movies explore sync sound and sync image, the sync between how we remember in the present and how we saturate in post, and there’s the Google of the first work we see of Kelley Dong’s, but text and tech is in some sense immediately abandoned thereafter, because with the next works there’s a more Duchampian relation to colour and a quickness of idea becoming form, what is felt and thought in an instant, and the exact size of instantaneity as such, a sort of throwing away of that plinth offered by the search engine and off to a search in everyday life and memory in all its indivisible compactness, in human and animal life, superimpositions that cannot be distinguished part by part, like snowfall on a pile already there, then reshaped by winterboots, where brick, tree, skin, sky, become at once one and none, a new material to live within, and with Alexandre Galmard, there’s a question of the camera, as surface, whether its iPhone or any-camera-whatever, the possibility of a camera in our daily life especially when none appears, how we see and produce our shots in our mind subtracted from distribution (he redistributes his own shots across his oeuvre), the miracle that there are cameras at all, the miracle there is production at all, and so there’s investigations of transits from appearances and reflections to things and back, the indiscernibility between seeing and thinking the tiniest details; in a way he’s been making novellas without words and instead with jutter, cuts, fades, as natural as 24 frames, ‘like L M N O P’. So what are we responding to, if anything, or are we responding to ourselves? What draws me to these pictures, to be willfully imprecise, is that they feel like life, in the historical present, which is to say there’s still a way to look at our private lives and their representation that hasn’t been taken over by Meta or ByteDance on the one hand, or a way of seeing that have already been prescribed by habits invented by the national cinemas of the past, or Netflix, or Paramount or whoever wants to buy Letterboxd. We already have the tools to do so, very simple ones, we just need new ideas and feelings and learn to play again. And we learn to play at home. I began by talking about Doug’s films in relation to housing our memories, and then there’s the concrete question of housing our lives and our person. Until the question of housing is solved in the deepest sense, we’ll always watch our home movies, we’ll always look forward to making our vacation movies; perhaps one day the Western, the gangster picture, the romcom, the horror picture, the war picture, the Redditor picture, the Criterion Closet picture, the festival picture, the race film, et cetera will disappear in a society that doesn’t need them, but the home movie and the vacation movie are the two genres that still house the future of cinema, and all the other genres are but small spinoffs of this Two, spinoffs that create jobs (‘unemployed, that’s work too’); and when certain things in our societies are resolved perhaps the emotion I feel towards the ‘home movie’ and the ‘vacation movie’ will disappear. But until then we must vacation somewhere, we must feel at home somewhere, and sometimes for that there’s only the cinema where the future lasts forever.
- I.M.
What was the origin of your relation to the cinema? When or how did you know you were going to be a picturemaker, was there an event, a film, an idea, something that happened where you knew you wanted to be part of this?
Douglas Dixon-Barker: It started with Episode 1. I’d been to the movies earlier, and watched videos at home, but that was the first time there was an anticipation for cinema. It was also when the production was exposed, magazine articles with behind the scenes photos of blue screens and discussions of Lucas returning after all this time. That was when movies became a thing you make.
Later, through movie watching, I keep digging deeper and find avant-garde films where I learn you can make films that pick out just the bits you find interesting, outside of studio systems. And later again I find friends online, like the people here in this discussion and screening, and learn that you can just make movies. So I started doing it.
Kelley Dong: My early movie experiences were on very small screens: Howl’s Moving Castle in a hotel room, a library copy of A Clockwork Orange on a USB-connected DVD player, The 400 Blows and Breathless on Hulu back when Criterion offered a free weekly selection of classic cinema, As I was Moving Ahead… on DailyMotion, Mothlight and Happy Together on YouTube, countless movies uploaded onto my iPod Nano, and screencaps of movies I’ve still yet to see on Tumblr. My earliest filmmaking experiences were short sketches scripted and staged with my sisters and filmed on a camcorder, and stop-motion music videos for Christian rock music made with MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker - a natural outgrowth of my childhood hobby of making comic books. As I do now, I loved working frame by frame. I was awakened to cinema as an art form once I realized it directly involved me: I watched The 400 Blows on my laptop at 15, then sat with my parents at the dinner table in a daze, feeling like I had this beautiful secret that was just mine, a self-portrait handed to me by someone else. I bought the Essential Art House DVD and the screenplay right away. Like Doug, my online friends taught me that there is nothing in your everyday life not worth enshrining in a movie. I knew I wanted to be a part of cinema in some way but I didn’t know exactly how and kept prodding at it from different angles, then at some point I simply was.
Isaac Goes: I can’t really remember a time in my life when I wasn’t making art. All my earliest memories are of drawing and Star Wars. I don’t really think there was a specific point where something clicked and I decided I wanted to make pictures rather than draw or make music. As far as my memory serves, I’ve wanted to make movies my whole life.
I made my first films at 9 or 10 on iMovie. I remember learning how to use it at school and being completely awestruck that I could actually make cinema even though I was a child. I feel very fortunate to have been born in a time and place where that was possible.
Around that time, I was exposed to these DVDs from this group called Directors Label, comprised of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Chris Cunningham. It was all of their music video work and short films. It was the first time I became aware of the possibility of non-narrative filmmaking. As a child, you’re still aware that the movies you see in theaters require money and teams of people, but these experiments seemed like something I could do. A lot of the films relied on clever camera and editing tricks that they’d walk you through in the special features. I loved this magic trick-like quality and set out to try similar things myself on iMovie.
Douglas Dixon-Barker: Those 3 DVDs were big for me too, the way they pulled things together (cinema, music, skating) really got me thinking about cinema in a way that I would continue to find inspiring in later Godard’s montage of images, text and music.
Dylan Tachick: I’ve always had wild curiosities and fascinations with horror, which were influenced by my family’s infatuations with the genre. Sneaking out of bed to join my older sister watching Nightmare on Elm Street, only to hysterically scream and cry seeing Johnny Depp get mutilated while pinned against the ceiling of his own bedroom. Going to my friend’s house and walking in on his older brother and his friends watching the climax of Blair Witch Project, thinking it was real. My family sitting me down to watch It at age 7. They also loved Michael Myers, and each of my aunts had their very own Michael Myers mask to ensure I went home crying. Those memories and fascinations have never left me, and in turn I have always found excitement in scaring others. I’ve always thought I’d make a decent horror film.
Growing up skateboarding trained me to see or approach the world in a different way, particularly when looking for perfect spots that were hiding in plain sight or required hopping fences and walking through hills. Skate videos are incredibly formative for my interest in cinema, especially experimental film. I filmed my friends skate but could never get the video made. Skating certainly inspired me to pick up the camera before anything else ever did and was also most likely the root of my understanding of montage.
Alexandre Galmard: As far as I can remember I always wanted to be a moviemaker. Every time I heard a new bedtime story, I wanted to become what the protagonists were. I quickly realized that what I truly wanted was to make up and tell the stories themselves. But I grew up a horrendously slow reader, so I thought I’ll never be a writer, because the idea of inflicting this on another person felt unbearable.
Shortly after, one of my earliest cinematographic obsessions I can remember was Jackie Chan movies. I watched all his films, and I loved how there was just no shortage of them. Watching the behind-the-scenes from the DVDs we’d rent from the local video store my father would take us to probably inspired me even more than the films themselves, because I’d find out there was no illusion. The making of the action scenes seemed even more fantastical, redoing the same impossible stunt several times over, than the single visible take that had made the cut.
I got my first camera when I was nine, an analog Handycam, with which I discovered framing, and this became the last toy I would ever need, until video games entered our home—notably with my first one: Star Wars Episode I: Racer, from my all-time favorite movie as a kid, whose CD soundtrack by John Williams I knew by heart. But it was especially in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask that the open world allowed my sister and me to completely rewrite the story, which included entire characters we would dub over.
Obtaining the camera allowed me to say, this is what I can do, and it changed how I approached everything else, but having access to a computer was the actualization of this dream. Inspired by Man With A Movie Camera, I remember editing my first ‘‘experimental’’ movie on my mother’s first laptop from rushes shot from my bedroom. Spending these first hours on iMovie, I knew this was it several times over, because there I was finally making it. In the end, there was no single event, only a series of confirmations.
Information regarding the program contains the years 2013-2026. How has cinema changed in this period of time? Has your tools changed, has your process changed, or has it remained the same?
KD: It’s become more imperative to protect “movie magic,” or cinema’s sleight of hand. It is more prevalent and incentivized now than in 2013 to broadcast, share, and circulate images of and words about art (and I don’t see this as criticism) for cultural and social capital, every incremental development from the idea to the trailer drop and the premiere night and so on. There is a severe glut of context and background and proof of concept as art. As a filmmaker I’ve been very deliberate about pushing against this conflation of artistic merit and authenticity, so nothing about my process has changed in that regard. I imagine textures and movements, draw shapes and write poems, and replicate them on my editing timeline frame by frame. And I don’t explain myself. I am really intent on protecting genuine surprise and cinema’s ability to both de- and re-mystify.
IG: The only thing that’s really remained constant in my process throughout the years is obsessiveness. Worlds took me years of editing every single day, my earlier films were similar but on a smaller scale. It’s uncomfortable at times, but I’ve come to terms with it. It’s just how I make art. I’m making a more tightly structured picture with narrative elements now. The idea is to do it in a way that builds outwards from my older processes. No ready-made production model exists for what I want to do, so I find myself with no other choice but to invent new ways forward. It’s exciting but extremely painful in practice. There’s lots of stumbling around in the dark and dealing with failure. But even failure can be rewarding once you gain some distance from it. It can be useful to discover a new way to fail that’s entirely your own. It’s the fact that cinema hasn’t changed enough during the period of time you mentioned that keeps me going.
DDB: When I started making films it was exciting to, and felt essential to, post everything, share it all as quickly as possible. Doing that on Tumblr is how I met so many people and why I’m able to have my works screened. But that doesn’t feel like a radical move any more, I need to be more intentional. I don’t think this means losing the energy we had then, but putting it to better use and not just feeding our art into an existing platform or algorithm. The tools of production and distribution are always changing, but I try to keep it additive, more options available, more control, and to be able to share those skills/materials as well as the finished pictures.
DT: In 2013 I was shooting everything on my iPhone. I’d get footage for short films throughout the day while skating all over San Francisco. I shifted to super8mm several years ago and have fallen in love with that. I see a lot of similarities between the accessibility of iPhones and super8 cameras. But given a roll of film is finite, I shoot each one single-frame, a bit more conservatively…it’s getting so expensive. While there is a similar guerrilla style that still carries over from how I used to make iPhone movies, I am much more particular about where I shoot with film. I have this way of thinking I can fit two rolls of footage on one roll of film if I shoot everything single frame, and this allows me to explore a space or idea through a portioned amount of frames.
AG: Making movies is always at the same time recollecting all the conditions required for moviemaking, and this starts with building a studio for yourself, and progressively retrieving the capacity to read, produce, modify, export, etc. I don’t think cinema itself changes apart from the movies that you want to make. If you only see it as the sum of all existing movies, then you remain within historicism. Rather, one can attest to its history as a repeated resistance to subsumption. Cinema was always risky, or at risk, because all its conditions are outside of itself. In this sense, the idea of cinema is immutable, or it is change itself. More precisely, it is its resistance to division which adapts and evolves against its supposed dissolution, as Isiah mentions, by television, by the internet, by AI, etc., but also by philosophy or even other arts.
Overall, from 2013, I have better computing power, better cameras, better everything. But there are only so many colors and so much resolution our eyes can even perceive. Nothing of my process and curiosity has changed. I am still looking at the same pictures to make the same pictures I always wanted to make. And I still prefer pulling my phone out in the streets rather than setting up a tripod. The world changes, we all change, but getting closer and closer to making the films you want to make only tells you that there is always a higher proximity to the dreams you are realizing. It takes time to master time, but inside of this process of mastery, time withers away.
Because of our situation today I have to ask an almost boring question, but what invented lineage do you see yourself in, or not? Who among the dead do you still think about, think about most often? Are there some among the living? Are there young people doing cinema today that you like, are there old people doing cinema you care about?
KD: We are both the young and the old people doing cinema today. The filmmakers I think of often are more like a directory of production models, mixtures of public and private funding, and different proportions of personal and political: Godard, Ozu, Brakhage, Bergman, Sembène, Jarman… That is different from the constellation of image-making I like to reside in: Agnes Martin, Rene Magritte, Milton Avery, Yi Sang, Paul Klee, Stan Brakhage, cave paintings, petroglyphs, Samuel Delany, Takashi Ito, Shuji Terayama, Eadweard Muybridge, CLAMP, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Nam June Paik… Then there is the lineage of artists like Nellie Mae Rowe, Henri Rousseau, Wallace Stevens, Toni Morrison, Lou Sullivan, etc. I remember them specifically when the work-life-art balance gets hard. I try my best to place myself there.
IG: It’s related to my answer to the first question. Really, I still feel like a child trying to pull off visual tricks. I’ve always been attached to the fact that projected and moving images began as toys and parlor tricks. I read an evolution of this sensibility in the history of our form. Méliès, Gance, Kurosawa, Welles, Tati, Godard, Lucas, Takashi Ito, Rose Lowder. It’s a broad lineage, but I see a throughline. Really, what I want to do is play with space, time, and motion in novel ways and I’m drawn towards filmmakers that do the same.
There’s also a practical lineage of filmmaking to consider. You can’t run from the fact that eventually, you actually have to produce the image. So you always need to take influence from filmmakers working within confines that you can relate to (such as you all) and to think in images that are concretely realizable. I think Kelley conceptualizes this nicely as a directory of production models. For me, making cinema is a process of reconciling these two lineages.
DDB: It’s Masao Adachi that I think about the most. Not the films, but the time away - and the return. Being a filmmaker as one part of living a life, maybe the defining part, but not always the most important. That’s not a lineage I see myself in, but it has been guiding my thoughts around being an artist in recent years.
DT: I don’t think I’ve really ever considered this but I have always wanted to follow the footsteps of filmmakers like John Carpenter, Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper. I’ve long admired their versatility as filmmakers, proclaimed “Masters of Horror” yet capable of making whatever they want. I had just recently watched Craven’s Music of the Heart, a surprisingly charming movie in ways, I think in part because his style is just as consistent watching Ghostface violently murder teenagers as it is watching Meryl Streep teach a classroom of children how to play the violin. The only dead filmmakers I actively think about are Abbas Kiarostami and Jerry Lewis. Of course, Pasolini, Gance, Visconti all come to mind, but there is always something new to learn from Kiarostami and Lewis whenever I revisit their work. I really hate to say that I’ve lost a lot of the excitement I once had for our contemporary filmmakers. The only living directors (old) that still excite me would be Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Spielberg, Shinya Tsukamoto and Jia Zhangke? At risk of sounding like a dick, the only young filmmakers that inspire and motivate me are my friends. Isaac and I met in film school, I wouldn’t want to speak for him, but he has always been my inspiration and my competition and I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am today without him. But so many friends have been formative for me - Kurt Walker, Michelle Yoon, Andrew Infante, Miguel Mantecon, you (Isiah), Doug.. Kelley.. Alex.. it would be hard not to mention these (and our) names.
AG: Early on as I mentioned, I was drawn to action films, which later led me down a path of watching every war movie under the sun. I fell for the propaganda of realism. I wanted to watch something real, and ended up in the most fabricated ideological trap of the medium. As I grew, I discovered other sensitivities, and experimental cinema, especially Soviet and American avant-garde, spoke to me in the most profound way. Eventually, it was the films of Stan Brakhage that prepared me best, because they taught me movies didn’t have to cost millions to change your life.
It was then, at the ripe age of 18 and in dire need of camaraderie, that a mutual friend introduced me to Isiah, and I found the only lineage I felt was the strongest and most potent for pursuing the future of our common practice. Today, I am still studying and discovering new ways in which our current present resonates in the works and theories of both Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard. The infinity of their contributions remains unscathed. Inversely, many living filmmakers whom I admire and whose next move I await are featured in this very program.
And what of your moviegoing habits? Do you frequent the cinema? Do you watch at home? What device? Or no cinema?
KD: These days I rarely go to the cinema (except for the $5 screenings at the Carlton). It has taken me a long time to accept that no movie is too rare or important for me to reject the flow of life. But I do love the sticky floors of the cinema, and my one consistent habit is that when I travel I ask locals for their favourite cinema. I try to go if I can, but I mostly just like the stories.
DDB: I live between the UK and Spain, so every two weeks or so I know I will at least have 2hrs on a flight blocked out where I know I can watch a movie on an iPad. I’ve been enjoying that recently; the planning ahead, thinking about how the runtime will fit in, trying to guess if the content is something I should be watching with people looking over my shoulder. I am watching a lot outside of that too, I love going to the multiplex cinema. I like to know what has already been made.
DT: When Isaac and I were in school, we would watch up to 3-4 movies a day, every day—such a funny and great period in my life. When I moved to NYC in 2017, I believe that coincided with Moviepass’ heyday, I was going to the cinema nearly every day. I have my AMC A-list membership, and find myself watching whatever is playing there as opposed to rep cinema. I’m usually just watching movies with either Isaac or my friends Emily Brown / James Emrick these days, but not nearly as frequently as I used to, despite thinking of movies on a daily basis. I don’t watch movies alone much anymore.
IG:I’ll watch an odd movie here or there with friends, but these days I watch most movies by myself at home. When I was younger, it was more about compulsively taking in as much as I could, going through the canon and all that. Dylan, Miguel, and our friend Cameron had a great time with that. We didn’t know about online film communities or anything and thought that we were the only young people in the world who knew about cinema.
Lately, my viewing is much more intentional. There are questions I need answered: Can I figure out how to reverse engineer a given lighting setup? How noticeable is it that Welles is filming a shot and its reverse in different seasons? Could I get away with the same? How should I live my life? How did Godard navigate making such and such a picture with such and such a budget? (The nice thing about this question is that a character might straight up tell you at some point.) But I dislike this on the whole. I hope to soon sort my life out a little better to see more movies in theaters and with friends. I miss it.
AG: I probably go to the theaters once a month. In the center of Paris, you can watch incredible classics. The last one I attended was Casino, which Isiah and I repeatedly watched back in our Montreal years, and I was fortunate to catch it on the big screen for the first time. My best friend has a projector and a good sound system, so we often get together in small groups to watch stuff at his place. Otherwise, when we can find them, I will watch something with my lover, on a computer or a tablet, usually in bed. I still very much cherish my bedtime stories.
The size of the screen is not an immediate concern. Sure, dynamic range is real, and you should know the extent to which loss occurs. Listening to music without headphones is losing 90% of the low end, and there is an obvious distinction between earbuds and clubs, for example, so the functions between spaces similarly vary in nature. But this, again, follows the finite technical aspect of things: true cinema is lossless and probably prevails no matter the size or shape.
What does it mean to be a filmmaker or a picturemaker to you today? Is it the same as it was at your origin?
KD: To remember through cinema. There is that phrase by Emily Dickinson, are not all facts dreams when we put them behind us? Behind us is the screen. Ten years ago I thought about the same but with the added touches of collective responsibility and political commitment, but I am more convinced now I have to start with my own faulty memories and stay loyal to the inconsistent pace at which they actualize or unravel.
DT: I don’t entirely have an answer to that, even on my own personal terms. Cinema has taught me a lot about myself and my approach to the world. If I can ever give that back to someone, then I think that’s what it is for me.
IG: I find making films to be extremely difficult. The form is so thorny, the production process so intricate and riddled with intangible problems, that you have no other choice than to stay honest. It’s a constant struggle that filters out the inessential ideas: you’ll know what’s really important to shoot when you only have an hour left with the actors and $200 in the bank.
In the end, you realize how deeply felt something has to be for it to even make it onto the screen, and because of that, you get to catch little glimpses of inner truths that would be impossible to access otherwise. I don’t think my thinking has changed that much on what it means to be a filmmaker, but the truths I reveal to myself in the process of making films have, and I can only hope that my collaborators and friends get as much out of it as I do in this respect.
DDB: For me, it’s about the frame. What you choose to put in it or what you don’t. That idea has sustained for me, but my approach has shifted. At first I was trying to put as much in as I could, things that I thought previously hadn’t been included, but recently I try to be more precise.
AG: I’m not sure what it means other than what individuals or collectives self-proclaim through their own practice. It is one thing to say or define what you think you’re doing; it is another to be able to concretely produce these thoughts. As I mentioned, my dream is intact, and I probably have a lifetime of scripts to develop and movies to plan for. This doesn’t define me as a filmmaker, though. Filmmakers only are, in regards to the amount of openness they allow their worldview to be affected by great conditions—a love encounter, a new corrupt government, and so on—inasmuch as their ability to carry their projects through these same obstructions. You’re never a moviemaker outside of making movies; you always have to reclaim the title by pulling up a new window, whether it is a camera angle or editing software. It is not up for debate.
The question of making work of course is difficult, I don’t mean in the actual making, I mean in its possibility, in the reality of the world, and so there are times we can make pictures, and times we must pause and retreat, and a true pause can be as good as an actual film, so my question is something else, which is, how do you continue? Most of us live in different countries, and we sometimes communicate, but cinema is in front of us, it’s shooting in the sun with other people, so how do you continue today? Does community exist? For example I feel closer to Doug than I do to many filmmakers in the city I live in and I’ve only been face to face with Doug twice. So maybe it’s a question of cinema again; I’ve only seen his face a number of times but I’ve seen his films quite a bit more. So how do you continue, or why do you continue?
KD: Community does exist in this age of virtual connection. But it lives in a non-linear temporality. I’m inspired by the thought of present-day Isaac but also re-encountering past Isaac’s Tumblr posts, and receiving texts from Isaac about future Isaac’s next film. Sometimes that can be lonely because of the innate fragmentation of long-distance, other times the vast spread across nations is very empowering. To be straightforward about myself, ever since I started socially and medically transitioning I’ve been more assured of my right to the avant-garde as an untrustworthy subject whose purview is already framed as an unreasonable complaint. To buttress this one faces the temptation to lean either into realism, social theory, anthropology, autobiography or confession. But my selfish desire to make less sense to anyone else, from the meaning of the textures, the secrets in the cuts, and the form itself, is what impels me to continue to make myself, in this private way, happy.
DT: I continue to work on movies because it’s one of the few things that I really love and care about aside from friends and family. I’ve been going through my own personal hiatus over the last few years, but currently I have a few things active in the pipeline. When I was younger I dreamed of being a career filmmaker but I’ve stopped thinking that is any possibility - if it were to ever happen somehow, it will be entirely on my own terms. I’m very thankful to be walking distance from my closest collaborators and colleagues and will always continue to work and help them with any of their projects.
AG: The work of the subject persists, and cinema, like the sun Isiah mentions which we cannot look directly in the eyes, is always unwavering and slipping through the cracks, like the light through the camera obscura. Ontologies of Presence would have us believe operations at the frontier or limit of any predisposed state of a medium are more complex than the singular steady increment. But there is greater value in the willful persistence, in the form of ever-renewed reasons to continue—what Badiou calls the ‘‘one-more of a step.’’ Consistent intervention, the chance to succeed, is always greater than composition, the experience of totality.
I end a poem I wrote some years ago this way: ‘‘Lonesome and bemused / I’m feeling unthroned / until another tiny brick / makes it all resplendent again / knowing it’ll have bent another.’’ Focus your attention on the tiny brick, rather than the resplendent whole, whether it is the oeuvre accomplished or the oeuvre ahead, for it is this tiny brick, and this tiny brick alone, which carries forth.
DDB: It’s always been communal in some way. I felt that was lacking a bit for me recently as I fell out of touch a bit with some people, but at the start of last year there were the Kinet/Quantity screenings in Madrid, where a lot of us were able to attend, and then Isiah’s retro at the ICA this year. Being back around these films and people really reinforced how much we have done together and in parallel and has got me excited to share work again.
IG: The sole reason I’m able to continue is my friends’ and collaborators’ willingness to contribute their time to seeing our projects through. Not many people are so lucky as to have such a large network of people willing to do what needs to be done to make a film on weekends and after work. I think it hinges on the fact that we all know we would do the same for each other. Without that trust, I don’t think any of us would have the strength to keep showing up.
Something I’ve spoken with a lot of you about in the past is that, because many of us initially met online, our friendships were born out of a mutual appreciation for each other’s work, which is the reverse of how things usually happen. Usually you meet someone in your day-to-day life, you become friends, and naturally end up supporting their art, as any good friend would. But in our case, the work came first and friendship followed. It feels very truthful to me. For instance, I know that Alex truly does like my films rather than just being a supportive friend. It goes back to how you feel closer to Doug than to filmmakers geographically closer to you. There’s not much contingency involved. For instance, I’m working very closely with Michelle Yoon on this new picture, whom I also met online around the same time as you all (over 10 years ago!!).
That being said, there are also people like Dylan, James Emrick, Marc Matchak, and Miguel Mantecon, with whom I have a different history. We may have met by chance, but it was so early on in our development that we all grew together into the artists we are now. None of us would have become the artists we are today without each other, so it’s only natural that we continue to come together in order to further our mutual development.
On the question of continuing to make work, it never occurred to me not to. I had a rough year and, for the first time in my life, briefly began to think about finding a “career,” only to find that I was at a total loss. I immediately realized I had never once previously given it any thought.
This is a longer technical question, perhaps to add to the directory of production models…I like to use the example of exporting my cuts to cut together other cuts for new rhythms, or that I don’t use proxies because I need to see what the picture actually looks like at all times, the colour correction is before the edit, I use the same C200 + iMac for almost 8 or 9 years now, I will keep using Final Cut until something external stops me, and I understand some of you have built computers to cut or make virtual cameras. Are there specific tools or moves you find yourself fond of? And to not divide questions since I imagine they are linked, though not, what of workflows? For example lately I’ve been thinking I’m trying to shoot first, then edit a little, and then scrapbook, and then write some voice over, and then edit that in, and then shoot some dialogue, and then edit again…What does your workflow look like to you today? Or even tomorrow? And what does crew size look like, yesterday, today, tomorrow, what is a crew, or even what is a cast to you?
KD: My main tool is the iPhone 12. My workday is structured around my 9 to 5. I work in an office. Within these constraints I make the movie. Throughout my workday I draw, read, and write. I make a list of textures that I need to shoot (trees, skin, snow, grass, brick) and folders of what I already have. I also write a poem. My previous films took 1-2 days to edit. But shooting takes months. Pears took a year. Letter to Sirius was edited over the course of a month. Storyboards were done on the glass door of the shower, the planner I use at work, my diary, and the iPhone notes app. Shooting includes taking photographs. Letter to Sirius was filmed from December 2025 to April 2026 across Toronto, Halifax, London, Zurich, two parks near my home, my bedroom, my porch, and my backyard. I spent less than an hour with the actors.
Lately I’ve been very inspired by the work of Black quiltmakers like Faith Ringgold and Rosie Lee Tompkins, and other artists from Roland Freeman’s collection. Now I approach editing as quiltmaking. Each frame contains and ruptures narrative, the way the quilt resembles a film strip and can be read in non-narrative and narrative fashion across an omnidirectional timeline. I treat color correction and editing as the same. First I separate frames into batches. Less so in Letter to Sirius, so now it seems too slow to me. I reorder the frames, duplicate some and remove others, replace frames with photographs, and recolor frames to create color-based rhythm. These sequences are then superimposed atop one another to create single compositions - a forest made up of trees from 3 different countries, for instance. Then I recolor each layer to create a new texture through the friction between different grains. These textures determine what comes next. I determine the cast based on the drawings. The crew is myself.
DDB: As I mentioned earlier, I see it as an additive process. I still think of the Sony VX1000 as my camera, but I’m using older and newer ones alongside this. Landscape #256 was shot with an AX53 because it’s something I can carry anywhere and after a long time of not shooting, I needed to get back into the habit of making images. That tool was what was needed at the time.
If it was viable I would still be using FCP7, because editing there is where I felt most comfortable. The rendering time as part of the process - similar to what Isiah says on cuts of cuts - still runs through my workflow, with a lot of time preparing the material and the actual edit coming together quite quickly. Placing clips on a timeline in structures I imagined, not seeing the film until I export.
IG: I’ve always loved learning different programs. I find that it opens you up to new ways of thinking in images that would be impossible to discover otherwise. These days, Blender is my favorite. I went into it to learn how to make typical CGI environments and things like that but quickly realized how much potential there was for making use of the program’s infinite digital space to stitch together images in interesting ways. I’m not an expert, so every idea I have requires going through the process of learning how to realize it within it in the program, which always ends up leading me down unexpected paths. At some point, I inevitably branch off from what I was initially trying to do, begin using the program’s tools in unintended ways, and arrive at a result I could never have envisioned beforehand.
I also do a lot of storyboarding and previs. Before rallying a group of people together, it’s best to come as prepared as possible, and most of my ideas are fairly complicated. I’ll do a lot of drawings and simple animations edited together in Premiere and iPhone versions of scenes using myself and my girlfriend, Rebecca Concannon, as stand-ins for the characters. Sometimes I overprepare a little. I use Figma to make these huge shot lists with tons of notes but never have the time to thoroughly reference them when the time comes to shoot. It reminds me of those open-note tests where you would spend hours filling a notecard with as much really small text as humanly possible, only to realize on the day of the test that you don’t need it anymore because you remember it all.
In terms of cast and crew, it varies across projects in terms of both size and responsibility. Worlds was a lot of filming with friends in relatively lax environments, the line between cast and crew being nonexistent. It’s all much more defined for our current picture. I think the largest crew has probably been seven or eight, but sometimes it’ll just be Dylan and I. Learning how to manage other people’s time more efficiently is my main focus moving forward.
DT: My process / workflow has generally been different for each film I have made. Up until last weekend, I haven’t ever required a crew in any traditional sense to make anything. I can’t speak as much to my processes of shooting on iPhone anymore because I haven’t done it in so long. Regarding “in:sent”: The movie was conceived and finished in I think just under two weeks. I had been in the process of making another iPhone film for about five or six months. A year before this (2016?) I had a confusing and emotional experience with a man who decided to end our relationship via email, an email that was delivered to my spam box and which I never saw until a year later when he finally reached out to me after ignoring any attempts I had previously made at contact. I was left in the dark for what felt like an eternity without ever seeing the email that reduced his reasons to a series of bullet points. I thought the whole thing was so ridiculous I just began to film the screen. Gradations I-II came to me by playing with iPhone footage in Premiere, trying to achieve some motion blur effects, which was also when I jumped to shooting film. During the height of COVID, I spent time outside in cemeteries as they were quaint and isolated. I don’t think anyone at the time wanted any more obvious reminders of death. I have now been shooting film primarily in the woods for the last 2-3 years.
I guess elaborating on what I had mentioned earlier - what I value most about super8 is the accessibility (aside from development costs) and how playful its attributes and functions are. As years have gone on, I have developed a much more physical approach to filming, experimenting with being looser with framing and just the image-making process in general. My camera is so easily manipulated and I am trying to find the threshold of how aggressive I can get with it, without damaging the camera itself, if I haven’t done so already. These rolls I currently have out for development will either be my best or worst work to date, keeping my fingers crossed..
AG: Similarly, I work in steady intervals between shooting and editing, which fuel each other inside a feedback loop with many more interesting tricks than with linear construction. Only now am I writing dialogues, with a few scripts already in the oven, so there is still, personally, much to conquer in terms of working with a crew or a cast, especially with this more circuitous approach of adding one ingredient after another to build more and more complex meals.
Building a studio also means developing your own pipeline and workflow, as much as it is about inventing a cognitive map, for yourself and others, depending on what and who you’re working with. I have lost all my masters to hardware crashes over the years. If I hadn’t archived everything on YouTube, only my friends could have helped me get my films back. So it is of the utmost importance that you care for your equipment, and your people, as much as you would care for your ideas, because they are ultimately the same.
I know in Sang Titre, Godard says, “we don’t need hope in order to try,” and Markopolous says, “art is not a knowledge,” but I just wanted to ask something a bit direct…Is there something you hope for or want to know, through cinema or without it?
DDB: It’s always questions, not knowledge. The question changes, but that’s where art always starts for me. Sometimes the question gets answered during the process, and that’s where it ends, it’s closed off and I start something new. So no, there’s nothing I want to know through cinema, but I want to keep learning.
KD: “To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” - Raymond Carver
IG: I want to know how to make pictures.
DT: I don’t really think about cinema like this. I have a good relationship with movies and my camera. I know I mentioned that cinema has taught me so much, but it has more to do with the questions it’s presented to me over the years than anything I’m specifically looking to find.
AG: I am at an odd spot in my life where I cannot completely settle down nor feel grateful for having the luxury of moving around so freely. I spent a few years in the countryside and simply fell in love with the tranquility. I can hardly stand big cities anymore. So I would like to start planning the rest of my life further out, and make films in my backyard just like Kubrick did. I’m currently finishing my last travel movie, and would like the next ones to be made, or reconstituted, from home. But perhaps my future present will take me elsewhere. The only way to know, said Benjamin, is to love without hope.
Lastly, in Cahiers du cinéma’s December 1963/January 1964 issue, American directors were asked six questions about their work, and rather than answering the question, Howard Hawks sent a still from his at the time forthcoming Man’s Favorite Sport — as a final question, share a still, of any sort —
DT:
DDB: Research into granular synthesis of the image.
AG: Open Sky (forthcoming)
IG: The Poser (forthcoming)
KD: