The following Q&A took place following the 10-year-anniversary screening of Isiah Medina’s 88:88 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver (September 29, 2025), presented by DIM Cinema.
Steffanie Ling: 88:88 is described as an experimental documentary, but I want to conjure two moments from critical appraisals of 88:88 that are not necessarily specifically about the film but instead note conditions of contemporary “experimental” cinema that Isiah’s cinema agitates.
To me, both of these statements made within appraisals of 88:88 resonate as indictments of experimental cinematic form (or at least the ones circulating within the experimental strands of mainstay festivals) for trafficking a kind of romanticism. I have seen my fair share of those forms these strands, which do tend to train audiences to assume arbitrariness or romanticism in or as experimentation. Coldiron continues, “88:88 is a real experiment, which means that its failures, or what appear to be its failures, themselves produce thought…“
These particular statements stand out because they raise two questions: how did the “experimental” become unhinged from structures of thought, and how do audiences become trained to assume arbitrariness in presentations of the experimental?
If we think about what experiments are in the “scientific” sense—experiments are not exercises in capturing poetic contingencies, which are although very nice, and have their place in certain aesthetic regimes, are not experiments. Experiments have a hypothesis, a method, an application of the method - there are calculated risks, failures, and most importantly—most ideally—experiments cause shifts in thought. This is very much true of anything that seeks to make a change in the way we are in the world, from physics to class war. When these shifts happen, often and especially if you are poor, racialized, or socially marginalized in any way, the response is very simply “how dare you?” How dare you deign to put a wrinkle in this equilibrium?
Isiah has attributed this kind of reaction to an aversion to philosophy. He has said, “I think a lot of people simply hate philosophy and the fact we’re poor and coloured and speaking philosophy makes them doubly hate it.” I interpret this kind of reaction to the possibility that the nakedly philosophical may simply make people feel dumb and that it’s not so much hatred of philosophy as a displaced hatred of one’s own finitude. Interestingly, one of the most decisive criticisms that this film offers is that elites do not have a monopoly on intellectual life, and that the epistemological dualism of science and art, maintained most consequentially as divisions of manual and mental labour, is entirely false. Therefore, under the reunification of philosophical conception and material execution, even the haters could theoretically transcend their own limitations.
Such divisions are reinterpreted in Isiah’s formal preoccupation with infinity produced within the cut where the edges of experience are rearranged and renegotiated to challenge cinema’s structure, the dimensional limitations of narrative, and the capacity for language to mediate truth weighed against the forceful articulation of montage.
In the film, his comrade describes losing his trust in infinity for four months. The dialogue reveals that he didn’t have a home for that time. Isiah’s voice in the film insists, these are political questions. This film has so many moments like this where Isiah and his friends identify the finitude of feeling like an animal who is only certain of its own death. 88:88 documents the casual connections that are possible between comrades who have love, friendship, honesty, and critical thinking, which feel unreal because of reigning problems with class identification when we think about the figures we conjure when we ask who philosophizes and who works?
Theorizing infinity as a young person living with no heat or electricity, underemployed, surveilled and surrounded by violence but also time to fill it with poetry, relationships, philosophy, and movies, it contains the possibility of an imminent threat to capital — when the working and struggling class begin to politicize houselessness and hunger. 88:88 insists, that moments in life where we connect material conditions to epistemological ones are not privileged terrain, they are necessary for getting through the crazy-making exchanges required of us under capitalism.
Anniversaries tend to be an opportunity to look at the past, but for Isiah, his cinema has always tended to the future which is full of more things to be said and thought as the film continues to provoke and change with the historical forces that compel the subjects in his film. Despite being structurally identical to anniversaries, birthdays tend to be celebrations of what’s to come. 88:88 is a film that invites us to philosophize about how we’re going to conduct better ways of living, at the very least, among a small cadre of comrades. So, instead of happy tenth anniversary, I want to say happy tenth birthday to 88:88, a film that like any revolutionary program, contains conditions and qualities of a future to be lived and demonstrates possibilities for emancipatory praxis through art and filmmaking.
I wanted to accompany this celebration of the future of 88:88 with a meeting of minds between Isiah and political philosopher, Alberto Toscano who has been significant in Isiah’s intellectual universe. So, be sure to stick around for that. The film is 65 minutes, following by a 30–40-minute discussion between Isiah and Alberto and a 15-minute Q&A. A final note that there is periodical flickering, if this presents any discomfort, I hope you’ll find it helpful to close your eyes momentarily. Please enjoy the film.
Alberto Toscano: Alright. Well, thanks a lot, Steff, for organizing this and for inviting us to have this somewhat, or very, improvised dialogue. As I was saying before to Steff, for a number of years when I was living in London, film screening discussions, film clubs, kind of punctuated my intellectual and part of even my political life. So I’m very glad to have this opportunity as well.
It’s a really remarkable film, and I can say that I watched it, but I’ve only seen it now because YouTube on a laptop is really not a cinematic experience, though one that obviously fits in with a number of themes and elements of the film, not least the pervasive presence of all sorts of subsidiary and non-cinematic screens. There were kind of three themes that I wanted to talk about, and then maybe we can digress and explore from there.
And I guess those three themes were reading cuts and abstraction in some way. The reading is an obvious one. Obviously, it’s a film in which there is a stupendous amount of reading in many different varieties, both of physical books, of screen text. We hear text being read. We see messages being read, et cetera. And I was thinking whilst watching it of a few things. One was the obvious interpolation. I was like, some of those words are not my words, but I wrote them because I translated them. So there was that jarring moment.
So a couple of texts by Alan Badiou that appear, one of them fairly recursively in the film and the other one from Badiou’s The Century just once. But I was thinking more, aside from the personal interpolation, I was thinking more about the way that both reading and philosophy are featured in films and histories of cinema that I’m acquainted with. An obvious reference, which is also a reference for Alan Badiou being, and I know for you, being Jean-Luc Godard. But I was thinking about how different the place of reading and of texts is in this film.
Because often, for instance, in Godard’s films, just to take the obvious paragon, the books themselves, the physical books themselves have this kind of citational quality and philosophy and very emblematic, often, philosophical phrases. And in fact, even very emblematic, like book designs kind of appear in a whole set of Godard films. Sometimes philosophers appear as well, like very briefly, Alan Badiou in his socialism film.
But the philosophy and the books and the reading have a very different valence, very different register in your film. On the one hand, the texts that you’re reading are, you’re often reading some of the most complex, or we’re seeing some of the most fiendishly complex or nigh unimpenetrableaspects of those books. And philosophy, obviously, and the books themselves are woven in with everyday life of the people on your filming and of yourself in a very different way.
So I was just wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about that, about the pervasiveness of texts and of reading and all their various genres, including the way they even make it into the hip-hop rhymes at times, and so on and so forth. And maybe more broadly about the place of philosophy in your making of this film.
Isiah Medina: Well, I guess when it comes to the books, too, I think what’s really interesting is that a lot of the times, like you were saying, they’re reading off screens. Because it could also be related to the time it’s being filmed, because obviously everyone could download a bunch of PDFs, so you have more of an instant access to it. And that’s why a lot of people wonder why the text messages are shot horizontal rather than vertical. That’s because I have bad eyes, and maybe your friends do, too. So we put the phone sideways, obviously, it’s easier to read the PDFs and zoom in.
But also in terms of those complicated or big ontological books that are constantly being quoted. I just wanted to take away this idea that they’re difficult. Because if you’re hanging out with your friends and you’re reading it, I don’t know, what’s the problem? And if you film it, too. And if you watch it again and you watch it again, these words feel less and less heavy. When I was, like, 13 or so, I read Althusser’s For Marx. Of course, you first read the page and, [are] like, what’s going on here? You just read it again. And usually, like most things, you just do it again. And you can figure it out. But you just kind of get used to things.
Like when people critique certain films for being, quote-unquote, difficult, or yada yada, just watch it again, and you’ll kind of acclimate to it. So I just want to, rather than the most obvious quotations or phrases, take a deep dive and jump right in and try to swim with the stuff. But also, it’s not just reading, right? Because I’m going to show some frames and cuts and images and sounds to interact with what you’re hearing.
For example, this is actually not a quote, but when you hear Big L say, “I wasn’t poor, I was po, I couldn’t afford the O.R.” Right? That comes up a couple times. But later on, it comes back again, with P or non-P. Like this possibility of choosing in classical logic. And then when he says, “I wasn’t poor, I was po, I couldn’t afford the O.R.” You couldn’t afford the or. You couldn’t afford the very choice between P or non-P. So I wanted to just show how, in the deep sense, how accessible it is. Because a lot of me and my friends grew up on Big L, but also on this logic stuff.
I just wanted to show there is no necessary dichotomy. It’s like, I don’t know, when I talked to some people when I was younger, obviously it’s not that, maybe it’s not this issue now. When someone listens to a rap song and thinks, oh, it’s too fast, or I don’t really understand what’s being said, or English is used in a different way, you just listen again. And whether it’s a rap verse you’re trying to memorize or learn better, or Badiou, or in set theory, I think you just listen to it again. And I just want to show that sort of accessibility to enjoying, like, and enjoying it. Because you hang out with your friends, you’re talking about certain things.
And also because I don’t go to school for this. I’m a movie-maker, an old-fashioned picture maker in the picture-making business. I’m not in this academic world in that sense. And I got critiqued a lot, like, why would you have that in the movie? In the sense of, this is too difficult for poor people, working-class people. But it’s false. You can see, it’s fine.
And I just think it’s evil propaganda to say that we’re not able to think like this. Because I always like to joke, and it’s not really a joke, philosophy is easy, making cinema is easy, everything is easy. Poverty is hard. That’s tough. But all this other stuff, we’re just having a good time. And I think just to kind of show that there’s no inherent difficulty in thinking anything at all, actually. Because when you have nothing, at least you can think. And you can’t take that away from me.
So I want to kind of show the deep pleasure of thinking, even if I don’t have lights, if I don’t have heat. If you don’t have love, you don’t have anything. Or even that, it doesn’t really cost anything. So I just want to kind of present the beauty and joy of thinking without any constraints, because there are no constraints. Yeah, you can download the PDF, but you can’t afford the hard copy or something. And if not, it’s like, we could talk to each other and learn the math on our own, or make a movie.
And I just want to show that simplicity, because I feel like even today, there’s a lot of propaganda that making cinema is hard. It’s false. You know, get a phone right now. You can make a classic if you really want to. You know, I just think this idea that you need a billion dollars and some genocide money and all sorts of different things to be able to make a motion picture, and a screenplay, and assistant director, and a script supervisor. No, it’s not true. You don’t need too much.
And that’s why I got interested in this stuff, questions of philosophy, since so much of philosophy begins with—a lot of great systems, let’s say, begin with the concept of nothing. And from there build up their system, whether it’s like Hegel, or Badiou, whatever. For me, that name of nothing was 88:88, because we experienced this type of nothing, this having nothing of poverty. And from there, I thought I could build everything else up from it. So it’s this idea that we can always think when we have nothing, and we even think nothing itself. And from there I built up everything I wanted to think with, but also by still having this primacy of cinema over books, to be honest.
That’s why I wanted to show that they’re always reading, but a lot of the people are always just filming throughout the movie, hanging out, just pulling out their phone, pulling out the camera. And this sort of other battle, too, not a battle, but this other tension, between we could read our way through things, we could shoot our way through things, and how to think these things together. And what is there, is there something in cinema that isn’t available necessarily in language.
I mean, that’s why I was inspired by all this stuff with the mathematics and the work of Badiou, for instance, or in general, with math. This idea that you could think without language, or like painting, maybe, right? Or some music. That there’s a possibility of thinking without language, and it’s not mystical, it’s not irrational. It’s concrete and stuff. So this relationship was interesting to me.
AT: That’s great. I mean, one of the things that kind of really struck me is that very often, whether it’s philosophy or just books and texts in general, when that material appears, it’s in a didactic mode, and this is extremely non-didactic. I mean, it’s a film where clearly the books and the concepts weave in and out of people’s perception and consciousness and everyday life, but it’s not about teaching. It’s not about, or even like, some kind of linear process of learning.
So I found, in a sense, the kind of egalitarianism of making it quotidian and not giving it a sort of place where it’s the explanation for what’s happening in the film, nor is it the kind of telos or the goal that you will kind of enter into the concept or enter into philosophy. So I like the fact also just out of the familiarity that the Hegel was sitting next to the bottle of wine and next to the Tupac toys and so on and so forth, right, rather than thinking that there’s a sense of a perceptual and intellectual hierarchy where these things sit over there.
IM: Exactly. I think also, yeah, seeing Tupac and then hearing the Big L and my friend’s poetry and his rapping and some of my poetry, he raps some of it, and a lot of poetry is just whatever poems I have in my pocket up there, and I ask my friend to read it, and vice versa, their poems. But yeah, having those poems, but also we hear Parmenides’ poem in it, too, and just to have that equality of how we construct our relation between thinking and being, et cetera. So I thought I wanted to have a film where I can hear my friend freestyling and Parmenides and know that I react to him in a very similar way in how he constructs how I see the world.
AT: I mean, among many other things, this is obviously also a kind of staggering and stunning also, in the physiological sense, work of montage or of cutting. And so perhaps I thought it’d be interesting to think more through that. Obviously, the affinity with Badiou or indeed Hegel or certain forms of philosophy clearly has something to do with that. You talked about the attraction of these ways about thinking from nothingness.
The question of subjectivity comes up also in various ways in the film. But I was also thinking in a more technical or in a more prosaically technical sense of the big differences in what montage means with the kind of filmic tools but also the kind of perceptual habits, let’s say, that we have, including the fact that everybody engages in constant activities of montage on their sundry devices and modalities of communication and so on.
So it made me really think, watching the film, about what happens to editing and the cut in terms both of our media sphere, for want of a particularly ugly word, but also just in terms of everyday life and everyday engagement with images and how deep that kind of logic of cutting and montage and breaks goes into the everyday. Also I very much noticed the way that you have a kind of interweaving of different rhythmic forms, including the poetry and the hip-hop and the text themselves as well as the rhythm and the temporality that you impose in the film through your own practice of montage. So I was just wondering if you had more to say about that and how that relates to the engagement with philosophy that you just talked about.
IM: Well, I think also because, of course, cinema is a little over 125 years old, so there’s not too much to think about. You could look at what happened and kind of get a good idea of what should happen next. It’s only 125 years. You could take an honest look and take a gamble. So when you look at Griffith and he goes to Eisenstein and there’s Hitchcock and Welles and Godard, yada yada, and you could go to Frampton. But you could kind of see, I think, some minimal idea of progress. And I feel like I’m against those people who think, oh, there’s no progress in art. I think it’s false. I think October is better than Birth of a Nation. Sorry, everyone. There is art. And in terms of cutting and how we think these things. What I’m really inspired by is this notion that there are infinite infinities. So there are some infinities that are larger than the other ones.
And it’s a very powerful idea. And for me, thinking with cinema is that you could use the cut in movies to think infinity. Because just like in mathematics, infinity is like a cut in the number line. The omega interrupts the count. And then we make a recollection of what was before. But in cinema, when a cut occurs, you sort of mentally recollect what you just saw. So it has a structure of that first infinity. And that’s why you see a lot of the omega symbol in [the film]. And even see my friend putting his hands up like this. Because it looks like the omega.
AT: And the armband.
IM: Yeah, and the armband. And the rest of the count. But also when the handcuffs are open, it looks like the omega symbol. And I wanted to play with that too. But that’s just images. Images, whatever. The cut is what’s really interesting to me. Because that’s what makes cinema what it is. Without that, you just have photography. And organizing reality through these cuts, I think, is not necessarily… Obviously, I have more access to technology. If I was a movie maker in the 20th century, I don’t know if I’m going to get hired, you know. But in the 21st century, I have my phone. I can save some money to get a camera. And that’s really important.
But more a question of access than, let’s say, being addicted to my phone and seeing a lot of images. I feel like this is a false question. It’s like a sophist type thing. Like, yeah, sure. A lot of stuff. But I think we have to make some axioms of how we’re going to construct how we’re going to cut. And I do think that’s something cinema gives us. So, yeah, when I see development from Gance, Griffith, and then Eisenstein keeps changing, I can see what cut is next. And since I’ve beentrying to study these infinities too, it’s like, okay, you’ll have like the lower one with omega and then later on with the zero sharp. And, you know, just kind of keep going.
And I think there’s new cuts being developed. So, for me, I think in a classical way of cutting, there’s shot A and there’s shot B, right? And then you get another idea from them. But when I edit, because I’m editing digitally, I could go from like, I could make a shot from the very relation between shot A and shot B. I could export it. So now that’s a shot AB. And then I could do that with C, D, E, F and export it. Okay, it’s another shot.
So instead, I have two shots. One shot’s AB and one shot’s like CDEF. And I could find all these new rhythms in between these two shots instead, right? So we’re out of this classical relationship of two shots make a cut. And in fact, I tried to invert it so instead it’s not that shots make cuts. It’s the opposite. It’s the cuts are making the shots. You know, it’s kind of like the Copernicus thing where you thought the earth was in the center and then it’s the sun. People think that we put images together to make cuts. I’m against that. I think that cuts make the images in a very deep sense.
It’s not even abstract. Look at your editing timeline in digital. You just have this big space that’s already a cut and you start throwing things in there. Kind of like what they call like big V in mathematics and everything and you start, you know, you start thinking. So that’s how I try to organize my thought. I think, I look at the history of cinema and try to think, okay, what’s the next move? And whether it’s perspective or cubism or like with Malevich, every time there’s some interesting moment where a form is invented there’s some interaction with contemporary mathematics or something like that too. So I thought, okay, what about cinema? We could maybe think set theory to think these new forms to at least guide us or give us a way in, you know. And I think that’s really interesting.
And I will obviously have a little joke too because yeah, I’m on a movie set all day and if I’m on a movie set, maybe if I have a movie set theory it could give me an honest hand. So that type of thing really intrigues me because yeah, like we were talking about, you know, there’s a joke I’ve always liked. Samuel Delany quoted someone saying when you’re 20 and you’re a poet it just means you’re 20 but when you’re 40 and you’re a poet you’re probably a poet, right? And I think we’re all making little movies on our phone, you know, but if you’re going to continue you can keep thinking what it is too.
I try to use cinema as if it’s philosophy in a sense. Because in the same way philosophy bases stuff on this nothing and then all of a sudden, like with Badiou let’s say there’s love, politics, science, and art and he kind of montages these things to invent this system, right? But I have the real montage machine in some of these sets, you know what I mean? And all these experiences of love, science, politics, art will be montaged with my cut as a form of nothing that will organize all these other nothings to think it and see it. There’s a different level of simultaneity, et cetera, that I could do that I can’t do when I’m looking at a book, right?
So that really excites me because when you’re with your lover and you take a picture or take a video of your vacation, that’s probably part of your procedure, thinking of your love or recording your friend doing their poetry or et cetera. But also when you’re talking about this relation to the books too, I just really think there’s a way to live it. That’s why if Plato goes and checks out Socrates’ court case, he’s going to go and write it down as a documentary or a screenplay but he didn’t have a camera. So when my friends have to go to the court, I’m going to go. And I think, to me, it’s not like an academic thing. I really think if there’s something worth thinking with philosophy, it’s going to be in actual life and I’ll shoot it if I can.
I really do think we can say some forms are better than others. I think it’s really important to claim or else there’s no progress. Especially today. And there are resources, whether it’s mathematical or just taking the risk to do it, you know, and saying these currently extant forms, I don’t have to say they’re the only ones. I think especially if, I don’t know how other artists feel, but cinema especially, there’s always like, hey, you have to make a movie in this very particular way. Where’s your screenplay with your producer? But you can just jump out and make a motion picture.
AT: There’s one point amongst the many shots and many cuts, there’s one of a traffic sign or street sign in French, Sortie d’usine. And obviously it’s like a film joke, like workers leaving factory and so on and so forth. I was thinking of that, you know, as a kind of genre. I was thinking how much that, the idea of the the exit, the factory exit was, you know, key for the politics of the likes of Badiou who was, you know, getting into set theory at the same time as, you know, leafleting and, you know, Renault factories at 5 a.m., like others in that period and later.
But I was also thinking about the way in which the everydayness and the intimacy and the hanging out and the loitering and all of the activities that are present in the film are also, you know, there’s also this sense of unemployment. Not just in the strict economic sense, but of désœuvrement, the inoperative or the dead time, which can also be an experimental time and a time of creativity. It struck me that that sits with this kind of spectral presence of other abstractions, not least the finance, the volatility smile and the presence of the sort of detritus of the 2008 crisis, talk of derivatives, and then of course the page from Moishe Postona’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination on Abstract Time with the recording phone, which is a nice visual pun as well.
When I was watching the film also this second time, it just made me sensitive or attentive to the ways in which the abstractive capacities of cinema that we’ve just talked about, the cut, the abstractive drive of philosophy—I mean, especially the philosophy of Badiou, but I guess also the philosophy of Hegel, et cetera—sit in a peculiar way with this spectral presence of a financialized capitalism in the forms of surplusing of everyday life that go along with it. And I was just kind of wondering what drove the montage of those abstractions in your own practice.
IM: I mean, for example, when we talk first with the Lumiere stuff, like in some deep sense, I think the movies are as simple as watching like a Lumiere actuality, you know? But also with the Lumiere stuff, obviously, it’s documentary, but he’s a composer of the shot. That’s why there’s diagonals. And I like that because, I think of Cantor’s diagonal proof of infinityand I like that type of rhyme.
But then we talk about the financialization stuff too. I have this friend Frank Ruda, he wrote this book called Hegel’s Rabble. And he talks about poverty rabble and luxury rabble. And I like this idea that whether you’re poor or rich, you’re still dealing with this contingency of the market you’re not really in control of. And that’s why near the end of the picture, I have some of that in there too. Like you see a 3D model of a flash crash. I forgot what the exact number is, but for a certain moment, it just crashes for a point and comes back. And that might be a rich person’s version of their lights getting cut off, you know?
But I just want to think that question too and not just relegate it to where I was shooting. But also to think that limit of thinking at that level of contingency because if it has that much in common with, I don’t know, a trader on Bay Street, then we have to think beyond that too. And yeah, so I wanted to think with those. Also because I made this in like 2015 and I think it’s so important as a filmmaker to be as close to the present as you can. You know, there’s a lot of picture makers saying, you know, I’m only going to do this sort of period picture. I don’t like seeing phones in movies. I hate that. Why are you scared? You should think about where we are.
But it’s also like the movies that last are the ones that actually take that chance, you know? If someone could have told Godard, you know, when you do La Chinoise, this Maoist thing is going to fade. Don’t make that picture. Why are you putting all these references for 1966? But we still watch it today. And I think the movies that really touch me are the ones that are so engaged with the present. That’s what makes something eternal.
So I was reading a lot about finance markets and this and that and I thought that should be in the picture too because, yeah, it was in the present when I was making it. That’s why I made it also look like the 88:88 as well. But also, with the Hegel stuff, all this other stuff, whatever was contemporary in philosophy at the time, not just him, but the very particular readings of Hegel, whether it’s Pittsburgh or Slovenia and yada yada, I just think it’s important to see how much we can put into the cut so you can try to see our present. So all these other types of abstractions in the movie, once they’re in front of me, I’m able to cognize it and organize it on the basis of these cuts and I’ll have a clearer vision of what’s this relationship between my oven flashing 88:88 and this flash crash of the man on Bay Street. You know, these type of things and it gives me a more total picture of what my friends and loved ones are living in.
Q1: Hi, I was just curious, a lot of the images in the film seem to span long, kind of different sources throughout the years. I was just wondering what span of time all the images and audio were sourced… And also for the audio, was there ever an instance where the audio you were capturing was candid, because some of those conversations felt very raw, and I was just wondering if some of those were kind of preconceived or, yeah, you just kind of in the moment started recording.
IM: So basically, in terms of the images you see and what time period it is, almost all of it was shot in the year and a half I was making it, except for some early stuff from when I was like 14. I found some of that footage that had my same friends who were in the movie and wanted to use it, and some of the sounds from that, but most of it was shot in that year and a half. I got my first camera when I was 13, and then I just started making pictures with my friends, with the same friends who were in the movie, actually. And we still make pictures to this day, which is lovely. But they got so used to me shooting them, and we just kind of developed a method with that.
So there are these sort of off-the-cuff recordings, but we’re just kind of used to it right now, and since we all consider ourselves artists in a sense, we never feel like we can’t go there. Even if it gets really emotional and personal, I cut it, and I asked my friend, it’s totally cool if you don’t want this one in the film, and he’d be like, no, we have to put it in the movie, I want this one in the movie. But yeah, just a sense of trust and comradeship in regards to that, that’s key to me. And some of it is like, oh, could you tell me that tale you told me, could you retell that story, and I’ll re-record that? Or sometimes, I can tell my friends, just say some heat or whatever, and I pull out my phone and start recording the thing, and that type of thing, right?
Or it’s like, my friend has a new poem, or I have a new poem, and I’m like, oh, we should just read this and everything. Or sometimes, a friend would send me an email saying, I have some new poems, me and Eliza will send it to you, and I’m like, oh, this is pretty good, could use some of this one, right? So it’s that type of thing. But other things are a bit more preconceived, certain things to say. And I guess it goes back to the question about the books and so on, too. Like, what is this line between something preconceived and something that came on the spot, and how do you distinguish that? Whether this movie is closer to documentary or fiction. But yeah, a lot of it was either caught on the fly or something retold, or just like, oh, could you say this sort of phrase here? Could you say this sort of phrase here?
And I would start cutting them and looping them together. It goes back to this infinity question, too. Sometimes the sounds would come back, because that’s when you know, oh my gosh, my life’s getting finite again, because the loop is coming back. I should make a cut. So that’s why these sounds start coming back. And if it’s coming back, we ought to change course.
Q2: It’s just like a single related question. So how much does the city and your ethnic cultural background play a role in the movie? Especially, I suspect, that your family… If this is kind of a bit too much of a personal question, you could say no, thanks, and you’ll be fine. So I suppose that your family, your friends, your loved ones, your friends would probably kind of, I suppose, a bit, for lack of a better word, bewildered, probably, making this movie.
IM: Oh, like whether my friends in the movie were bewildered?
Q2: OK, so I’ll just, like, rephrase it more easily. Like, I’m just wondering how big of a role does the city play in the movie?
IM: Well, the movie, actually, a lot of it’s shot in Winnipeg, but some of it’s shot in Montreal and Toronto and there’s some Paris in it, too. But I think Winnipeg played a huge part in how I see the world, for sure. Because I went to university in Montreal to study film, and realizing how different my life was in Montreal made me rethink what it is I grew up with, too. Because I came back after I finished school, I came back to make the picture. But I think also, because like, I just find being in Quebec way more racist than things I experienced in Winnipeg. And I think that’s really important because I feel like there’s a different racial solidarity, class solidarity to all my friends who all grew up on the same blocks in the West End.
And, yeah, all my friends are of different races, yada yada. So that, I guess I grew up with this different relationship to equality when I went to Montreal, I found it quite a bit different. But also, I think because I was part of this, I grew up in this neighborhood called the West End. I think even that type of contingency helped out because, when I think of Plato in the West, and ending the West, all these other things, and what that means, I’m sure that played some sort of deep role. But also, I thought about it because I had nothing to nothing to really have to depend on. You know, when I talk to my friends in Paris or New York, there’s this huge, like, I don’t know, legacy of New York picture makers or Parisian picture makers.
But since I was in West End Winnipeg, I could invent anything I want. I don’t feel any lineage I have to continue or be against. And a lot of the Winnipeg filmmakers, when they saw the movie, they just didn’t know where it was coming from because, like, I was hanging with my friends. I was not trying to hang out with the industry or the local filmmaking community because I already had my friends. We’ve been making movies together since we were 13. So no one was really bewildered. They kind of knew that this is the type of picture I was kind of into making because we’d shoot [when we were] like, teenagers. And after that, we’d, like, do nefarious things and we’d come back and watch it at my crib, you know. And then, you know, this is kind of what we got used to doing.
And then we’d watch all these classic movies and go out and do graffiti, yada, yada. I’d film it and cut it in a particular way. And so everyone kind of knew what type of pictures I was into. Me and my friends all have this refined taste. We had a good time. So yeah, I feel like most people weren’t bewildered. Maybe, like, when my father saw it, he just wanted to talk about it a bit, you know. I was kind of concerned, oh my gosh, he’s gonna see me smoking cigarettes, you know. But there was actually way more things going on in that movie that he might have been concerned about. But yeah, maybe that, maybe my father. But then when I talked to him what it was about, he was down, you know.
And he’s the one who bought my camera, so I mean, he never put any restraints on what type of pictures I should be making and everything. It’s like, everyone I was hanging out with in the neighborhood, too. My friend Erik’s in this movie. And when we were kids, when we were like 11 we read Dante’s Comedy. And that’s why I thought I was gonna be, I wanted to be a poet. But then I started describing scenes and everything. And oh, we should just make movies, you know. We’ve always been on this sort of wave about the type of things we wanna make. So actually, no one was surprised. We loved poetry from the beginning.
I think they’d be more bewildered if I made, like, a three-act Hollywood picture.
Q3: Hi, I was wondering what was your motivation behind the moments of silence in the film and how you choose their placement within the film.
IM: Sure. I wanted to be quite liberal with the use of silence, too, just in the sense of, first of all, when these things happen… Actually I guess it goes back to another question. One of the shots of the eights is actually from my oven when I was, like, 17. And then later on, so I’m gonna make this movie, that image came back to me. I’m like, oh, I should investigate that. And at that time in my life, I just stopped looking at the clock. You know, if I’m gonna wake up everyday, and this keeps happening I’m just gonna keep the clock flashing 88:88, whatever. But it kind of suspended me from the time of the world in this beautiful way.
But with the silences, yeah, it’s when your house sounds really quiet because all the electricity’s gone. And also, I guess, like, the way an impressionist might, throw some white on the canvas. I just wanted the right to put silence where I feel like it’d be nice, you know. But also, I mean, [Alberto] would know this, too, because there’s this thing in this book, Logics of Worlds which I really like, where when you think of change, you go from the most minimal to the most maximal. And I wanted to kind of experience that through the film. I go to a shot of black and then a sort flashed image, then all the sound and then silence. And just kind of have the viewer, which is me, just recategorize my mind through these abrupt and not-so-abrupt changes from the minimal to the maximum.
And I think cinema changes us, right? I always love that story of Stan Brakhage going to the doctor, and the doctor looked at his eyes, and his eyes are moving way faster than most people that he was seeing because he’s making those movies he’s making. Yeah, because cinema really does change us, and I want to take part in that changing. Because I like Schoenberg and Anton Webern and everything, the use of silence in those songs would just appear, and I wanted to think about that, too. But also, I don’t know, there’s that song, “Stop”, by J. Dilla, and it’s like, “you gotta stop [silence] think about what you do.” So these type of relationships.
Also, actually, we’re already here, so you know with J. Dilla, where the beats are like boom, boom, bap, but then the way he does it, he changes where the bap’s gonna appear or the boom’s gonna appear. But because you have an idea of where it’s gonna be, you kind of hear the phantom of it, you know, in his music. And I wanted to do that with cutting and with putting silence in certain places. You can still hear the phantom, and I wanted to kind of play with that quality by using silences, by using the black screen. Yeah, so it’s more than just a pure question of taste, like I think I’d like some silence right here. I think it would help me over here in this type of relationship to it, because I just feel like when you’re making movies, you should never keep a sound or an image to tell a story.
That’s when we’re doing the wrong thing. We’re giving into language. I think you should only put a sound or an image because you like it, and it’s nice to look at. If it’s not gonna be that, then I should just write a screenplay and have someone read it, you know? But yeah, I can’t really do that in the screenplay. It’s like, ooh, silence here. I gotta hear that. And also, it’s so much of this question of the nothing. We’re talking about nothing and how not all nothings are the same. If they were all the same, it would be a big one. But because each time you hear the silence, it’s actually a different silence that recollected the other sounds or other things. So you have a different silence each time.
In the same way, the cut superficially appears the same, but each time I cut, it’s a different cut. I like this idea that each silence is actually a bit different because it’s reacting into the previous one. And so much of music and movie making is how to get from one silence to the next. From the opening of the picture to the end.
Q3: Awesome film, man. That was so great. Full disclosure, I’m Filipino. I’m from a poor family in Vancouver. And I was just so touched by what you did. I think we’re probably about the same age. In any case, you keep talking about 88:88 and infinities and kind of like repeating timelines. When I saw 88:88 flashing on the oven screen, I thought about the story of the Paris Commune where they shoot out all the clocks. Because that’s actually maybe the alternate horizon with a communist perspective, like the abolition of time itself. And I was just wondering if that’s kind of a flip side of thinking about your relationship to time or how time plays in this film.
IM: Oh, I think it’s exactly the same. I agree with you 10,000%. It’s just like every time there’s a new form invented, whether it’s artistic or political, there is this stoppage of time, an ability to begin again. And that’s why every time there’s a great, like a truly great movie, it just feels like cinema started again because we stopped the time with the type of loop we’ve been trying, the type of pictures we’re trying to make. And then some people say, oh, I think it feels like we’re starting cinema again or whatever. So yeah, I definitely think of that too. Or it’s like in October, the Eisenstein, I think it ends with all the clocks kind of going crazy like that. And then it says, “long live the world.” You know, it’s that type of energy. Yeah, but also like in this really concrete way, like this is silly, but I watch The Aviator a lot. The Martin Scorsese film.
It’s always on in my home, okay. And then after a while, I can kind of tell how much time has passed in my day because he’s defending his right to make a big plane that means two hours have passed. But the reason I bring this up is just because cinema beyond just like a clock gives you a different perception of how time is or isn’t passing, right. So I like using cinema, thinking of cinema as a different way to account for the passing of time as one thing other than as a clock we know. In this other way, the movies do become its own type of clock. I mean, 88:88 is 10 years old now and it means something quite different. And yet not than when I first made it too. Yeah, it stops me when I watch it. It abolishes the distance I have from the 10 years ago I made it. That’s really important to me too.
I think that’s why we return to films again and again. Because we return to films again and again because you remember all the other times this movie stopped time for you. I’m a big re-watcher, but each time I re-watch it, all my other memories from the last viewing is in there, and I get to experience the other relationship to the movie as if time stops each time I watch the picture.