In early 2026, I was asked by Jed Rapfogel, Director of Film Programming at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, if I’d be interested in shooting a project for the artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher that had been commissioned to show at Anthology. I’m not sure if he knew that Fisher’s Standard Gauge (1984) was one of my favorite short movies (what I call a “retroactive inspiration” to my own Indefinite Pitch [2016], and a direct inspiration to my subsequent work). In any case, J-Rap, doing his job right and now acting as a kind of Hollywood mover and shaker, was correct in assuming the only filmmaker I’d work for is Morgan Fisher.

And so we began, under Fisher’s direction, a new iteration of Screening Room, a film first produced in 1968. It is a journey into an empty movie theater which may only be shown in the same (hopefully full) theater.1 A tracking shot enters the theater and terminates with a zoom into a square of pure light on the screen as the film runs out of the projector. It can be made for any screening room, and therefore, exists as alternative “states,” as Fisher call them, of which there are maybe 15. These days, the production of a state necessitates a crack team with temporary production roles. Fisher is based in Los Angeles, so he directed us through email in very precise language. He takes real pleasure in precision. While deeply conceptual, his language, and thus his work, at least in my opinion, is far from cold. All his films offset a structural rigor with wry humor and a melancholic awareness, stated or implied, of passing time. Execution is logical, yet not perfunctory. While physically limited to a space, there is something particularly ghostly about Screening Room. I was very happy to have contributed as a factotum or executor or just a ghost—whatever I am or am destined to become.

After the successful screening of the Maya Daren Theater state on 16mm at Anthology, I got to talking with Leo Goldsmith, another film programmer doing his job right, who proposed to his New York Film Festival colleagues an unusual partnership with Fisher, the production company Mostly Works, and myself to realize a state shot exclusively for the Walter Reade Theater at Film at Lincoln Center. Somehow we pulled it off, and the first 35mm “standard gauge” version of Screening Room premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival.2 It’s important to note this endeavor would not have been possible without cinematographer Dan Fridman, the festival programming team led by Dennis Lim, and the technical assistance of Regina Riccitelli (Programming Manager), Manuel Santini (Assistant Director, Programming and Exhibition), and of course, two old-school Walter Reade projectionists, both named Greg.

This interview, conducted over email in September 2026, is an outgrowth of the conversations Fisher and I had during the making of the two newest states of his Screening Room.

- James N. Kienitz Wilkins

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS: I think a good place to start is with your own words. In an interview with Scott MacDonald for Film Quarterly3 in 1981 (and published in 1987), you said that the “[film] industry is a point of reference and a source, in both a positive and a negative sense, something to move toward and at the same time react to.” This deeply resonates with me in ways we can possibly discuss later. You made this statement two years before I was born (you are now twice my age) and Screening Room was initiated 13 years earlier, in 1968—a lot has happened between now and then, especially in the film industry. For example, in the interview, you use the term “independent film-making,” a term that has gone through the wringer since 1981. What kind of movements and reactions have you undergone in the 45 years since?

MORGAN FISHER: First, I feel stuck with the term “independent film,” no matter how broad its use, extending to conventional narrative films made in the industry, because there is no satisfactory alternative. I don’t want to say “experimental” because I would not say that my films are experimental. They do what they set out to do. The reaction they receive is another question. They are liked by some and disliked by others. “Avant-garde” is self-congratulatory. “Artists’ films,” same thing. There was a guy who ran a distribution company that used the unhappy neologism “cinemartist.”

The short answer to your question is that despite the changes that have swept through the making of moving images since I started out, I haven’t reacted to these changes and I continue to make films as I did at the beginning. The state of Screening Room for the New York Film Festival was something of an exception because it was shot digitally and then put on film. And this was true for the state we made for Anthology Archives. At least we can say that both cases being shot digitally was for the sake of convenience.

Here’s a longer answer:

I started making films in the late ’60s—’67, ’68. The films had affinities with the structuralist school, then the reigning paradigm, which was announced by P. Adams Sitney in Film Culture in 1969. He and Jonas Mekas and their colleagues, through Anthology and Film Culture, ruled the avant-garde film scene. Their power was immense, such that after P. Adams announced the structuralist idiom people actually wanted to make structuralist films, as if this were the route to critical recognition. My films’ relation with the structuralist moment was a coincidence. The films were what I happened to do. I think my interest in what was called minimal art had something to do with my films, for example the importance of the module, the repeated unit. The power of the Anthology/Film Culture axis ultimately waned, and since then there has been nothing like a single critical institution or even a few that dominate the scene, which I think is a good thing.

What has changed, and drastically, as you yourself know, is the context, using that word in the broadest possible sense—technical, material, critical, and so on, to an extent that I could never have foreseen. And now there is AI. The rise of digital moving images has had consequences that can’t help but make me sad. Labs going out of business: General and Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles, the labs in New York, and so on. Things that filmmakers used and relied on as a matter of routine when I started out have disappeared. Eastman has drastically cut down on the kinds of emulsions it makes and the formats it makes them in. To my understanding, Eastman no longer makes 16mm black leader. We must thank Tacita Dean for fighting to preserve film as film, which is no more than film as it was when I started out, and which I assumed would always remain as it was then.

Several years ago, a school in New York wanted to show Projection Instructions, but they did not have a 16mm projector. Never could I have imagined that such a situation was possible. At least there are still places that screen my kind of filmmaking—mostly museums and archives, of course—along with lots of other kinds of films.

When I made my first films, video was in its early days. It was on tape: ½-inch, then ¾. No one, least of all me, could have foreseen what digital moving images and the internet have made possible—for example, the instantaneous transmission worldwide of digital moving images. Making a film is a cumbersome process: after the shooting, after the editing, there is the preparation of the elements for printing. Now making a moving-image work is ridiculously easy—too easy, some might say—and its dissemination is equally easy. No more trips to the post office to mail a print. A film, for being a film, the result of a demanding material process, used to make a claim on our attention, our critical attention, that a digital moving image work cannot.

Several years ago, I showed some of my films to a class at UCLA, 16mm prints on a projector, and some of the students had never seen a film print before. I found that astonishing. I cannot conceive of film apart from its material origin, a strip of celluloid with perforations and frames. That’s why a strip of film with sprocket holes, and usually frame lines too, used to be on every poster for a film festival, but that moment is passing.

But what I will call the authority of film lingers on even as film itself is on the wane. I’ve seen clips on television—commercials, I think—that included dirt and sprocket holes and frame lines that jittered, that were clearly created digitally.

To repeat, with the exceptions that I noted above, I continue as I did when starting out those many years ago. There is nothing I want to do in film that I cannot.

JNKW: That’s as true a definition of independence as can be. I appreciate your insistence—to read between the lines—that a film is what it is, no matter what others say it is. For example, one of my scintillating wisecracks on the touring circuit (bread and butter and all) is that there’s no such thing as “slow cinema” unless it’s projected at the wrong frame rate. But one very unusual thing you’ve done with your film work, especially Screening Room, is confound expectations of distribution. This is perhaps its most “experimental” quality, in my opinion, given that the film isn’t over until you say it is (I presume?). It seems to me that Screening Room is a movie perpetually complete and in the making. It’s site-specific, yet theoretically could be filmed in every theater in the world. It can be executed by others, yet remains produced and directed by you. What’s cool is that the concept is flexible enough to be shot digitally (I personally find it significant that the newer states are openly digital and printed to film, which is what film really is these days). And it’s totally relevant in the context of all the recent renewed interest in the singular event of cinema-going; the analog experience as panacea to recent social and cultural ills (true or not). While there’s no denying the waning “authority of film,” we’ve oddly seen more discourse about its supposed value than ever in recent memory (I really want to ask you about Christopher Nolan and follow up on AI but this question is getting too long). Anyway, Screening Room plays into all these preservationist desires and sublime effects, but also withholds. It is both simple and complex.

I guess as I chip away at a question, I wonder how concerned you are about the evolution of distribution (that fifth circle of hell of the independent filmmaker’s odyssey after development, pre-prod, prod, and post-prod), which is probably how filmmaking has most significantly changed in recent years, beyond the shiny new gadgets. Your example of a film school not having a 16mm projector is salient. Projection Instructions becomes a movie that cannot be projected. So has that movie changed or just the context (“If you have access to a projector, the movie begins.”)? How do you think your moving image work will be understood in the future (you are also a painter)? And not to be flip, but what if a rogue Letterboxd4 freak bootlegged a version of Screening Room at the New York Film Festival by recording it on an iPhone and then uploaded it to the “universal screening room” of YouTube, something that never could have happened in the ’60s?

MF: I am not up on any discussion about “slow cinema” so I can’t comment on that, except to say that conventional thinking about commercial movies makes the assumption that films should be fast rather than slow. That is, slow in the world of commercial movies is a fault. But I like—more than like, love—lots of commercial movies that by the standards of the day are slow. Of course, these tend to be old. Sansho the Bailiff comes to mind. Slow, but every square inch of every shot is alive. You hear about how kids today don’t have the patience to sit through an entire film. They demand stimulation, but of a kind that to me is fake, merely the form of stimulation.

It is an understatement to say that Screening Room confounds expectations about distribution. It defeats expectations in advance. As you and I well understand, you can’t send the print to theaters all over the world, as you can with what I will call a normal movie. (But, in certain respects, it is a normal movie; it goes through a projector that is operated normally, except at the end, etc.) I made Screening Room in 1968, and it was one of the first films I made. I can’t recall what I was thinking or how aware I was of its implications, but we can say that, conscious or not, I was examining an assumption about movies, the universal projectability of a print. (Projection Instructions, which came later, in 1976, examines another assumption, normal or self-effacing projection.) As we understand, the economics of the film industry depends on universal projectability. You make the movie once, you make a print (or a bunch of prints, all identical to each other), you show the prints all over the world, and you make your money back, sometimes a lot more money. Not so with Screening Room.

The title card for the film made clear that the film was not forever limited to that one state, for an auditorium at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York. Yes, that one state is limited to that theater, but as the title card said, “For any other screening location a corresponding state of the film must be prepared.” This announces the possibility of other states for other theaters. I feel it ever so slightly insults the intelligence of the viewer by giving a state two dates, 1968 and then the date of the further state, because, as the title card makes clear, the one date, 1968, anticipates all that can follow. It would be a wonderful provocation for a state made for a theater that did not exist in 1968 to be given the date 1968.

An important aspect of Screening Room is that it troubles the question of where the identity of a work of visual art lies. All of the states are necessarily different from each other, but because they all enact the same model, the same form, they are identical. This bumps up against the assumptions about expressivity that underlie the idea of copyright. This uniformity of the model is what makes it possible for other people to shoot it for me. Here is a description of the idea; follow the description. The differences in what you see don’t matter; in fact they are necessary. So, as you suggest—at least this is what I think you are suggesting—the film troubles the idea of personal expression. My description is general, the separate states are different in specific ways but at bottom are identical.

Even if it is shot digitally, it ultimately ends up a film; it has to be a film, to go through a projector and to make possible what happens at the end, when the film runs out of the projector, which absolutely can be done by no means except film. So a film I made in 1968 holds off the rise of the digital—not that this is what I had in mind when I made the film because what Mark Toscano recently called the “hellscape of digital”5 did not yet exist. As long as film print stock exists, and as long as there are projectors—nothing to count on, sad to say—there can be new states of Screening Room. Thank you for calling it “both simple and complex.” I would agree.

About the sudden interest on the part of the general public in analogue prints, I can only understand this as expressing the wish to get as close as possible to the original, as close as possible to Christopher Nolan’s vision. Behind this is the model of the religious relic, as close as possible to the authentic. But I guess it can make a difference of a less mystical kind. Margaret [Honda] and I have a friend who saw The Odyssey in 5-perf 70mm and then saw it in IMAX, with a much bigger frame and also a bigger screen, although I gather the frame is bigger in proportion to the bigger screen (I have never seen IMAX). He said the IMAX was much better, although Matt Damon’s pores were noticeable. And this guy is not a film freak.

About distribution, we can only be sad at the devastation of what used to be. With the disappearance of 16mm projectors, it’s not just no more Projection Instructions; we say goodbye to all of the films I have made in 16mm. Of course, serious institutions—cinematheques, archives, museums—will have 16mm, but elsewhere…. It pains me to recollect that, even for some decades after I started out, there were commercial businesses that distributed 16mm films. But the Co-op soldiers on, the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek soldiers on, places in Paris.

For me the question is how to go on making my films available with the shrinking ubiquity of 16mm projectors. The obvious answer is to make them available digitally, but the prospect pains me, particularly since many of the films allude to film itself: its material form and properties related to it, such as the lengths of rolls of raw stock. I know there is a community of film enthusiasts who circulate digital copies of films made in 16mm, seeming to accept seeing them in this form as if the films suffer no great loss, but perhaps this just means that they accept what I will call the loss as the price they pay for having access to what otherwise they could only see by paying a rental fee. Of course, Projection Instructions would not work from a digital file for the same reason that it would not work if broadcast on television. You have to experience the changes on the screen and the changes in the sound as the result of someone behind you manipulating a machine.

Anyone who shoots Screening Room off the screen and then puts it up in “the universal screening room” is showing that they don’t understand the film. That doesn’t mean they won’t try it. What is necessary for the viewer is to be present in the theater after the film runs out of the projector and to see the rectangle of white light on the screen that a moment before they had seen as an image. Shooting off the screen can’t capture that.

JNKW: It’s funny you say you’ve never seen IMAX—is this true? I was just talking to someone about how I’ve only ever seen seven minutes of IMAX: a sneak peek of The Dark Knight Rises (2012) where they were giving out promo t-shirts, which I swiftly sold on eBay. Suddenly, everyone is talking about IMAX these days, but it’s definitely not an experience I ever thought to seek out (or pay an excessive price for). As a filmmaker who otherwise pays attention to formats, I’m somewhat reassured that you are in the same boat.

Speaking of reassurance, despite the shrinking distribution options, at least your films on film are more archivally stable than digital, right? So there may be a future where no film of yours can be projected, but at least they still exist as legible objects, unlike a corrupted hard drive. At least a film strip can still be handled, held to the firelight after the apocalypse. I know you’ve talked about this in past interviews.

Another provocation, to me, is that Screening Room is a film about a past moment that predicts, or continually anticipates, a future moment. Despite the “uniformity of the model,” very specific spaces, time periods, and technologies are chronicled. I think that some of your work, like Standard Gauge, which you were commencing during the interview I first quoted (and is also the work of yours I first encountered, due to my friend David Levine’s obsession with Messiah of Evil [1973], which is cited within), can be discussed as documentary. Is this a relevant or useful term to you? Do you consider Screening Room a documentary?

MF: Yes, it’s true that I have never seen IMAX. What is wrong with me, that I am okay with this? I just looked up IMAX on Wikipedia. I gather there have been films containing sequences shot on IMAX. They’re inserted into an otherwise standard format? Not having seen this, I can only imagine that the change from one to the other would be jarring, making us aware of the means of what we are looking at, which is contrary to the model of a commercial film. There must be something I don’t get, but I am content to live in ignorance. I watched Detour the other night, for the umpteenth time. I am perfectly happy with what it was, what it did, how it used the means available to it. (Years ago, during the film noir festival, Noir City, at the American Cinematheque, Ann Savage was in the lobby. I stood a few feet from her. She was not in character. She was just as scary in real life, just standing there, as she was on the screen. She must have been amazing to work with.) Beyond the means of Detour, there’s color, there’s wide screen, and there’s Panavision. What else do we need to make great movies? Put another way, I cannot imagine that there are great movies that depend on technical means beyond these, movies as great as Contempt, Ride Lonesome, The Naked Spur, Kiss Me Deadly, The Quiet Man, etc.

I guess my films are more stable on film than in digital form. I have heard that this is the case for film generally. That is why studios make silver separations to preserve their films: chemically and materially, they are longer-lived than other forms.

There will certainly be enough pressure from the industry to keep 35mm alive, even if it means not depending on the good will of Eastman but instead ordering stock in large enough quantities. I assume that is what Christopher Nolan did, order millions of feet of 70mm stock and then more millions of feet for the prints. Of course, Eastman was happy to oblige. In the case of 16mm, I can’t imagine that archives and museums who want to maintain 16mm as viable and people who want to keep it alive to do their work—people like me—will be able to entice Eastman Kodak to keep on making it available in the form that will keep it alive, or alive enough. Will archives and filmmakers band together to place orders that are large enough? I don’t know.

The idea of being able to visualize a film by eyeballing it as a print, as if it would be possible to gain even a rudimentary sense of what it would be as a film, sounds like a kind of archaeology, or a wish for a kind of archaeology. Maybe we could have a glimpse of the picture. We think of Paul Sharits, but what can we see in a print of Sansho the Bailiff that lets us see why Mizoguchi is among the greatest masters? Or, for that matter, Straub and Huillet? And then there is the sound. How to decode that wiggle? Come to think of it, in the case of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, we could have a glimpse of both the picture and the sound, thanks to the utterly rudimentary binary character of both, but the relation between them would be difficult, if not impossible, to make out—with any precision, at least—and that relation is what gives the film its identity and its power. I find the subject distressing to think about. A film seen in this way would end up a relic, a sanctified object that lets us approach the holy but keeps us at a distance from seeing in full what it is a trace of. But for that day to come there would have to be no more 16mm projectors, or if there still were any, no more prints that makers were willing to project, presumably because the prints can’t be replaced and the makers do not want to subject them to the risk of wear by projecting them. Perhaps that day is closer than we know. When I started out in film, it never occurred to me that this day could ever come, that there could even be the risk that a medium could wither away.

Screening Room has a documentary aspect, but it’s incidental. The questions are these: in what way is it a documentary, and how useful is it as one? Images from the past can have their power, but it is always a question of why and how and to what degree and to what point. About 30 years ago, I did a state of Screening Room for a group show I was in at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Los Angeles. The theater was in the building on Grand Avenue. In earlier (and later) states, the shot begins at a point that is a walk of four minutes or so to the theater. But this was very different. The shot began some miles to the west, on the Santa Monica Freeway driving toward downtown. So at the beginning, from a distance, you see downtown Los Angeles as it was 30 years ago. The skyline now is totally different, many new buildings, tall ones. There wasn’t much traffic, and the guy who drove moved right along. But there’s more. From the off-ramp to the front of the building was a few blocks. I got out with the camera, went down the stairs and into the building, through the lobby, down the stairs, through another lobby, and into the theater, which remains exactly as it was. So, at the beginning, it is a documentation of a cityscape that has disappeared. But the front of the building and the interior are unchanged, except for what happens to be on exhibit in the lobby outside the theater. So the shot moves from a record of a scene that has disappeared over the last 30 years to an interior that looks as it does today, taking us from the past to the present in a single continuous shot.

As I planned a micro-run of four of my feature-length movies1 at the Roxy Cinema in New York City (September 30–October 4), I realized I hadn’t ever written much about Common Carrier (2017), which is the oldest of the offerings [Oct 4]. Two of the movies in the series are explicitly fictions; two are less explicitly documentaries. All are stubborn, and Common Carrier—one of the documentary-like things, made without a full script—is explicitly anti-commercial, in the sense that it has never traveled outside of film festivals, one-off screenings, temporary streams, and private link sharing. Unlike the others, it never enjoyed a theatrical run after its festival run (at BAMcinemaFest and CPH:DOX). It is a movie that could never, and was never, meant to satisfy the burdensome requirements of income-generating distribution (e.g., clearances, insurances, publicists), and to be honest, I never much tried to distribute it. Still, it is no less a “real movie.”

Ten years on, it seems appropriate to look back upon what was essentially an experiment, literally shot from the hip on a small Panasonic Lumix camera over the course of 2016. Common Carrier is very much about 2016. But maybe it’s about 2026, too. Bernie Sanders is still alive. Trump is still torturing everyone. Drake is kind of alive? Are you in a WNYC or a Hot 97 mood these days? Common Carrier was made in a frenetic, desperate, and overwrought year that in hindsight feels like the official start of where we’ve ended up today.

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Tickets and showtimes here

Filmmakers and cast in person Mon, Fri-Sun

Low Cinema, 70-11 60th St, Ridgewood, NY 11385

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For sale: 24 test frames from the first 35mm theatrical run of The Misconceived (dir. James N. Kienitz Wilkins), now playing at Anthology Film Archives in NYC (May 8-14, 2026)—tonight, tomorrow, the next two days!

• Numbered, limited edition release of 24 frames

• 35mm frame with optical track from test print in magnetic acrylic frame (2.875x2.875”)

• Director signed certificate of authenticity

$100 per frame + free shipping via USPS (North America only)

Click on titles below for order page (lofi digital preview images via loupe on light box). While supplies last. Please allow 2-3 weeks for shipping and handling.

#1. Job Interview

#2. “It’s self-serving and retrograde.”

#3. Voice Performers (in order of appearance)

#4. “What’s up?”

#5. A Few Beers

#6. “No no no!”

#7. “She’s advising Thelonious now. So we got to talk–”

#8. Guilt Trip

#9. “I’m not guilt tripping you!”

#10. “He materialized!”

#11. Decisions

#12. Steamboat Willie

#13. “Shit.”

#14. “Hey!”

#15. “All I know he could be dead somewhere, y’know?”

#16. Goose on the Loose

#17. “Everything. Table saw, router, you name it.”

#18. “Yeah, but I don’t want to talk too much shit about him.”

#19. “It’s probably just therapeutic.”

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The Misconceived (2026), 35mm, NYC theatrical run

• Fri, May 8, 7:30p - Q&A with filmmaker and Whitney Mallett (The Whitney Review)

• Sat, May 9, 6:30p - Q&A with filmmakers and artist Nile Harris

• Sat, May 9, 9p - Introduced by filmmakers

• Sat, May 10, 6:30p - Q&A with producers Emily Davis and Joey Frank

• Sat, May 10, 9p - Introduced by producers

• Mon, May 11, 6:30p & 9p

• Tues, May 12, 6:30p - Q&A with filmmakers and Matthew Shen Goodman (The Baffler)

• Tues, May 12, 9p

• Wed, May 13, 8:45p

• Thurs, May 14, 6:30p: Q&A with filmmakers and filmmaker Pete Ohs

The Plagiarists (2019), digital, theatrical redux

• Wed, May 6, 6:30p

• Sun, May 10, 4:15p

• Wed, May 13, 6:30p

• Thur, May 14, 8:45p - Introduced by James N. Kienitz Wilkins and producer Paul Dallas

Maidstone (1970), 35mm

• Wed, May 6, 8:45p

• Sat, May 10, 3:45p - Introduced by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

“This is a strange one: a nearly unwatchable train wreck of a movie you need eyes in the back of your head to safely watch, lest you get jumped by a psychologically crippled hipster who has snuck up behind you in the dark movie theater, hammer in hand. I haven’t had the pleasure because I’ve only seen it on YouTube. So here’s to new experiences at Anthology Film Archives. I’ve heard the endeavor bankrupted Norman Mailer, and honestly, that’s the realest definition of independent film I can think of. As a character in my own THE MISCONCEIVED says about MAIDSTONE: ‘You can’t make that movie anymore,’ which is slightly inaccurate since Mailer couldn’t make it in the first place.” – James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Sometimes a guy wakes up and is like, “What happened?” Over twenty years ago, I was in art school. I should have been making paintings and applying for an MFA at Yale. Instead, I was making “moving image” and grinding away on a thesis concept about “homocentrism through the seasons,” which is not as gay as it sounds—at least that’s what I told myself then. I’d purchased a beloved Canon Scoopic (a compact 16mm camera intended for quick field journalism and a precursor to electronic news-gathering [ENG] video cameras) to shoot a motorcycle movie starring a high school classmate who is now an MMA fighter. I was lucky to have some footage of this escapade ready when my professor at the time, the filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt, invited the guitarist Marc Ribot to class. Working atop a rat’s nest of guitar cables, Ribot jammed an improvisatory score to what became Springtime. I owe him $400 if it ever makes any money.

A few months later, the late filmmaker Ross McLaren sold me his cumbersome and practically medieval Frezzolini 16mm camera, which possessed an oscillating crystal sound-sync mechanism I lusted after for my thesis endeavor, Nature Mature (obstinately pronounced “Natter Matter”). I bought a stack of discounted and long expired film stock on eBay, overconfident in my analysis of Harris Savides’s cinematography for Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (which I had caught by chance at the now defunct Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street), reasoning that the natural fog of aged emulsion could be part of the look. I wanted it to be a pure film film, so I went so far as to construct a dust-free eco-tent in my rented bedroom in the artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s parents’ house to cut straight negative, baby—huffing acetate cement as I toiled on even more gear wisely tossed by McLaren during his fire sale: a four-gang synchronizer, A/B rewinds, and a film splicer. It was a total disaster. DuArt called me up and said, “Kid, something’s wrong here.” The glue was bad and my edits had fallen apart in the printer. They didn’t charge me, and I taped up the damage and had to accept that the gooey, murky mess of a movie was mine. Per usual, I’d pushed too hard in too many directions, and the film had morphed into something probably best viewed as a document of its making, battered and torn before it was born.

Time passed. I graduated right at the start of a multinational financial crisis and sold the Frezzi and then the Scoopic on eBay to help pay for production of my feature Public Hearing. A user named ItsRainingBen69 (or something like that) bought it in a flash. I was elated and sad. He sent his attractive girlfriend to pick it up. We had coffee as I gave her the scoop on my filmmaking travails. Then she schlepped it to London and Ben Rivers shot something that ended up in the Tate (if memory serves). I felt that was an OK outcome. Blessedly, a Dutch cinematographer friend (the manliest man I’ve ever known) gifted me his old Aaton LTR to shoot Public Hearing on super 16mm (which was a great outcome), and it’s a camera I own to this day.

The problem with all this early 16mm work is that it made no real sense. Except for Nature Mature (and you’ll see how that turned out), up until 2010 or so, it was all destined to be transferred to and edited from the low-resolution archival prison of MiniDV, which is perhaps the truest medium of my Millennial filmmaking cohort, we wretched souls who entered artistic consciousness right at the decline of mainstream 16mm production, but years before the sexy revolution of high-bandwidth, low-cost HD. The most emblematic camera of that post-9/11 age was the Panasonic AG-DVX100, which promised to replicate the look of film on MiniDV through its 24p frame rate. (You can still find message board posts on DVInfo.net from an upstart named Barry Jenkins waxing poetic about his “old Panny” in the moonlight.)

Today, shooting real film is strangely, ironically more accessible than ever: film stock is chemically better; it scans better on high-resolution devices; it syncs better with digital monitoring; and simply looks cleaner and better, all at a lower emotional cost than ever. Now there’s a lot less detective work involved—less time and energy spent sourcing and searching, the brutal back-alley pursuits for the next new camera that promises to solve the deficiencies of the past. Sometimes I wonder what my early movies would have turned into under more forgiving conditions. Less camera, less men. But maybe the problem was me—the overzealous young man of a fading era.

This selection of subprime juvenilia is presented for your one-time amusement. Though it is transparently naive and both materially and narratively opaque, I believe it holds some charm, if only as a warning to others. The last time Nature Mature was projected on 16mm was at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals in 2007.

- JNKW

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To the eye, Alan was forty and white. The light of the moon glimmered off his whiteness and bounced off the soft ripples of the Hudson River that passed to his right, an objectively beautiful sight out the window of the northbound Amtrak train, had Alan been looking. Alan looked tired. He was half dozing, his head lightly tapping the glass as he drifted in and out of consciousness on the late, last Empire Service from New York City. A tool bag rested on the seat next to him. A book was splayed on his lap. To the eye, Alan looked like a nice enough guy who wouldn’t ever let anyone dig too deep into his thoughts. To the eye, he was the type of guy with a manual laborer’s authenticity offset by the mystifying habits of the type of guy who picks his way through a hardcover copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany after a long day in the city installing custom cabinetry in a billionaire’s brownstone or hanging sculptures in a new satellite arts space dedicated to innovative art and ideas, across all forms of creativity, to build a shared understanding of our rapidly changing world and a more equitable society. Alan stirred and gently reached into his jacket, checking on an envelope of cash.

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- Dr. Frank as recorded by Joey Frank

Screenings here | Watch the teaser on Vimeo here

A daughter’s poster:

2026 © Automatic Moving

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Marty McCormick had a bum knee. He also had the last name of a world famous spice manufacturer. He didn’t know which was more annoying. The knee was a hell of a lot of trouble, and the limp made him look older than his fifty-five years, but he got really spicy when people snickered about McCormick because, coincidentally, he’d worked in the logistics department at McCormick & Company for over fifteen years. His ex-wife used to call herself his “Cinnamon Girl.” She was always pushing him to be more romantic. “Keep Neil’s name out of your mouth,” he said to her when they were breaking up. She left him for a guy named Neil. That was five years ago.

Marty’s knee, which had ailed him since childhood, flared up in hot, humid weather, so it was at least predictable. But last year, he’d slipped in the office bathroom on a dusting of thyme, sage, and marjoram poultry seasoning. The weird thing was that he hadn’t hit his knee. The contortion of the fall had done it, the pathetic way he’d unscrewed himself in midair to save his ass, moving in a manner he’d never moved before. He saw himself go down in the mirror—it was so cartoonish, those ugly HOKAs in the air, like Bugs Bunny on a banana skin, he almost laughed before slamming on the tile, and then the pain bit into his lower back, and twelve hours later, his fragile knee. The doctor told him the time had come for arthroplasty and told him he’d be laid up for a while. Marty added up the workers’ comp and his 401K, and it appeared he could eke out an early retirement (blessed in a cursed way to have no wife anymore). So Marty read the tea leaves and told himself “It’s gonna be great,” understanding it was time to move on from McCormick.

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The surprise flew Delta. My family was cruising at 30,000 feet, and as far as I knew, things were perfectly fine: clear skies, everyone munching on Sunchips and Biscoff wafers, easygoing Miami days ahead of us. I’d ordered a Mr. & Mrs. T Original Bloody Mary Mix, hold the booze (before noon, it tastes sharp and healthy while reminding me of good times to come), and settled into my paperwork—an endless heap of grants, screenplays, student grading, and emails. I’m a so-called filmmaker, but I’ve got a family, and I’ve gotta make that paper.

Suddenly, my seven year-old daughter screamed bloody murder. She was clinging to my wife like she’d been touched by evil. She’d seen something horrible. I quickly understood it was a movie—someone else’s movie flashing on a screen angled between the seats with a direct line into her soul. There was a beaten and bruised woman locked in a hospital room getting eviscerated by a grinning demon. A slack-jawed Gen-Zer watched this morning programming, his temples pinched by expensive Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 Wireless Over-Ear Noise-Canceling Headphones that rose and fell with every impassive munch of his complimentary Cheez-Its while human entrails splattered onscreen.

Continue here…

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I’m a bit of a hypocrite: I hated school but now advocate for the experience, I force my kid to do her nightly homework when I failed to do mine, I failed art class in high school (and later dropped out of high school) but ended up with a BFA. This is because (I’ve been told) I possess a Protestant work ethic; while I believe deeply in the power of education, I’m unsure anything can truly be taught beyond what one is willing to teach oneself. Despite abhorring being told what to do, I teach full-time in an undergraduate media program while believing that “film school” boasts little tangible advantage over online tutorials as far as craft is concerned. I hate authority, especially in the classroom—nothing irks me more than the smug unquestioned power of the middle-aged Professor—yet I operate with authority. I both play the part of teacher and reject that part. I am perpetually of two minds.

Given my personal and professional contradictions, I try to keep aware of what I do or do not bring to the table for my students. One belief I offer is that the Movies — which I consider in the singular as a behemoth now 100 years past its middle-age—is the ultimate hypocritical art, pretending from day one to be what it is not, starting with still images feigning life. As the Movies matured into young adulthood, it developed a peculiar, hypocritical reputation as a so-called “collaborative art” while still demanding—at the end of the day, like any good art—the decisive voice of an author. Try thinking of any movie that is good (actually good; not accidentally good or socially good), and you will find collaboration collared by authority. I try to teach the way I direct my movies: a collaborative exchange of ideas—up to a point.

The most efficient way I can describe my attitude towards moviemaking vis-à-vis teaching is “superimposition”—a word that’s intrinsically cinematic (I once made a feature that was entirely superimposed), while describing a type of questionable authority (the “imposition”), while meanwhile referencing a core principle of quantum physics: that an object can exist in multiple states at the same time: on and off; left and right; wave and particle; documentary and fiction; good and bad; real and unreal; faithful and faithless; love and hate. As I teach younger people how to make movies in the Quantum Age, I’ve come to believe it is no longer enough to simply be cinephilic (watching 1000 movies, movies logged as Letterboxd merit badges, yadda yadda). One must also cultivate a well-developed cine-phobia in order to push the art forward — a discontent with the same old recipes and forms, to question whether it is even worth it in order to find worth. Because it can’t remain business as usual. Making movies should never be stagnant, never just be a job.

The reality is that I teach in a liberal arts school, not a film school proper, and I know enough not to promise jobs to my students. But it often feels hypocritical and almost irresponsible to humor the fantasies of young, aspiring writer-directors who hope to land big gigs unless they’re from a well-connected family, have a popular TikTok, are some sort of rising Disney Channel star or lucked into European dual citizenship and have the smarts to get the hell out of dodge upon graduation. I’m the last person to ask how to get a dream project properly funded: I’ve made six features for less than the cost of two shorts funded by the French CNC; that’s six features for less than the cutoff tier of a single SAG Ultra Low Budget (ULA) project, minus the hassle of dealing with The Nanny. That’s six features that cost basically nothing, yet six features that managed to screen beyond the confines of my mom’s basement—so maybe I’m actually the first person to ask about funding? Whatever the case, there’s surely more rational ways to fund movies (like the French CNC), but I live and work in America.

Obviously there is no direct path to becoming a successful filmmaker, markedly none as simple as going to “film school.” One possible route I haven't tried is becoming a famous actor and only then directing. In my nonacademic-after-work-hours opinion, the financing of American films seems to have veered into the hands of actors with production deals who have maximized their celebrity to unlock new levels of authority as producer-directors. I’ve often wondered what exactly qualifies an actor to transition to the role of director over, say, the boom operator—a much more reliable and silent witness to the complex mechanics film production—but that’s just me expecting that a certain type of knowledge should be the determining factor in what gets made and how.

So what am I supposed to tell my students these days? Keep on TikTokin’? Go to acting school? That I’m considering it myself, just to get my movies funded? That I’m a world-class grump after work hours, when I drink too many dank DIPAs in the dark (the nectar of aging Millenials)? Fortunately, I am not paid to humor delusions, including my own. I am paid to teach and advise: I am a full-time moviemaker, but my full-time job is to teach, and that is a blessing. The duality provides a certain freedom that took me thirty years to figure it out. So, in class and in life, I try to demonstrate an alternative vision—that moviemaking can be more than a career; it can be a compulsion. There are those among us who must do it, at any cost, and it is worth studying why: why are some of us are less concerned with making a living in the movies than bringing the movies to life, however irrational the task may be? Why do some of us persist against the known odds? I try to provide all my students with the tools to determine whether they are this person—the person who knows better on a cold professional level, yet acts in creative contradiction to that knowledge—through the lens of my time and my entangled beliefs. An abridged list of those thoughts on movies (subject to change):

You can make a movie out of nothing if you think hard enough. A feature film is only a lot of minutes, so don’t be scared. The anti-commercial movie is potentially profitable under the right conditions. Funding is no fun. Film festivals need you more than you need them. Awards are terribly stupid unless you win one. When you think you’re done, you’re probably not. Don’t be fooled by “production value.” If you’re concerned with creating “likeable characters,” you need to like yourself better. If you make commercials, your movies will look like commercials, not to mention that commercials are lame. Shooting on 16mm is fun and pointless unless you're also projecting on film, which hardly anyone is. Always watch the credits til the end—here lies the secret to how the movie got made, and Netflix doesn’t want you to know the secret. YouTube is as helpful as film school, except you can meet someone like me in film school. And please don’t rely on someone like me, because I’m a bit of a hypocrite. Unless you want to be a hypocrite, which is to say, someone who makes movies.

“In 2020, James N. Kienitz Wilkins set out to adapt Telephone, a new novel by the veteran author Percival Everett. But Wilkins, a self-described “noncommercial filmmaker,” never bothered to inquire about the rights to the novel while working on his screenplay. “Maybe a switch flipped in my head after I read that Barry Jenkins never asked to adapt If Beale Street Could Talk,” Wilkins writes. “That motherfucker just picked up the pen and begged forgiveness, and now he’s directed Mufasa: The Lion King.”

When Wilkins finally reached out to the author’s representatives, he learned that an unnamed entity had already secured the rights. Thanks to “the renewed interest in—and aggressive marketing of—the capital-B Black experience,” Everett, known for his genre-twisting racial satires and philosophical metafictions, had become a hot commodity in Hollywood. Within a couple of years, the writer/director of another adaptation, American Fiction, would win an Oscar, and Everett would hit the talk-show circuit.

Wilkins wasn’t willing to give up, though, and his lawyer advised him to pursue a loophole that could put the rights-holders in a bind: If Wilkins could get them to read—or even click on—his screenplay, they’d open themselves up to “accusations of IP crimes and misdemeanors.” For fear of infringement claims, they’d be forced to collaborate, if not to cease and desist.

“Can U Digg It?” is an account of Wilkins’s effort to reclaim the right (or some right) to a story that he believes to be his own—and to defy the agents, managers, lawyers, Hamilton stars, IP hoarders, Disney “dinglehoppers,” and IMDBPro metrics standing in his way. Inspired by the form of Telephone, Wilkins offers three versions of his quest: a lawyer-approved screenplay, an essay, and a dossier.” [Triple Canopy]

*** READ ON TRIPLE CANOPY ***

Late one night last year I was taking out the trash in the side yard of my house in Queens, minding my business, sorting through recycling and lightly humming to myself. I heard a noise. I peeked over a bush at the train tracks across the street. Two men were emerging from a big hole in the iron fence that divided a parking lot from the big CSX freight trains. The men were stacking boxes. I moved to get a better angle and drew my iPhone. Then my motion-sensing porch light activated, backlighting me like an off-off Broadway song-and-dance man. Suddenly, I was the one on stage. The guys turned and stared; my eyes bugged. They scowled, dropped the boxes, and dashed to a BMW I hadn’t noticed idling nearby. The getaway car squealed off into the night.

I drew a breath and waited. The porch light clicked off. I could see the stack of boxes and the hole in the fence. I waited for the bad boys to come ripping back, guns blazing, but they never returned. It got real quiet. I wondered if I should call the police. If it was worth it. I’d just moved to the neighborhood and didn’t know the ins and outs; the rules of the streets. Glendale is on the edge of Ridgewood and known for a very Blue Lives Matter, NIMBYist surveillance-state culture. What should I do? I thought. Do I want to integrate with this culture? I said what the heck and called the police. It took them an hour to show up and I drank two beers in the meantime. Around midnight, two stocky cops pulled up. They stood around, idly toeing the boxes. I emerged from the leafy shadows with my hands up.

“Hey fellas,” I said in a high-pitched voice, not taking any chances. They were a little startled to see me, but not too startled, like maybe this happens all the time. I looked at the boxes and realized they were full of beer—it was a huge stack of Corona beer.

“You called us?” one cop asked.

“I saw it all,” I said, “I even filmed it.” I showed them my shaky iPhone video: the hooded thieves, the smoky getaway car.

“Cool,” they said, “Mind if we zoom in?”

I gave them my phone. I was integrating pretty nicely. We were almost having a good time.

“So what’s the deal, pals?” I asked. The cop handed the phone back to me.

“There is no deal. We can’t do nothing with this beer.”

“But it came from the train,” I said. “Right there.”

“Nah, they won’t take it back. This is tainted beer.”

“Looks fine to me?”

“Nah, this beer is off the wagon. Can’t resell it cause it’s officially stolen. The train company will just file for insurance. Everyone files for insurance. This beer, well, it doesn’t exist anymore.”

“So what are we gonna do?” I asked, a bit too eagerly.

“You want it?”

“What? All this stuff?” I couldn’t believe it. Two cops offering me a pallet of Corona at midnight in Glendale, Queens.

“Yeah, it’s yours. Finders keepers.”

I hesitated. What kind of trap is this—Corona from a cop? Did I need a lawyer? Or at least a tax attorney? I thought for a moment, then remembered something important: I don’t like Corona. It’d take me years to get through all that Corona. My kids would be grown, in their twenties, drinking skunked Corona. On top of that, I didn’t want to get involved. The crooks had seen me bright and clear, and no amount or type of beer was worth getting shot up in a drive-by. They could’ve been watching us at that very moment for all I knew. So I told the cops cheers and thanks but no thanks and we waved our goodbyes. The beer sat there for a few more hours and by morning, it was gone.

I thought about my experience over breakfast. I did a little research. Turns out the train line is nicknamed the “Pizza and Beer” line for all the baking flour and Mexican beer it pushes out to the boroughs. There are lots of robberies on the line, and a spate of them lately. Funny, I thought, and thought nothing more about it.

Flash forward to Wednesday, April 3, 2024. It’s about 11:00 p.m. and I’m sitting around, and guess what pops up in my newsfeed? Well, they caught the guy. Earlier that day, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing Jose Cesari of “being the mastermind of … the ‘Beer Theft Enterprise.’” Eight Bronx men had been arrested. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, said:

For years, the Beer Theft Enterprise has operated brazenly, allegedly breaking into rail yards and beverage distribution facilities throughout the Northeast and filling U-Haul box trucks to the brim with cases of beer. That dangerous and disruptive conduct—sometimes allegedly accompanied by the threat of violence—has left several beverage distribution and railroad companies ailing. Today’s arrests reinforce that the Beer Theft Enterprise’s staggering thefts will not be tolerated in the Southern District of New York.

James E. Dennehy, then the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Newark Field Office, weighed in:

Train heists harken back to the days of the Wild West and gunslingers riding horses, stealing loot from rail cars. The romanticized image has nothing to do with the modern-day criminals we allege took part in a theft ring in New Jersey, New York, and beyond that targeted rail yards and beverage distribution centers. They used the cover of night to cut through fencing, off-load pallets of beer, and sell off the stolen goods, costing the victims’ companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. The alleged ringleader Cesari often used a weapon during the robberies. Our team of agents and investigators working on this case has done an outstanding job bringing these alleged thieves’ crime spree to the end of the line.

Wow, I thought, I dodged a bullet, a real bullet. Those guys were kind of smart. Based on what I’d learned, though, they didn’t need to steal the beer at all. They just needed to touch it. Like a game of tag. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d played right into their hands: The goody-two-shoes calls the cops, the cops report the theft, and then the beer is legally abandoned. I got the sense the FBI was being a bit histrionic. I mean, it’s just beer, right?

Thank you to Light Industry for originally publishing this text along with the online premiere of LEWISTON (2002) — again available here for a limited time.

Today, Lewiston, Maine is in the news for all the wrong reasons. I grew up there, the twin cities of Lewiston/Auburn. It’s my own L.A. I’ve made movies there since childhood. While I’ve lived in New York City all of my adult life, I maintain a relationship with the town. My family was under lockdown last week. Reading the news, I feel like I’m watching a movie I’ve seen before. Every location in the terrible saga is familiar: The Walmart distribution center. The pool hall. The bowling alley, crossing circuits in my memory with scenes from The Big Lebowski, which was in theaters back in the 90s around the last time I went bowling at Spare Time Recreation (what it was called then), a local fixture across the street from my mom’s favorite discount store, Marden’s (“I shoulda bought it when I saw it at Marden’s”). I bought my first rug for my first NYC apartment at Marden’s.

Reeling from the nearness and farness of the nightmare, I remembered I made a movie with John Aaron Frank called LEWISTON, taped one summer day in Kennedy Park in 2002, at the peak of the Somali refugee migration to Maine, and less than a year after the concept of “terrorists” became associated, in many American minds, with guys named Mohamed, despite being far more suited to losers with good Christian names, as we’ve been darkly reminded since. But this was under the surface to us at the time. We were local kids with biblical names sniffing out the scents of what simmered under surfaces. As Aaron puts it, “We saw parts of the city most don’t,” and I think that’s true. The movie arose out of our sparetime as teenagers with fresh driver’s licenses and cobbled-together camera gear, wandering around a tired and honestly pretty grim post-industrial mill community, reinforced with after-hours access to the darkroom at the Sun Journal (where Aaron’s dad was the visuals editor), and some half-formed education in the techniques of Robert Frank, Frederick Wiseman, Dogme 95, Italian neorealism, pre-Obama Shepard Fairey, plus whatever culture pushed its way through the creaky pipes of low-bandwidth dial-up internet, or was smuggled up the actual superhighway of I-95 from Boston and eventually New York, or mailed first class via United States Postal Service from a burgeoning Netflix in those classic matte red envelopes, as valuable and rare as cash sent from China. In 2002, Netflix was a year away from posting a profit, and YouTube wasn’t a thing yet, although eBay had served me well (cheap gear), and Final Cut Pro had just hit the market. Somehow we negotiated access to a Canon XL1 3-CCD MiniDV camera and shotgun mic from the local public access station, in exchange for taping the high school graduation we didn’t participate in.

Looking back, we were probably weirdos. The thing I’ve come to appreciate about Lewiston (and Maine, in general) is that Mainers are pretty harmless weirdos, which makes the assault that much more shocking. Like even when the dark side exists, the typical Mainer prefers to keep it to themselves. Maybe chalk it up to a high value placed on privacy and a Thoreau-like inner life. At least usually. A few years after we made LEWISTON, a white guy bowled a frozen pig head into a Somali mosque on Lisbon Street as some sort of prank. Later, he committed suicide with a semiautomatic in the parking lot of Marden’s during a standoff with police. His MySpace page was littered with memes and creepy jokes—“Happiness is a warm AK-47,” “Welcome to America, now either speak English or leave.” These guys have always been lurking. And so have their machine guns.

Today, all I can say is that who and what we encountered on that summer day in LEWISTON is distinctly not what everyone’s dealing with now. It’s a small movie made by overgrown kids with the privilege to explore, and tape some other kids, all with their lives ahead of them, twenty years ago, poorly preserved, and it is what it is. I don’t love Lewiston, but I’m fond of it. I’m talking about the town and the movie. At the end of the day, it’s just a place where people are trying to do their thing, trying to live their lives. My thing is making movies and I have this one to share.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins
October, 2023

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By James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Originally published in The Brooklyn Rail (July 2014)

On a computer, a vector graphic is the opposite of a raster graphic. A vector is all relative points with no resolution; a raster is all resolution. The raster is resolute, fixed, of this world. It contains the photographic, and if you blow it up, it will appear to degrade. If you pair it with a vector, there will be a contrast, for better or for worse. This is precisely what Vimeo does. Or you could say, this is what it offers. It is a frame which prefers highly processed HD images over older formats. New video images are becoming more processed in an obsessive pursuit of resolution (2K, 4K, 8K, 18K?) in modern camera manufacturing, despite the images being viewed on smaller and smaller screens. So even though the videos we watch on Vimeo have been shrunk and compressed, the ones which fit in the frame best are those which feel most like computer graphics. They’re either photographic images scaled down from huge resolutions, smoothing themselves to simulate computer graphics, or they were born on a computer to begin with.

Yet as 70mm film attests, resolution is nothing new. What’s been added is scale and stability. The smaller a viewing screen, the less visible the pixels. And the more stable the surface of an image (decreased noise, grain, jitter—advances in cameras are accompanied by advances in digital film scanning), the more absolute its resolution feels. These are important aspects reinforced by the graphic-designed “skin” of a website, an operating system, or the sleek brushed aluminum of the device itself. It is a standard to which new images aspire.

I find it funny that the quest for larger and larger resolution is actually the elimination of the concept of resolution. It is a quest for an image that cannot be degraded; the stand-in for reality itself. When reality becomes a vectorized icon. And through this form, content is noticeably affected: more and more moving images enter culture as tidbits and teasers and short, streamable, digestible chunks of data. Icons. This is a broad trend in digital design, as well as popular filmmaking aesthetics. It’s moving image as an idea, a suggestion, a perpetual preview format. Vimeo clearly gets it.1 Its very name is an anagram for “movie”; the thing itself, reconsidered.

Icons are the order of the day—tattoos and Instagrams and online dating and avatars and the relentless war-drumming of self-promotion and marketing and product placement and kickstarting—and we all know this. What matters to me, as a filmmaker, is assessing whether I have autonomy. For instance, I don’t like buying new products to ensure that my movies look competitive. Maybe this is being broke, or maybe it’s an allergic reaction to an overabundance of images—that part of “moving image” now losing its singular appeal. I’m driven more by the “moving” part, the time. I’ve noticed that spending enough time with any format—VHS or 16mm or Flipcam or HD—projected in a dark theater, is equally convincing if shown on its own terms. Bad and good image quality is extremely relative. It’s more about learning a particular language.

Ultimately, Vimeo is just a service responding to the flux. I’d be curious to experience it minus any skin: just videos and hyperlinked text. (You actually have to pay two-fold for that freedom with their “Pro” account. For the site’s public face, I guess it’d be too weird and austere and unfriendly, more like old-man-skin than cool-Brooklyn-skin.) I’m probably overthinking it. Maybe in the same way YouTube has become a medium of quantity, Vimeo is becoming a medium unto itself, one of specific quality responding to technology and the companies that make it; reflecting the reality that moving images are now computer images: frames within frames within frames. Is there any point resisting? I certainly don’t want to be that guy wandering the streets of the East Village like a ghost, insisting nothing is like 16mm. Because a lot of things are only like themselves, and great.

I’m reminded of filmmaker Pedro Costa’s ruminations during a lecture delivered at Tokyo Film School in 2004, notably the same year Vimeo was founded, about his personal attraction to, and conflict with, mainstream imaging tools:

“I have the impression that these little cameras come with … an invisible label—though very visible for me—that says: ‘Move me, move, you can do everything with me.’ That’s not true. Don’t do that with your camera or sound recorder, what the people who make them want. I bought this Panasonic camera but I’m not going to do what Panasonic wants. Things are used for work, cameras, small cameras, they’re very useful, they’re practical, not expensive, but watch out, it’s necessary to work them a lot, and work is the opposite of ease. Ease is the first idea. It’s like a lack of resistance.” 2 3

110 min / S16mm-to-HD / B&W / Stereo / English / USA / 2012

Directed and produced by James N. Kienitz Wilkins
Cinematography by Dan Fridman
Music by Eugene Wasserman

WATCH UNTIL JANUARY 1, 2026:

Rent on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/publichearing

For Substack subscribers, free rental link below:

https://vimeo.com/r/3UYC/T3JaMFpUQW

METROGRAPH

• TONIGHT: Still Film preceded by Moon v. State + James in discussion w/ artist/performer/writer Jess Barbagallo

• Sat, Aug 2, 3:45p: Mediums preceded by Special Features + discussion w/ Matthew Shen Goodman (Editor in Chief, The Baffler)

• Sat, Aug 3, 6p: Indefinite Pitch and This Action Lies + discussion w/ Sir Joey Frank

• Sun, Aug 4, 12p: Common Carrier + discussion w/ filmmaker Sierra Pettengill + Robin Schavoir (performer)

• Sun, Aug 4, 2:10p: The Plagiarists + discussion w/ Professor of the Practice Hon. Dr. David Levine + Robin Schavoir (co-director/co-writer)

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

• Fri, Aug 9, 6:30p: Public Hearing as part of VERBATIM series

• Fri, Aug 9, 9:15p: Mediums as part of VERBATIM series

ONLINE

• Watch The Plagiarists on Metrograph’s streaming platform

READINGS

• Discussing everything with Gabriel Abrantes

• Discussing documentary filmmaking with Ryan Swen

• Discussing Still Film with Mike Sauve

SPECIAL FEATURE

Spec trailer for Public Hearing, 3 min, 16mm, 2007

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