Show me something that does not move: an interview with angelicism01

For some, Film01 recalled Infinite Jest – not the book itself, but the film within it, that “total entertainment” experience lobotomizing anyone who watched it into eternal bliss. As far as I know, Film01 hasn’t left anyone catatonic, but a lot of people felt there was a “before” and “after” when it came to the screening experience. DFW kind of opened the doors to the canon of new sincerity. Do you feel the film and angelicism itself belong to any particular movement?
I would say “angelicism” was the name of an impossible “movement”, one almost designed to vanish as a sign of what it tried to name. Something similar might be said of Film01. The 10hr version shown in Milan is especially impossible; it is an impossible film to watch, and I’m not even sure it is a film or movie. In a way it’s just FILM. That would be a better title. Like with Playboi Carti’s MUSIC, a title so universal you can’t even use it as a search term. In your documentation for the Milan screening of the film, we can see people kissing, sleeping, resting, looking at phones, and this is something we encouraged. I don’t mind the film not being seen. It seems to me indecent right now that any film gets seen or wants you to see it. Since Film01 was a kind of placeholder name, perhaps the film has not yet even had a name.

ⓢ This year marks the 70th anniversary of the release of the first Godzilla, which embodied the trauma of the atomic bomb. Is it accurate to say Film01 does something similar with the specter of extinction?
Angelicism has magnetized the word “extinction” in a way that has usually been misunderstood. But in very basic terms, yes, it’s as if the viewer is confronted by a problem of greater proportions than the one that faced the atomic scientists working in contest with Hitler’s will during the time of the camps. We have to move beyond distinctions between the nuclear, the danger of AI and global warming. Extinction qua extinction names all that; it acts as a threat that can remove humanity from the field of play. So the film takes as its hidden object this new type of “bomb scare”. Extinction is a plastic bomb that can wipe out the future of the future itself, and the film is a space for this as a question.

ⓢ If I’m not mistaken, you’re dealing with a wave of haters, counterfeits, and malicious clones, one might say, apocryphal ones. Or maybe it’s nothing new. What’s going on?
It’s actually remarkable to consider that during an extinction event an art object that tries to carry the trace of that event would be attacked so much. But it makes sense. And all it means is, literally, accepting that the worst will come. Our names and faces don’t matter. We are in the middle of the post posterity storm. And this is what we get, what we will get. What we become. The attacks on all of us will get worse, and it is always down to some “we” to be the subject of them. This is because “we” got the subject right. We were right on the mark. We are marked out because our engagement is with the deep trace of extinction, which nobody wants to own. Say if you want, the online hater is a function or carrier of the truth of extinction – and they are not only that, they are its truth. Online hate carries the truth of the threat of extinction.

ⓢ Tell me about Bianca Censori.
I still remember the start of 2024 when the best art online was Ye posting paparazzi shots of Bianca Censori on his instagram. Ye was looking for an image and it seemed like he was finding an image. His work felt close to Film01 in that moment. I even felt like Ye was working on Film01. Because the search for an image to remember a final century by is what the film is about. Now, what happened was that Ye stopped posting images like that and his grid changed. He put out the AI video with Jon Rafman, which I found boring. But it was actually because of the BackGrid legal suit in August, which accuses Ye of copyright infringement for sharing ten of their photos on his own grid. Ye was taking the photos of paparazzi and presenting them as if they were by Yeezy, and in fact they were by Yeezy, because he “signed” them. Art in 2024 is about images of Bianca because it is this attempt to find an image otherwise.

ⓢ Speaking of your previous answer, I’ve always liked to think of Kim Kardashian as more of a house than a person.
Yes, houses. I like the fact Bianca is an architect. Film01 has a lot to do with architecture because we’re trying to fold the film back into the space around it. Like in Milan, I was interested in what was happening outside the screening. Not what was being said about the film outside the screening, but what was happening in the sky or what the buildings opposite looked like. After seeing your documentation for the film, I dreamt about being in a concentration camp space where the future extinct were housed. Their limbs were too cold and I was lifting them up on metal stools and pouring warm water on them. I was crying because I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t get them warm. The camp looked  like the factory space in Reservoir Dogs.

ⓢ Oh wow, I’d love to give more people concentration camp vibes with my images. You cited Jon Rafman, which I find to be the most boring artist of this decade. Probably also of the previous one. How distant does the term ‘post-internet’ feel to you?
I think the post-internet generation is extinct. I don’t fuck with them at all. I don’t fuck with anything. Art as a whole is extinct. Godard said this in the first part of Histoire(s) du cinéma and then relapsed back into political filmmaking. There is a line in the Cohen/Ye/Bianca Cut of Film01 that we showed in April in NYC, “I fuck with nothing”. You asked at the start whether angelicism belongs to a new movement, and no, we don’t. Angelicism has no contemporaries. I fuck with nothing.

ⓢ Will you mint Film01 in 2031?
I don’t know what will become of Film01, it doesn’t matter.

ⓢ Your link with Godard is very strong. Do you also think he was the most influential artist of the 20th century? Or, like Lacan used to say, is it Freud?
I don’t really feel linked to Godard in any strong way, certainly not as a filmmaker. I don’t think of myself as part of cinema, that’s just a trap. But Godard did one decisive thing in Histoire(s) du cinéma, I mean beyond all the formal innovation. He invented a kind of conspiracy cinema. The thesis that the first part of Histoire(s) contains is actually very contemporary with the most advanced forms of true conspiracy theory, or “dark WW2”. Most people just repeat that in Histoire(s) Godard said that cinema is over; but that isn’t really what he said. Godard said that cinema was over for a precise reason that changes everything: because it failed in that moment (the Second world war) to depict the camps. It chose entertainment over its own powers of documentation, and this means for Godard the deep complicity between cinema itself and the holocaust. After that, everything Godard did feels redundant to me. It doesn’t matter whether one makes a beautiful film, because the lesson Godard brings to cinema is too fundamental. The question remains of the update. If cinema failed in that moment, why would it not fail in this one, and how?

ⓢ Do you care about “going mainstream”? Or is angelicism not possible without gatekeeping?
Originally, in 2021, when angelicism first had some kind of niche virality, it was probably because I had given up caring about posterity. There is this thing R.S. Bakker says about how all art now is post-posterity art. Like, for centuries we made art and wrote things with the horizon of future readers and viewers intact. Now we don’t have that, so careers actually make no sense at all. When angelicism was all about trolling, this too was a function of post-posterity art. Like, you can argue that the end of the world doesn’t negate the will to power, the will to mastery, but actually I think it does. And that is the type of experience that has some kind of residual beauty now. In fact, only that. Only this experience of dissolution. ​But I do want angelicism to be more abstract, and I think abstraction is something I don’t understand yet.

ⓢ Speaking of an earlier era of angelicism, I think we can agree on the fact that corecore is gone. Do you see anything similar on the horizon, on TikTok or elsewhere?
Show me something that isn’t moving.

ⓢ The other day, I watched a trailer for a third-person video game where the protagonist is a nun, but it’s not in third person—it’s the POV of the devil trying to seduce her. Does that resonate with you at all? I am interested in the directorial gaze you infused the movie with.
My job was to absent myself from the process I was often guiding in detail, or provoking. I acted as a kind of “prompt”. For “director”, substitute “designer”, or simply “empty space”. Because, in fact, the film was made thanks to empty space. I think I said somewhere that the 01 is the point of view of extinction, which will not be admitted to the history of cinema, as Godard showed. It has to remain slightly unclear to me what that means. I wanted to be more absent than any other director in the history of cinema, though empirically speaking, I was forced to take hold of a film I had tried to give to others even in the act. In that sense, the film must remain as if by nobody, with no point of view, from no person, and this is why in most cases it has been presented as a blank (white) file without any names attached. I wanted it to arrive in filmhouses as if from completely outside the history of cinema, and for the precise reasons I am giving. If cinematic ontology takes over the film, which it will always try to do, then the film itself is taken over by hermeneutic relapse. As Godard says, this flame, the flame of cinema as thought, was forever blown out in Auschwitz, and those who still say cinema thinks have simply forgotten, as they must, what Godard thinks. Godard himself was the first to begin this work of forgetting.

In this zone, “angelicism01” simply becomes a classificatory term for the field of space of the film itself. And Film01, or FILM, is also actually several films at once. It refuses the work of forgetting by putting outside itself an extra set of frames. These frames are direction viewed anew. I dream of a film that exists apart from the director that made it. Duras, whose cinema we watched a lot while showing the film around the world, said that making a film takes “strong desire”. Let’s say that “strong desire” is real direction; it’s the ability to act as if one can never forget.

In this sense, the “I” of the movie is, yes, devilish. Because the only “I” that can never forget is, perhaps, the “I” of AI. This is why the film says at one point, «I am AI, I am AI, I am AI».

ⓢ Baudrillard said that the fashion industry is an industry of death: to survive, it must cyclically kill the interest in the objects it produces. I had the distinct impression that Film01 was somehow informed by the semiotic logics of this world. Maybe you’ve worked within it. Am I wrong? In any case, what’s your relationship with fashion?
I was the casting agent for the film. Or rather, in its early stages, angelicism was itself a kind of conceptual casting agency. The “angelicism girls” (Lola, Sierra, Chloe, and Emilia) were like a series of models inside the film. I didn’t want the film to just be montage. I wanted the documentary aspect of seeing how someone looked during an extinction event. When you see the angelicism girls on the street in NYC in the film, you are meant to be looking at a fashion shoot with no real content other than the question, do human beings feel extinction? Bresson spoke of “models” too. The angelicism girls, with their angelicism tees, were meant to be even more emptied out than Bressonian models.

I’ve become fascinated through reading Laurence Rickels with a moment in an Adorno letter to Benjamin from 1935 in which he says the recent past is the most suppressed, the most explosive. And this would include fashion. Fashion is always coded as the now, or rather as the coming seasons. Fashion is already SS 2025. Film01 makes no effort to repress the recent past, it does not exist on a fashion timeline.

ⓢ This leads me to another question. Why is Film01 so sexy? Malicious tongues would say sexist. Maybe it’s just the omen of death flying around it.
Sexiness is interesting. The supplementary element here, once again, is extinction. Extinction as concept, mode, feeling. Are sex and extinction, not just death, now related? Why has the entirety of the contemporary cinema failed to ask this question in outward if not inward form? This is what the history of the internet discloses for us.

ⓢ I agree, sexiness is indeed linked to extinction. Angelicism, Andy Warhol, Bernadette Corporation: some phenomena only seem possible in New York. What’s your relationship with the city? I mean, NYC is definitely one of the characters of the movie, along with Lola, Sierra and the others…
NYC is a giant nipple. Recently we made a Warhol Cut of the movie, which was a “folded” split-screen version of the 10hr Paradise Cut. And obviously we were thinking of Warhol’s extended “torture” cinema, not just Chelsea Girls but also his 25hr film Four Stars (also known as ****). These are NYC films, but for us duration is connected once again to extinction in various ways. In the Paradise Cut much more time is given to “the walkers” of the movie. I always wanted to see a movie that was just uncut footage of characters walking. When you see Spiraljette and Sierra and War Criminal walking on the streets of NYC you are seeing these “characters” who are not acting, have no lines, they are not being told what to do or be. The city is there in the background but often in a banal way. At another moment, Emilia is shot by War Criminal reading the first pages of Heidegger’s Being and Time in Dimes Deli. That isn’t something I “directed”. I simply asked for footage in the most general sense. And the characters decided what that footage would be. The NYC psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster told me she didn’t like the signifier “girls” in “angelicism girls”. But I think “girls” has always been a beautiful New York signifier. And the girl carries with her a trace of extinction she can’t want to see. We can see her not seeing it. And towards the end of the 10hr version of the film there is a long walking shot of “characters” leaving Jamieson Webster’s angelicism experimental group psychoanalysis session. So the movie becomes a kind of documentary about the psychoanalysis of extinction in those moments. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But what if we never can make it again? The nipple of NYC falls off, so to speak.

ⓢ Is your work really about extinction? Or is it about something else? I do feel that, in the film, extinction is more of a spice than an ingredient, but feel free to tell me to fuck off. Maybe it’s just me being more interested in the wellbeing of my cat rather than the destiny of the human race.
We speak in English of something being a “dead certainty”. Something as certain as death. That’s certain. That’s done. It’s over. But can the same type of certainty attach to extinction? What interests me is something more like a “perhaps extinction”. Perhaps extinction is coming, and ours is a unique instance of life (“Earth”). Or perhaps the universe is teeming with life and “extinction” has no real granularity as a concept. There is an angelicism meme that captured this in 2022. It simply said, “there is no universe, there is no extinction”. But it seems to me that as soon as we say, “there is no extinction”, we have something we are trying to deny away. Which is why it seems safer, and more beautiful, to be on the side of the perhaps. Nietzsche after all referred to “dangerous perhapses”. Angelicism is, if you like, infinite in both directions. Godard’s gift was to see film and the camps were inseparable. The failure to document the camps at the time was not just extraneous, it was something imparted to cinema on the inside, and this makes avant garde cinema no different from Hollywood. Look at Rüdiger Suchsland’s documentary Hitler’s Hollywood for example. Certainly we can ignore this trace of the camps and refuse to update it to a trace of extinction, but then we are back in the place of needing to keep something out. I would say that Film01 is this very zone, and not really a film. The reasons should be clear. An extinct certainty, perhaps.

ⓢ You’ve always been associated with the scene that emerged from dimes square. I never quite understood the degree to which you relate to this phenomenon. And by phenomenon I mean all that shitposting, leftism, crypto, fascist occultism, and cyber-libertarianism that all congeal together into an amorphous – and nihilistic – cultural blob.
I’m not interested in all that anymore. “Dimes” to me was just a manipulable symbol. For a while what it actually meant was beauty. Those who remember 2021 know that. It was a meme, sure, but now it’s just what I’d call a race-to-the-bottom aesthetic. That might have been interesting in itself, in another age, on a superhabitable earth. But the question comes round, how many centuries do you think we have down the line?

ⓢ Do you believe in accelerationism? Do you use drugs?
No, no.

ⓢ Herzog apparently loves Keeping up with the Kardashians. I’d like to know your guilty pleasures when it comes to entertainment.
Yeah, I heard that Joan Didion watched Fox News during the early Trump years. I don’t really see culture in terms of “guilty pleasures”, because like I’ve been saying, the whole of culture is that now. Perhaps hatewatching is a better term. Sometimes I love watching CNN for example even though I hate them because they are lying. But a CNN segment on Trump can be a deliciously layered thing as what Robert Pfaller called “interpassive enjoyment”. You get to analyze your own hate.

ⓢ By the time this article will be published, the American elections will be gone. Are you going to vote?
Trump is another sign for me. I’ve always been interested in him as a sign. Right now he is making “trash” and “garbage” into a sign. He’s another great NYC figure. I would weep if Trump won on the night next week, but only because I fuck with what Kant says in the Analytic of the Sublime. What does that mean? Well, I used to think Trump was beautiful and now I just think he’s sublime. In fact, he’s not just the sublime, he’s the dynamical sublime. The idea that he is an existential threat to the species is strange, given that it was hardly Donald Trump that got us to this point. Everyone knows that right? So here he is, riding the garbage truck, and that’s what comes after, after the beautiful. And won’t we have hated that?

ⓢ Yesterday I started watching Serial Experiments Lain for the first time (yeah, I know, being late on this), and I’m noticing a lot of parallels with Film01. The most intriguing one is the authors’ hope that only Japanese audiences would enjoy it, almost as if they wanted Americans not to “get” it. In a sense, it critiques how much Japan has been culturally colonized by the West. Are you into anime? Or just into the aesthetics? Remilia seems very into this.
I’m not into anime. As a critic, I did write about Remilia. There’s an interesting gap in contemporary legacy art discourse where angelicism and Remilia are. These are skipped by art magazines and venues as if they don’t exist, and for precise reasons. But Remilia is no longer what I would call an extinction imaginary, so it has lost potency for me. I think animation, AI, LLMs, cinema, memecoins, all these things go together. What is amazing about them is how quickly they become obsolescent. This obsolescence-effect is itself amazing, a form of very advanced “tech”. Show me something that does not move. NFTs were over before they began, right? And that’s what’s stunning. There’s a very fine art to that speed. Show me something that does not move.

ⓢ I mentioned Herzog before because, in some way, the way you intertwine images with music and words reminded me of his approach. Though it seems to me you have a much sharper musical sensibility.
Let’s recall that angelicism movies pass through many hands. What’s remarkable about Film01 is that in any one 10 minute segment at least 5 or 6 different editors may be involved. And then if we add to this that some of the footage being used within those edits is already montage, then we have this perhaps unique situation in the history of cinema. Group-editing. But the overall style of Film01, musically for example, originates in something like the meme video or instagram edit, which then became the corecore edit. There is the use of snippets and hints and then longer blocks of sound. There is a moment in Herzog’s Fata Morgana where two or three Leonard Cohen songs are used in their entirety back to back as images of the desert pass by. That had an impact on me. Messiaen is also used throughout Film01, especially his piano music from the Second world war. But when we talk about our own movies in this way, what are we actually doing? What is being left out? What is the interest assumed? The difficult thing is not to relapse into being a connoisseur and collector of one’s own work.

ⓢ Is it true that you cannot get Stendhal’s Syndrome from contemporary art? Or, when was the last time you saw something interesting in a gallery or a museum?
I think you can, yes. It seems real. I never go to galleries or museums.

ⓢ Why, if I may ask? Is this why you were very adamant, especially at the beginning, about not being screened in galleries?
I don’t know why I never go to galleries or museums. Haven’t we already seen that image has gone?
Yes, to begin with there was a definite decision to show the film in cinemas. We had this internet film, but I wanted the movie to appear for the first time in real cinemas, and not just in a “group show” or “festival film” context. Film01 was first shown in NYC in three cinemas on the night of 5 June 2023 and still has no internet release. Even though certain aspects of the movie are complete, the film itself remains “in production”. Film01 can be framed in so many ways, cinema is just one of them, and should not be allowed to dominate. One way of framing the film is as an art object. And as art object it seemed interesting to show it first of all in a cinema house.

ⓢ I’ve always loved your annual lists gathering the year’s trends. Give me some theoretical gossip for 2025.
I don’t know really. I don’t cathect anymore. I don’t cathect with culture as it stands.

ⓢ What’s next for angelicism? And what’s after Film01.
Perhaps the fact that there will have been nothing next.

*
This interview is featured in issue 61 of Rivista Studio, “Digital Underground”. You can find it in our online store (here).